Getting Your First AEs Off the Ground
Why prepping pipeline, defining your ICP, and stepping out of the way are critical to your success.
DEAR STAGE 2: I hired our first 2 AEs and they are starting next week to drive our outbound sales motion. What can I do to make sure they hit the ground running? ~MOVING BEYOND FOUNDER-LED GTM
DEAR MOVING BEYOND FOUNDER-LED GTM: Hiring your first AE(s) is a milestone moment for any company. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you, or other founders, closed the first 10+ customers, those customers are live, happy and hopefully referring additional customers your way. Even with the foundation set, there are many failure modes when hiring your first sales person.
I called on Alex Shartsis, GTM advisor to early-stage startups and founder of Skyp.ai, an AI-native tool that helps founders run outbound their way to weigh in on this critical transition. Read on to hear his advice:
Demand Before Hiring
At the risk of stating the obvious, salespeople require pipeline to succeed. If you’ve hired AEs ahead of demand, you’re going to have a cold start problem. Alex recommends that founders find a channel that works and can consistently generate pipeline before making those first AE hires. Cold email, LinkedIn, content, events, referrals, PLG… all are on the table and you can lean into whatever works for your product and customers.
Outbound is a common first move because you can personally execute on it as a founder, it offers fast feedback lookups and you can control tooling, messaging, and list quality. Alex advises “You don’t need to brute force it. Tools like Skyp.ai can help automate outbound for founders. You can run the play yourself, and later hand it to marketing or an AE.”
Still, outbound can be a big lift for an underresourced, overstretched founder–which is why Alex built Skyp. You need to send ~1,000 emails to get ~10 meetings–if you’re doing it well, which is why AI is so well suited. If you want to DIY outbound, here are Alex’s top 6 tips:
Research your list yourself (more below on this) to be sure you’re reaching your real ICP
Get the technical stuff right (secondary domains, DNS settings, email config, etc.–yes, it’s a lot)
Write very short emails that focus on the customer and their pain, in their words.
Limit calls to action per email to 1 or 2. And try something that isn’t “book a meeting”.
If you know what you’re doing, it takes at least 4-6 weeks to see if things are working. If you’re a novice it might take many experiments and much longer to see results.
If you decide to use a tool to support these early efforts, check out Skyp!
Action item: prove that you can get an outbound working before hiring someone to take it over.
Own the ICP and ‘The List’
Too often I hear that founders take a back seat on deciding which accounts to target. Alex and I wholeheartedly agree that your target list is your strategy! Alex notes “As a founder/CEO, you’ve been in the meetings, and you know who buys and why. Don’t outsource that judgment too soon. If your sales cycle is 3 months, and you started with a bad list at the top of the funnel, it’ll take at least that long to see that things aren’t working.”
Whether you use Skyp or stitch together DIY-tools, there are a few critical success factors. You need to know your ICP and build a quality list. You have to be specific and move beyond “Series C B2B SaaS companies” to something like “CFOs of B2B SaaS companies that closed their Series C in the last 6 months and are struggling with reporting for their suddenly much more demanding boards.” Do the research (or pay someone to do it) instead of buying a list.
Alex advises using tools like PromptLoop, KeyPlay, Apollo, or Clay to help you source intelligently and build lists faster. You could even vibecode scrapers or use deep research features of OpenAI and Claude for hyper targeted list building. BUT don’t hand this to someone who hasn’t sat in on a dozen customer calls. A spidey-sense for a good lead or a bad lead takes time to develop.
“New hires see logos. Founders see patterns. That’s the difference between wasting months and running a productive outbound motion.”
Action item: build a target account list and hand it to new hires to get them started on the right accounts. Better yet, scale your process and automate the outreach so your new hires have full calendars.
Let AEs Sell
Startups love a generalist. Alex has seen this mistake play out at many companies “It’s easy to get excited about the AE who wants to fix your CRM, build an email sequence, or clean up your deck. Don’t let them. And be wary of this in interviews. It can sound strategic or thoughtful, but usually doesn’t lead to closed-won deals. It leads to vanity metrics and wasted time.”
The first sales hire’s only job is to close deals. Period. If they’re not in sales meetings 30+ hours a week, they should be. Everything else (ops, reporting, automation, etc…) can and should be handled by you, fractional rev ops/consulting support, or a tool.
Action item: Alex nailed this advice - “There’s a balance in the early days between GSD and focus. Make sure you’re not distracting your AE with the kind of S that doesn’t matter.”
Get Out of the Way
If Alex can leave founders with one piece of advice it’s this: “You need to remove yourself from the sales process. Not just to save time, but to get real signal.”
I always struggle with the right way to communicate the balance. As a founder you can’t hire a VP of Sales and checkout of GTM, but it’s critical that you give new hires space to work and actually prove that you can build a repeatable GTM motion that is not reliant on founder heroics.
Alex shared, “Founders are great at opening doors, sometimes disguising unscalable top of funnel. Founders often distort deals, just by being there. They say yes too quickly. They take lower prices. And in enterprise sales, founder presence can backfire and actually lower confidence.” Alex did an entire podcast on this if you want to dig deeper.
Action item: Coach early to build confidence and empower your team, but step back quickly while holding the team accountable to quotas/metrics.
Hopefully, you can grab the action items in this list and get back to enabling your new hires.
Until next week!
Interesting article that brought up a couple of thoughts - Re the CTA being something other than book a meeting it depends on what stage of engagement this is with your ICP and the content. If this is the first series of touches you need to provide value up front before asking for anything - maybe it's a short white paper on how to think about solving the problem or an offer to do a technical review of existing solutions. Whatever it is make sure it's high value and do that over the course of the outreach sequence based on how they are engaging. And re getting the ICP right craft it based on your best customers if you have enough of them to see common threads.