Building a startup sales team is the process of hiring, structuring, and scaling the team responsible for converting prospects into paying customers. It typically starts after the founder has personally closed enough deals to prove the sales motion is repeatable, then layers in account executives, sales development reps, sales engineers, and sales leadership as revenue scales. It is one of the most expensive and highest-stakes hiring sequences a startup makes, because a wrong early sales hire can stall the company for a year.
The standard sequence starts with the founder doing sales themselves. Until the founder has closed roughly 10 to 20 paying customers, hiring a sales rep is premature because there is no proven...