Making the right choice is pivotal. Making the wrong one can cost you 12 months and six figures in wasted capital. Here’s how to get it right
As a SaaS advisor, one of the most consequential decisions I see founders wrestle with is their first commercial hire. The debate of "marketer vs. salesperson" is often framed as a matter of opinion, but it’s not. The right answer is a direct and logical consequence of your business model and the Go-To-Market (GTM) motion you’ve chosen to execute.
Choosing correctly accelerates your path to product-market fit. Choosing incorrectly means you'll have a highly skilled professional who is fundamentally misaligned with your company's immediate needs, leading to frustration, wasted cash, and lost time.
This isn't a coin toss. It's a strategic decision. Here is the framework to use.
The Guiding Principle: Hire for Your GTM Motion
Your GTM motion is the engine you’ve decided to build. Your first hire is the operator for that specific engine. You don't hire a pilot to drive a race car. The same logic applies here.
Scenario 1: You're Building an Inbound or Product-Led Motion
If your strategy is to attract a high volume of customers through content, SEO, or a self-serve product (freemium/free trial), you are building an attraction engine.
- Your Hire: A T-Shaped Marketer / Growth Marketer.
- Why: Your primary challenge isn't closing complex deals; it's generating a steady stream of qualified leads or product sign-ups at the top of the funnel. You need someone who can build the systems to generate demand while you sleep. A salesperson hired into this environment would have no one to sell to.
- What they do: This person is a "doer" who will write SEO-optimized articles, manage your first ad campaigns, set up email nurture sequences, and analyze web traffic to optimize conversion. They build the foundation for scalable lead generation.
Scenario 2: You're Building an Outbound-Led Motion
If your strategy is to sell a high-value product (e.g., >$15k ACV) to a specific list of target companies, you are building a hunting engine.
- Your Hire: A Founding Account Executive (AE) / Salesperson.
- Why: Your primary challenge isn't broad lead generation; it's proactively engaging and persuading specific, high-value buyers. You need a skilled operator who can navigate complex organizations, build relationships, and articulate a compelling ROI to close deals. A marketer writing blog posts won't land a meeting with the VP of Engineering at your target enterprise account.
- What they do: This person lives and breathes the sales pipeline. They will build target account lists, conduct personalized outreach, run product demos, and negotiate contracts. They are responsible for generating revenue directly.
The Founder's Non-Negotiable Prerequisite
Before you hire your first salesperson, you, the founder, must have sold the product yourself. You must have personally closed your first 5-10 deals.
This is the golden rule. It validates that a market exists and that the problem you solve is painful enough for people to pay for it. It also forces you to understand customer objections and create a rudimentary "sales playbook" for your first hire to build upon. Hiring a salesperson to validate your market is an abdication of duty and a recipe for failure.
From Hire to High-Performer: The CTA
Making the right hire is the critical first step. The second is equipping them for success. A great commercial hire—whether in marketing or sales—is driven by data and clear targets. They need to know what "success" looks like on a dashboard.
Before you even write the job description, you must define the key metrics this person will be responsible for.
Download our free SaaS GTM Scalability Scorecard. It's a template designed to help you map out the exact KPIs your first commercial hire will own, ensuring you hire for measurable impact from day one.
