Hiring Your First GTM Leader
Congrats! You have started to establish a product-market fit, you have taken on some early funding and now you are TOO busy to do it all. The board is pushing you to grow revenue and has decided you need to hire an experience leader to lead this for you. Below is a handful of tidbits our team at Husk Talent has put together which hopefully makes this process easier to navigate.
Focus on What Is Working Now
Please, PLEASE focus on what is already working versus what you hope will work down the road. The average tenure for a GTM Leader is under two years. This hire should be focused on building a repeatable process so you can continue to scale on the success you have had, not re-inventing the wheel.
Look at the current clients you have and find consistency with the sales motion:
What stakeholders were involved in the deals you’ve closed?
What were the average deal cycles?
What is your average deal size?
How big is the team currently? Where do you expect it to be in the next 24 months?
What are the biggest areas of opportunity you are currently seeing?
From here you can start to build out your ideal candidate profile but also start to piece together realistic goals you want this person to achieve within their first 12 months.
Ensure All Decision Makers Are Aligned
This sounds simple and easy, yet we often see that executives and board members aren’t in lockstep around who they want to hire and what they want them to accomplish. There are even instances where stakeholders involved in the hiring process aren’t even aware that this role is being hired for! Don’t assume and make sure you are aligned across all departments if possible.
Go one step further, sit down with a few other stakeholders in the business and make a scorecard. Choose the four or five qualities that are most important to evaluate and have every interviewer use it when they speak with the candidates.
Lastly, keep things fluid as things will change as you meet candidates. Use the feedback from your team, and even the candidates themselves to improve the process.
Make It A Priority
Another simple yet often overlooked piece of advice to follow. You can make hiring a priority by setting alignment calls weekly. The pieces you need to visit weekly include connecting with your team (see alignment), chatting with your recruiters (internal or external), and carving out blocks of time to chat with candidates. Time kills all deals, so don’t let too much time go by or else you might be losing strong candidates as you go. Aim to have next steps scheduled within 72 hours and have them take place within a week. Things come up, but if a week or longer passes be sure you or somebody else connects with them to ensure nothing has changed. Being nimble will also pay dividends here. For example, if an interviewee is away for a week, have them chat with another member of the team even if that’s step three on paper versus step two.
Lean on Your Network, Advisors, Investors
Your network is incredibly valuable, especially at the advisory or board level. These folks have been selected because they have seen this dance before so lean on them for guidance. Ask them what unforeseen challenges have come up in other similar situations? Are there any candidates that come to mind they can help introduce? For first time founders we can’t stress this enough. If you need to leverage a recruiting partner, this is a good time to ask for referrals of firms that specialize with this type of search at a company your size and stage. Let the people around you help!
Listen
If you’re drinking the company Kool-Aid, that’s great! Don’t assume every candidate will see things the same way though, especially from the outside looking in. During the hiring phase we often see people get so excited by their own product and selling the vision that they forget to listen to candidates.
Think of it as free advice? Who better to tell you what you should consider when hiring a GTM leader than a GTM leader himself/herself. By doing this you can uncover what is important to these types of professionals and gain some valuable perspective on how your company’s story is resonating.
Once you listen and learn more about a finalist or two that you like, you can be thoughtful of how you communicate with them from here on out. If a candidate mentions their family and how they prefer to spend weekends not working, do NOT email them on the weekend. Instead, show them that you have a flexible vacation policy and a family inclusive workplace. If candidates express how much they don’t enjoy pieces of their current role, lean in, and understand exactly why, and then educate them about how it’ll be different with you. Listening at a high level allows you to take correct action, making sure the interview process becomes much more enjoyable for the candidate AND you! Everybody wants to be heard so make sure that you aren’t distracted during interviews, can listen, and put what you heard into action.
Setting Expectations
Finally, ensure that the soon to be leader and your team are aligned in what will be expected of them. We’ve seen many instances where candidates and hiring managers get so excited about partnering, they forget to make sure they are aligned on expectations. Remember, the goal here is not to just hire, but to make a successful hire that will help grow your company. At the offer stage, make sure that goals and metrics are clearly communicated. These goals will most likely back into the bonus and how you evaluate performance of your new hire. Don’t assume you are aligned, put it in writing, chat about it, and make sure you are both on the same page of what is expected of everybody.
Need to make a hire like this? Email us a info@husktalent.com to set up a call and chat further.