By stage
Hiring your first sales leader at Series A
At Series A the motion exists and needs to be repeated. That changes who you're hiring. The Seed hire found the motion with you in every deal. The Series A leader takes you out of deals and builds a team behind them. Those are different jobs, and they are usually different people.
Who is this for?
You have revenue and some evidence of repeatability. You're hiring a first sales leader, or the first pod underneath one. Someone in the company is already doing part of this job informally.
The Bridge Group's 2026 research found the average experience required at hire is now 3.7 years, up from 2.7 years in 2022.
When should you hire a VP of Sales?
When there is a motion that works and more demand than the current team can run — and, specifically, when the constraint has moved from finding the motion to scaling it.
The clearest signal is that your existing sellers are succeeding and you cannot say why with enough precision to train the next three. That is a management problem, and it is the one a sales leader is actually for: turning something that works into something teachable.
The common mistake is hiring a leader to fix a motion that does not exist yet. They inherit a broken funnel, spend two quarters diagnosing it, and get measured on a number they were never positioned to hit. If your reps are missing because product-market fit is still thin, a VP will not close that gap and will be blamed for it anyway.
- Hire when the bottleneck is repeatability. You know what works; you cannot yet transfer it to someone who was not in the room.
- Do not hire when the bottleneck is the product or the market. A leader cannot manufacture demand that is not there, and hiring one to try is an expensive way to find that out.
What does a sales leader cost at Series A?
Base, variable and equity vary enough by market and stage that a single figure misleads more than it helps. The numbers we maintain live on the compensation benchmarks page, which is updated as the data moves rather than restated here where it would go stale.
What is worth saying about the structure: at this stage the split between base and variable is usually more conservative than at a later-stage company, because the leader is being asked to build predictability rather than to hit a number inside a system that already produces one.
What do founders underestimate?
At Seed you're hiring someone to find the motion with the founder still in every deal. At Series A you're hiring someone to take the founder out of deals and hire four people behind them. Those are different resumes and almost never the same human. The part founders underestimate is that they've usually already implied the first role becomes the second one, so the Series A hire arrives as a demotion nobody agreed to.
This is the conversation we have in the kickoff, before we source anyone. It is uncomfortable and it is cheaper than the alternative, which is losing your first seller in the same quarter your new leader starts.
The second uncomfortable conversation is about you. Hiring a sales leader before you're willing to stop closing is the most expensive common mistake at this stage. Every deal the founder closes after that hire lands is a deal that teaches the team nothing.
How do we run a Series A leadership search?
Leadership searches move on trust in both directions, so we brief both sides seriously. The client gets a written brief and a calibration slate. The candidate gets a written brief on the company, the board, the existing team, and what they're actually inheriting.
A leader who arrives with an accurate picture of the mess ramps faster than one who arrives with a pitch. It also filters early: the candidates who read the real picture and step back were never going to stay.
What do you get?
Candidates who have been told the truth about the stage, a written record of the gap between your Seed hire and this role, and a search process that treats the internal conversation as part of the work.
What does this cost?
We run contingent, retained, and embedded engagements, and every search carries a 90 day guarantee. Fees differ by model and are published in full on our pricing page.