Hire a salesperson or sell yourself a while longer
Work out whether your enquiry flow and margin can carry a salesperson yet, what the first year really costs, and when founder selling still wins.
You are the best closer and the bottleneck
You close most of the business yourself. Buyers ask for you by name. The conversion rate on calls you run is better than anything anyone else in the business manages. This is also why nothing else gets finished. Proposals go out late. Delivery reviews slip. The pipeline fills in the weeks you sell and empties in the weeks you ship.
The question is rarely whether a salesperson would help. It is whether the business can carry one person learning to sell something only you have ever sold. That is a cash question first and a management question second.
What the hire costs beyond the salary
The salary is not the cost. Excluded from the figure in your head are the months before the hire produces anything the recruitment fee the incentive component the phone and travel reimbursement and the hours you spend training rather than selling. Budget several hours a week for the first quarter at least. Those hours come out of your own selling time so revenue usually dips before it rises.
Add the cost of the enquiries the new person will handle badly. Early on they will lose leads you would have converted. Treat that as a training expense rather than a performance problem. Professional fees for recruitment carry GST at 18% on the fee. Whether you can recover that depends on your registration and the credit rules that apply to you. A qualified professional should confirm the position for your situation.
Who should hire and who should wait
Hire when you have more qualified enquiries than you can answer within a day. Hire when the gross margin on an average order covers a salesperson's monthly cost in roughly two closed deals. Hire when the sale is repeatable. If you can write down the questions you ask and the three objections you hear then somebody else can learn it.
Do not hire if your enquiry flow is thin. A salesperson with an empty pipeline becomes an expensive prospector and most leave before they build one. Do not hire if the sale rests on your own technical judgement in the room. Consultancies architecture practices and specialist fabrication businesses usually cannot delegate the first conversation and a salesperson there will only book meetings you still have to run yourself.
Wait also if cash will not cover six months of the full cost with nothing closed by that person. Six months is not pessimistic. It is the ordinary shape of a ramp in a business with a sales cycle measured in weeks.
The sequence that works
Write the sale down first. Record three of your own calls and note the order you ask things in. Turn that into one page. Then split the job rather than handing it over whole. Give away qualification and follow up. Keep the closing conversation for yourself through the first quarter.
Pay a base somebody can live on in your city and tie the incentive to collected payment rather than booked value. Booked value rewards optimism. Collected payment rewards the deals that are real. Set a ninety day plan with weekly checkpoints and make the first month about learning the product rather than hitting a number.
How to tell whether it is working
The flattering metric is activity. Calls made meetings booked and messages sent all rise quickly because they are easy to produce. They tell you the person is busy. They do not tell you the business is better off.
The metric that matters is the number of qualified conversations you no longer have to run while total closed revenue holds or grows. If your own selling hours have not fallen then the hire has added cost without removing the bottleneck. Read it on a three month average because any single month in a lumpy pipeline will mislead you.
The expensive mistake
The common error is hiring a senior salesperson on the assumption that experience substitutes for a system. Somebody who sold for a large organisation sold with a brand a lead flow a pricing sheet and a manager behind them. Drop that person into a business with none of those and the experience does not transfer. They will ask for what they used to have and you will not be able to supply it.
The loss is not only the salary. It is two quarters of founder attention and the nerve to try again. Businesses that hire wrongly once often decide salespeople do not work for them and go back to founder selling for years longer than they needed to.
A realistic timeline
Assume nothing meaningful in month one. Assume partial contribution in months two and three. Judge the hire at the end of the first full quarter after that. Anyone who tells you a salesperson pays for themselves within a month is describing a very short sales cycle or selling you recruitment. Nobody can promise what a particular hire will produce because it depends on your pipeline your pricing and the work the person is actually given.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.