Producer or Performer? The Sales Hire That Defines Your Startup

An article we liked from Thought Leaders Sean Ellis and Garrett Brown:

Your First Sales Hire? Don't Look for a Performer, Find a Producer.

A founder I know was finally ready to make his first sales hire.

He spent three months recruiting the “perfect” salesperson. Ten years of enterprise software experience. Consistently ranked in the top 10% at a household name company. A deep “rolodex” in the space. The offer letter went out on a Friday afternoon with a champagne emoji and genuine excitement about the inevitable hockey stick growth that lay ahead.

Ninety days later, the “perfect” hire was gone.

Not because he was bad at sales. He was an objectively great seller. The problem was he was used to someone telling him exactly who to call, what to say about the product when he got them on the phone, and how the deal process was supposed to work. The kind of clarity that comes from a proven system.

But nobody at the company had those answers yet. They were still figuring it out themselves.

Here’s the thing most founders miss: the salesperson who can execute a proven playbook is fundamentally different from the one who has to (gets to?) invent it. One is a Sales Performer. The other is a Sales Producer. And confusing the two can be one of the most expensive mistakes early-stage companies make.

A Sales Producer figures out what should be sold, to whom, and how.

A Sales Performer delivers that message consistently and at scale.

What a Sales Producer Actually Does

A Sales Producer, much like the producer of a movie, walks into a company that has no playbook. No documented process and no ironclad understanding of who the customer even is yet, let alone how to reach them, what to say to them, or how long it’s going to take to get them across the finish line.

They’re usually the first non-founder sales hire, sometimes working alone for months, occasionally bringing on a small team as things start to click. Their job isn’t to hit a number that’s been forecasted based on historical data. Their job is to figure out what works, document it, and turn chaos into something the next sales hire (and the hires after that) could potentially replicate. They’re the person in the cliched but apt metaphor who’s building the plane while flying it.

I lived this at Bitium. I was the first and only non-technical employee for most of the first year of the company’s existence. We were in the emerging Identity Access Management (IAM) space, competing with early leaders like Okta and OneLogin. Now, every company has an IAM tool, but back then, potential customers weren’t looking for a specific solution – most didn’t even know the category existed.

On paper, my job was to prospect, close deals, and keep our revenue (and our team) growing. But in reality, the job was a whole lot more than that. It was answering existential questions like…

Who should we even be selling to? We tested startups, mid-market companies, enterprises. Our first customers were smaller companies, but like many startups, we eventually realized we needed to go upmarket if we were going to hit our goals. It took months of conversations with banks, insurance companies, and other large organizations to figure out how to do that.

How should we price the product? We tried to differentiate by charging per admin instead of per user like everyone else in the space. The thinking was solid: it would simplify budgeting for customers and scale naturally as they grew. But sales were slow. As soon as we switched to the standard pricing model, revenue started climbing. It turned out customers wanted to compare apples to apples. We had to learn that by doing it wrong first, and who knows how many customers we missed out on while we were learning that lesson?

What does the sales process even look like? When you’re an early-stage seller, there’s no demo to work from. You have to create everything from scratch. The demo, the scripts, the onboarding process, and even setting up the CRM so the team can monitor pipeline and forecast revenue. At Bitium, every single conversation taught us something new, which meant the process kept changing. I had to learn to celebrate the lessons as much as the wins, because the lessons came far more frequently.

Should we build channel partnerships? I spent significant energy trying to form relationships with resellers who could package Bitium with their other products. It didn’t produce great results. Looking back, trying to figure out channel strategy while simultaneously inventing the basic sales motion was a mistake. But that’s information the next sales hire at the company could benefit from. I had to learn it by doing it wrong.

This is the reality of being a Sales Producer: you’re making things up as you go, testing them constantly, documenting what works, failing a lot, and creating the roadmap future hires will follow. It’s creative, it’s stressful, it’s fundamentally different from executing a playbook someone else built. And it’s not for everyone.

Why Sales Producers Are So Rare

I’ve met a handful of people who genuinely love the Sales Producer role. They’re built for it. They thrive in the uncertainty of starting from scratch. But most salespeople can only handle doing it once, if at all.

The stress is existential. If you don’t sell, the lights might not stay on. The Sales Producer feels an outsized share of that weight. Every loss lands differently when there’s no established system to point to, no proven playbook to fall back on, no mentor to look up to. It’s just you, in real time, with the company’s survival potentially hanging in the balance.

The losses outnumber the wins by a lot. In an established sales organization, good reps might close 20 to 30 percent of their qualified opportunities. As an early Sales Producer, you might be closing 5 to 10 percent (at best!) while you’re still figuring out who’s even qualified in the first place. You’re celebrating lessons instead of commission checks, and that’s psychologically exhausting for most people.

Success creates golden handcuffs. I know one Sales Producer who helped build a company from the ground up. As the company scaled, they gave him equity and a comfortable role. Recently, he told me he’s feeling the pull to get back to building something from scratch. He’s a true Producer who loves that early chaos. But going back would mean a massive pay cut and leaving the stability he’s earned. Most people, understandably, choose comfort.

The role is temporary by design. Once you’ve built the sales system, the company needs to scale. That usually means hiring Sales Performers and growing a team. The Producer either moves into management, which is yet another completely different skill set, or they leave to do it again somewhere else. And “doing it again” means voluntarily returning to stress and chaos. Not many people sign up for that twice.

Different People, Different Skills

Sales Producers and Sales Performers are both valuable. But they’re valuable at different stages, and they require completely different approaches.

I know someone who was hired as an early Account Executive at three different startups. None of those roles lasted more than a year. She’d get frustrated with the ambiguity, the constantly changing processes, the lack of clear direction. But once she joined one of the biggest tech companies in the world, got traditional sales training, and had a system to work within, she became a star. She’s thriving now and has no intention of leaving. She’s a world-class Performer. She’s just not a Producer. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

What makes a great Sales Producer?

Comfort with uncertainty. The job requires making decisions with incomplete information and being okay when those decisions don’t pan out. You can’t just be comfortable with ambiguity, you need to be energized by it.

Creativity over process. You have to invent solutions to problems you’ve never seen before. Following a playbook isn’t an option because there isn’t one yet.

The ability to “celebrate the process.” In The Unsold Mindset, Colin Coggins and I write about how great sellers have an uncanny ability to celebrate everything - not just the wins and the closed deals, but also the losses, the hang-ups, the chaos, and everything in between. This sounds counterintuitive for sales, but when you’re figuring things out, every loss teaches you something. And every lesson gets you closer to being the seller you want to be. If you can only feel good about wins, you’ll burn out fast.

Pattern recognition from limited data. You’re working with small sample sizes and need to identify what’s signal versus noise quickly. That’s not something everyone can (or wants to) do.

Willingness to document and teach. The whole point is to create a system others can eventually follow. If you’re not willing to write things down and transfer what you’ve learned, you’re not actually Producing anything.

What makes someone a great Sales Performer?

Hunger to win consistently. Performers are typically motivated by hitting quota, being at the top of the leaderboard, and closing deals repeatedly within a defined framework.

Coachability within structure. They want to be taught the system and then master it, finding small optimizations that make them better at running the existing playbook.

Discipline to follow process. Even when it feels restrictive, they trust that the system works and stick with it rather than constantly trying to reinvent things.

Ability to deliver a proven message authentically. They can take what’s already been figured out and make it sound spontaneous and natural in their own voice, not robotic.

These are fundamentally different profiles. Hiring a Performer when you need a Producer means they’ll struggle with the chaos and probably leave frustrated. Hiring a Producer when you need a Performer means they’ll get bored with repetition and might start “innovating” when you actually need consistency and scale.

What You Should Do Next

For founders: If you’re past product/market fit but don’t have a repeatable sales process yet, you likely need a Sales Producer. Don’t just post a job for an “experienced salesperson” and assume they’ll figure it out. Be explicit about what the role requires: inventing the system, not executing within one. And if you can’t hire one, be prepared to do it yourself. It’s too important to delegate to someone who isn’t built for it.

For sales professionals: One of the questions I get asked most by students in my Sales Mindset for Entrepreneurs class at USC who are interested in a sales career is, “Should I work for a startup or a big company?” If you’re energized by uncertainty and the challenge of figuring things out from scratch, consider specializing as a Sales Producer at a startup or a growing company. It’s one of the highest-impact roles you can play at an early-stage company. Your compensation will likely include meaningful equity, because you’re taking on significantly more risk and responsibility than any Performer will. And that equity has real potential to appreciate quickly, since you’re coming in before the revenue engine has been proven.

For hiring managers: Know what you are actually looking for. If you have a playbook and need to scale, hire Performers. If you don’t have a process, let alone a documented playbook, you need a Producer. The interview questions should be completely different. For Producers, ask about times they’ve had to figure things out with no guidance, how they handled ambiguity, what they learned from failures. For Performers, ask about their ability to master and refine an existing system, how they’ve optimized processes, how they’ve consistently hit targets.

Why This Matters

The founder I mentioned at the beginning? He eventually figured it out. His second sales hire was a Producer - someone who’d done this before at another early-stage company, someone excited by the ambiguity rather than intimidated by it.

Six months later, they had a documented process. Nine months later, they made their first Performer hire. That Performer is still there, consistently beating their quota because they walked into a system that actually existed.

The question isn’t whether someone is “good at sales.” It’s whether they’re right for the sales job you need done right now. Most startup sales failures aren’t about talent; they’re about timing and type.

Get the type right for your stage, and the rest falls into place.

Garrett Brown is co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Unsold Mindset and former CRO at Bitium, which he helped scale from pre-revenue to an acquisition by Google. He and his business/teaching/writing partner, Colin Coggins, are professors of entrepreneurship at USC, popular keynote speakers, and founders of Agency18, a company that works with mission-driven companies to build, scale, and optimize sales teams. He's currently building his next AI startup and looking for founding operators and technical leads who thrive in the ambiguity of zero-to-one. If that sounds like you, connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garrettjbrown

Read this article at seanellis.substack.com...

Thanks to the Growth with Sean Ellis blog for the first publishing of this article.

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