Most founders budget a sales hire by taking the salary and adding a little. The hire then underperforms for longer than expected, and the conclusion drawn is that sales hires do not work. The real issue is that the cost was never modelled properly.
The costs people forget
Ramp time. A new salesperson is not productive from week one. Depending on your sales cycle and product complexity, meaningful production starts somewhere between month two and month five. For that whole period you are paying full cost for partial output, and that gap is a real number you should write down before hiring.
Recruitment cost. Advertising, screening time, interview time, and the cost of the ones who do not work out. Early-stage sales hiring frequently takes more than one attempt, which doubles this line.
Management time. A salesperson with no manager produces roughly half of what a managed one does. If the founder is managing, that time comes out of whatever the founder was doing instead. It is a real cost even though it never appears on a payroll.
Infrastructure. CRM, calling system, collateral, proposal templates, training material. Modest in money, significant in setup time, and almost always underestimated.
Opportunity cost of a bad first hire. The worst outcome is not the salary wasted. It is six months of market contact handled badly, prospects burned, and a founder now convinced that outbound does not work in their category.
The capacity question nobody asks first
Before asking what a salesperson costs, work out what one can produce. Take your average deal value, your conversion rate from qualified conversation to close, and your sales cycle length. That tells you how many conversations one person needs per month to hit a number, and whether that volume of conversations is physically available in your market.
If the arithmetic says one person needs forty qualified conversations a month and your market generates fifteen, the problem is not the hire. It is lead generation, and hiring a salesperson will produce an expensive, demoralised person with nothing to do.
Do this calculation before writing a job advert. It takes an afternoon and it changes the decision more often than people expect.
Start with one, structured properly
The common failure is hiring two or three at once to "build momentum". If the model is not proven, you have multiplied an unproven assumption, and you will not be able to tell whether a shortfall is the person, the process or the market.
Start with one, with a defined process, defined targets and real management. Scale when that one is producing against the model, not when the plan says month three.
The build-versus-outsource question
Building in-house makes sense when you have the management capability to run the function, the cash to carry the ramp, and a sales model that is already proven by someone, usually the founder.
Outsourcing the function makes sense when you need to start selling before you can carry employment and management risk, when you have no one internally who has built a sales team before, or when you want the ability to scale against proven results rather than against a forecast.
Neither is permanently correct. Several businesses start with an outsourced function and bring it in-house once the model is proven and documented, which is a reasonable outcome and worth planning for from the start.