75% of sales hires fail within the first year. Not because companies pick the wrong CV. Because they screen for the wrong thing.
If you are a founder making your first or second sales hire, there is a specific version of this mistake you are almost certainly going to make. You are going to hire someone who "gets" your product. Someone who asks smart technical questions in the interview. Someone who already understands your market.
It feels like the safe choice. It is the expensive one.
The mistake: hiring in your own image
Founders care deeply about what they have built. That is the job. But it creates a blind spot in hiring. You unconsciously weight product knowledge because it feels like alignment. A candidate who speaks your language, who understands your solution, who already knows the competitive landscape. That feels like a shortcut.
It is not. It is a vanity metric. It feels good in the interview and underperforms in the field.
A study of over 20,000 new hires found that 89% of those who failed did so because of soft skills, not technical knowledge. The pattern holds in sales. The candidates who impress founders most in interviews are often the ones who stall fastest in pipeline.
Product knowledge is learnable. Sales instinct is not.
The average new salesperson reaches full productivity in three to five months. For account executives selling complex B2B products, the Bridge Group puts it at 4.9 months. That is your ramp window. Your product can be learned inside it.
What cannot be learned in that window is the ability to handle rejection without losing momentum. To run structured discovery that uncovers real pain. To push back on a prospect without torching the relationship. To create urgency without being desperate.
These are years-in-the-making skills. You cannot teach someone to be curious, resilient, or coachable. So assess for what cannot be taught, and trust that what can be taught will be.
Look for demonstrated proof of learning
"Are they coachable?" is the right question. But it is too easy to fake in an interview. Everyone says yes.
The sharper question is: have they actually done it? Can they point to a specific moment where they picked something up from scratch. A new industry. An unfamiliar product. A sales motion they had never run before. And turned that into measurable performance?
That is the evidence. Push for it. Ask for the story, the timeline, and the numbers. Vague answers here are a red flag. You are not testing whether they can learn in theory. You are testing whether they have a track record of doing it under pressure.
At meritt. we screen for this specifically. Curiosity, coachability, grit, and communication. These four traits predict sales success far more reliably than product knowledge or years of industry experience.
Too much product knowledge makes you a presenter, not a problem-solver
Here is the trap nobody talks about. When a salesperson knows too much about the product, they default to answering questions rather than asking them. They show up to educate, not to diagnose.
The best salespeople sit in ambiguity with a prospect. They pull out the real problem before they ever mention a feature. Over-technical hires skip that entire step because they are too eager to demonstrate what they know.
You end up with someone who delivers a polished product briefing on every call. That is not selling. That is presenting. And presenting does not close deals.
Founder, you are already the product expert. That is not the gap.
This is the sharpest reframe. If you are the founder, you do not need a salesperson who knows your product as well as you do. You already have that person. It is you.
What you are missing is sales expertise. That is why you are hiring. A founder who optimises for product knowledge in their sales hire is essentially hiring a second version of themselves. When what they actually need is the skill set the business lacks.
You are not hiring a product expert. You are hiring someone to open doors you cannot open yourself.
What a great first sales hire actually looks like
They will not ace your product quiz. They will ask you questions about your customers that you have not thought of yet. They will have a story about the time they sold something they barely understood, because they were relentless about learning and sharp enough to connect the dots.
A bad sales hire costs roughly £150,000 when you add up salary, lost pipeline, ramp time, and the cost of starting over. That is six months of runway for most early-stage companies. The way to avoid it is simple. Stop screening for what you already know. Start screening for what you cannot teach.