How to hire your first sales lead without breaking equity

The Series A sales hire is the most consequential decision you'll make after your first funding round. Get it right and you compress your path to Series B. Get it wrong and you spend 18 months unwinding a bad equity split while your pipeline stalls.

Most founders wait too long, offer too much equity, and hire the wrong profile. After working with 110+ portfolio companies through this exact moment, here's what Breega's scaling team has learned.

Key takeaways

• Hire your first sales lead when you have repeatable proof of concept — not before
• The right profile at Series A is a builder, not a manager. Avoid candidates who want to inherit a team
• 0.3–0.6% equity is the right range for a VP Sales at Series A in Europe. Anything above 1% is a red flag on your cap table
• The first 90 days should be spent on process documentation, not quota
• Fire fast if they can't run discovery calls without you in the room by week six

When to hire

The most common mistake is hiring a sales lead because you raised, not because you're ready. A funding round is not a signal that your sales motion works — it's a signal that investors believe it might. Those are different things.

Hire when you can answer yes to all three of these:

• You've closed at least 10 customers yourself, without a sales process, on founder relationships alone
• You understand why each of those 10 said yes — and it's the same reason each time
• You're turning down inbound because you don't have the bandwidth to run calls

If you can't answer yes to all three, a sales hire will not solve your pipeline problem. They'll just make it more expensive.

"The best time to hire your first sales lead is when you're already overwhelmed closing deals yourself. Not before."

What profile to hire

At Series A, you are not hiring a VP of Sales. You are hiring a founding sales lead — someone who builds the playbook, not someone who runs a team that already has one.

The profile that fails almost every time: the enterprise sales executive from a large tech company with a Rolodex and a reputation. They're excellent at running structured sales motions inside mature organisations. They have no idea what to do when there's no CRM, no SDR team, and no marketing qualified leads.

The profile that works: someone who has been the first or second sales hire at a company that reached Series B or C. They've built from zero before. They're comfortable with ambiguity. They run their own discovery calls on day one.

How to structure the equity

European benchmarks for a VP Sales at Series A sit between 0.3% and 0.6%, with a four-year vest and a one-year cliff. Anything above 1% at this stage is distorting your cap table before you've proven the model.

If a candidate pushes hard above 0.6%, treat it as a signal, not a negotiation. Either they don't understand the European market, or their risk tolerance doesn't match the stage you're at. Both are useful information.

The cash component matters more than most founders admit. A strong sales lead at Series A expects a base salary between €80K and €110K depending on geography, plus commission on a quota that's achievable in year one. Under-paying on cash and over-paying on equity is the classic mistake — you end up with a demotivated hire who is watching their unvested shares and thinking about the door.

The 90-day test

Set one expectation in the first conversation and hold to it: by day 90, this person should be able to run a full discovery-to-close cycle without you in the room. Not close deals independently — run the process independently.

If they can't do that by week eight, the conversation about fit needs to happen before week twelve. The sunk cost of a bad sales hire compounds faster than almost any other early-stage mistake.

Breega's scaling team works directly with portfolio companies on this transition — from writing the job spec to structuring the offer. If you're a Breega portfolio founder navigating your first sales hire, reach out to your partner directly.