Stop hiring the same salesperson at every phase of growth

When most companies think about hiring salespeople, they picture the same type of person.

Confident. Persuasive. Energetic. Relationship-driven. Commercial. Comfortable starting conversations and pushing opportunities forward.

In Compono's Work Personality language, they're often thinking about the Campaigner.
And to be clear, Campaigners are incredibly important in sales. They create energy, open doors, influence people, and turn interest into action. Without them, sales teams stall.

But one of the biggest mistakes companies make is assuming every sales hire should be a Campaigner, no matter what phase the business is in.

That's not how great sales teams are built.

A sales function changes as the business grows

In the startup phase, you may be hiring your first salesperson. In early growth, that may become two, three, or four. During scale-up, it may become five to ten. Eventually, in a more mature sales function, it may become ten, twenty, or more.
At each phase, the business needs something different from sales.
Before we go further, it helps to know what the eight types of work actually are. They come from research on how high-performing teams distribute work, and every team needs coverage across all eight:

• Doing: executing tasks and delivering results

• Auditing: checking for accuracy and compliance

• Evaluating: analysing performance and outcomes

• Coordinating: organising people and plans

• Campaigning: promoting ideas and gaining support

• Helping: supporting others with empathy

• Advising: guiding with insight and perspective

• Pioneering: creating and exploring new ideas

Compono uses this model to map how people are wired for work. Most people have one dominant type and work others with less natural ease. A team of eight people with the same dominant type is a team with seven gaps.

None of the eight stop mattering as the business grows. At every phase, a sales function still needs all eight to be covered in some way. The business still needs to pioneer, campaign, evaluate, coordinate, do, audit, help, and advise.

The difference is that different work types become more important at different phases of growth.

Even so, a sales role still requires multiple types of work. That's especially true in smaller teams, where one person may need to cover a lot of ground. The question isn't whether a salesperson needs to campaign, do, evaluate, advise, or coordinate. They do. The question is which type of work should be prioritised based on the phase of the business.

This matters more than most companies realise. A 2024 piece of research on sales team structure found that composition, not raw talent, is the primary driver of performance outcomes. Even when individual competence is high, the wrong mix of work types produces a mediocre team. A team made up of highly skilled individuals with the right spread of work types can outperform a team of equally skilled individuals who are all wired the same way. The same pattern shows up in wider diversity research: teams with different wiring and perspectives make better decisions up to 87% of the time compared to homogeneous groups, according to Cloverpop's analysis of 600 business decisions across 200 teams. Apply that to sales hiring, and the lesson is obvious. A team of eight Campaigners is not eight times better than one. It's a team missing seven other types of work.

Startup/validation: hiring your first salesperson

In the startup phase, your first sales hire isn't stepping into a mature sales machine.

They're helping build the machine.

There may be no proven pitch, no clear ideal customer profile, no reliable lead source, no strong collateral, no clean CRM, no repeatable process, and no clear sales playbook.
So who should the first salesperson be?

Usually, the best first sales hire is a Pioneer.

Not because Campaigning doesn't matter. It absolutely does. Someone still needs to open doors, create interest, build relationships, and move opportunities forward.
Not because Doing doesn't matter either. The first salesperson still needs to make calls, send emails, write decks, follow up, update the CRM, chase proposals, and do the grunt work.

But the dominant business challenge at this phase is not simply selling.

The dominant challenge is discovery.

The business is still trying to work out who the real customer is, what pain matters most, what message lands, which segment has urgency, what objections keep appearing, and what sales motion can actually be repeated.

That's Pioneer work.

And the data is clear on what happens when founders skip this. Research cited in First Round Review's 2025 analysis of first sales hires found one enterprise startup didn't close a single deal without founder involvement until year five of the company. The first salesperson wasn't there to run a polished process. They were there to help the founder find one.

But even in this phase, the other work types still matter. The first salesperson needs enough Evaluator discipline to learn from the market, spot patterns, and work out what's actually happening in the sales conversations. They need enough Advisor capability to help customers understand the problem, not just pitch the product. They need enough Coordinator instinct to start capturing the basics of a repeatable process. And they need enough Doing energy to keep moving when there's no one else around to pick up the tasks.

A Campaigner may be excellent once there's a clearer proposition, a stronger market, a better process, and a more mature sales environment. But in the startup phase, a pure Campaigner can struggle if there's no clear system, message, or market to campaign within.

This is the important distinction.

The first salesperson still has to perform Campaigning work. But Campaigner may not be the best dominant Work Personality to prioritise first.

A Pioneer is more likely to tolerate ambiguity. They're more likely to test, adapt, explore, challenge assumptions, and keep learning when the answers aren't yet obvious.

The key is this: hire a Pioneer personality, but make sure the role still requires and measures Campaigning, Doing, Evaluating, and Advising actions.

Early growth: moving from one salesperson to a small team

Once the company moves from one salesperson to two, three, or four, the priority starts to shift.

The business can no longer rely on one person's instincts, memory, hustle, and personal style. The team now needs some consistency.

This is where Coordinator work becomes more important.

Someone needs to bring order to the chaos.

What are the sales stages? What does a qualified opportunity look like? What should be recorded in the CRM? What does the handover process look like? What does a real pipeline actually look like?

At this phase, you still need Campaigning, Pioneering, and Doing to continue. But you also need more deliberate Evaluating, because the business has more sales conversations, more market feedback, more wins, more losses, and more data to learn from.

You also need stronger Advising. As the sales team grows, being persuasive isn't enough on its own. Salespeople need to guide customers well, understand their needs, shape the conversation, and help buyers make better decisions.

The priority starts shifting toward Coordination because without structure, the sales function becomes inconsistent and difficult to scale.

This is also where the Campaigner becomes increasingly valuable.

Once the business has more clarity around the ICP, the pitch, the problem, the offer, and the sales motion, there's now something clearer to campaign around.

The Campaigner can take that clarity and create momentum. They can build pipeline, create urgency, energise prospects, strengthen relationships, and turn the early learning into commercial traction.

So in early growth, the question isn't "do we need Campaigners?"

You do.

The better question is: "do we now have enough clarity for Campaigners to be effective?"

Scale-up: building repeatable execution

As the team grows further, often to five to ten salespeople, the business needs execution at scale.

This is where Doer work becomes critical.

The sales function now needs people who can follow the process, make the calls, run the demos, progress opportunities, follow up properly, close the loop, and maintain activity discipline.

The danger at this phase is hiring only big personalities who want to sell in their own style.

That may have worked when the team was small, but it gets harder to manage as the team grows. A 2026 analysis from ZoomInfo on sales team structure puts the threshold plainly: most companies should transition from a generalist model to a more specialised one when they hit 10 to 15 reps with predictable deal flow. Specialisation improves efficiency at scale, but it requires enough volume to justify separate roles. At this stage, the business needs people who can execute the system, not just improvise around it.

Campaigners still matter here. In fact, they can be extremely valuable in a scale-up environment because they bring energy, urgency, influence, and commercial momentum.

But they need to operate inside a clearer system.

At this phase, the business doesn't just need people who can create excitement. It needs people who can create excitement consistently, within a repeatable sales process, and in a way that can be measured, coached, and improved.

The Campaigner helps drive the engine.

The Doer helps make the engine reliable.

You need both, but the priority shifts depending on what the business is trying to solve.
This is also where Auditor work starts to matter more. Not because the business wants bureaucracy, but because it needs to know whether the sales system is actually working. Where are deals getting stuck? Which stage is leaking? Are people following the process? Is the forecast real? Are conversion rates improving, or just activity levels?

At the same time, Helper work becomes more important as new salespeople join. Someone needs to support onboarding, share knowledge, help people adopt the process, and maintain team continuity. Without Helper work, every new salesperson learns through trial and error, and the sales function becomes harder to scale.

So in scale-up, Doing becomes the priority, Campaigning remains critical, Coordination keeps the process consistent, Evaluating and Auditing improve the system, Advising improves customer trust, and Helping keeps the team connected.

Expansion and maturity: improving the sales system

Once the sales team becomes larger, often ten, twenty, or more, another shift happens.

The business now needs greater inspection, quality control, performance analysis, coaching, and operational discipline.

This is where Auditor work becomes more important.

Auditors help the sales function move from activity to performance. They look at the data, inspect the pipeline, and identify leakage. They test whether the process is being followed, improve forecast accuracy, and help the team understand what's working and what's not.

At the same time, Helper work becomes more important too.

Helpers maintain continuity across the team. They support onboarding, coach new team members, and share knowledge. They protect culture and help people adopt the sales process without turning the team into a rigid machine.

This is often overlooked.

A sales function doesn't scale just because you hire more salespeople. It scales because the work becomes better designed, better distributed, and better supported. Korn Ferry's 2024 research on sales organisations found that companies with a clear understanding of what "excellent" looks like for each sales role achieve superior performance across the board, and also report 17% lower voluntary turnover and 20% lower involuntary turnover. Clarity on what the role actually does (and doesn't do) pays off twice. Once in performance, and again in retention.

Campaigners still play an important role in mature sales functions, but they're no longer expected to carry the whole system through personality and effort.

They're most powerful in roles where relationship-building, influence, persuasion, and opportunity creation are central. This may include new business, enterprise sales, partnerships, channel development, strategic accounts, or expansion into new markets.

In a mature sales function, the Campaigner is still critical.

But the Campaigner is part of the system, not the substitute for the system.

The same is true for the other work types. Pioneers remain valuable when the business explores new markets, launches new products, tests new segments, or challenges the current sales motion. Evaluators help the business interpret patterns and make better commercial decisions. Coordinators maintain consistency across teams. Doers keep execution moving. Advisors deepen customer trust, especially in more complex sales. Auditors improve performance. Helpers strengthen onboarding, culture, and team continuity.

Maturity doesn't make the eight work types less important. It makes their distribution more deliberate.

The practical takeaway

The mistake is hiring the same "salesperson" at every phase of growth.

The better approach is to ask: what type of sales work matters most right now?

In the startup phase, prioritise the Pioneer, because the business is still discovering the market, the ICP, the message, and the sales motion. But make sure that person can still campaign, do the work, evaluate feedback, and advise customers.

In early growth, increase the focus on Coordination, while bringing in more Campaigner capability as the proposition becomes clearer. The business still needs Pioneering to keep testing, Evaluating to keep learning, Doing to keep moving, and Advising to help customers buy with confidence.

In the scale-up phase, strengthen Doing and repeatable execution, while using Campaigners to drive pipeline, urgency, relationships, and conversion inside the system. At this point, Coordination, Evaluation, Auditing, Helping, and Advising all become more important because the team is now large enough for inconsistency to become expensive.

In expansion and maturity, build stronger Auditing, Helping, coaching, and system improvement, while placing Campaigners in roles where influence and opportunity creation matter most. Keep Pioneers close to new markets and new products. Keep Advisors close to complex customers. Keep Evaluators close to commercial decision-making. Keep Coordinators close to operating rhythm and process discipline.

Through all of this, the full sales function still needs coverage across all eight types of work.

Great sales teams don't just campaign. They pioneer new markets, evaluate what's working, coordinate activity, do the hard execution, audit performance, help each other improve, advise customers properly, and maintain momentum.

Sales growth is not just about hiring more salespeople.

It's about designing the right sales team for the phase your business is in.

Seven steps for hiring the right salespeople as you grow

1. Hire for the dominant personality needed by the business phase, but define the full work required by the role and team. A person has one dominant Work Personality type, but a sales role still requires multiple types of work. In the startup phase, you may prioritise a Pioneer because discovery is the dominant challenge. But that Pioneer still needs to perform Campaigning, Doing, Evaluating, and Advising actions: prospecting, pitching, following up, learning from feedback, guiding customers, building materials, and closing deals.

2. Define the phase of your business before defining the sales role. Are you validating the market, building early growth, scaling execution, or optimising a larger sales function? The answer should shape the hire.

3. In startup / validation, prioritise a Pioneer. The earliest sales challenge is discovery. You need someone who can explore the market, test the ICP, refine the message, find urgency, and build a sales motion from scratch.

4. Make sure the Pioneer still does the sales work. Hiring a Pioneer doesn't mean they avoid cold calls, follow-up, demos, proposals, or closing. It means their natural strength is finding the path, while the role still demands Campaigning, Doing, Evaluating, and Advising.

5. Bring in Campaigners when there's something clearer to campaign around. Once the ICP, pitch, offer, and sales motion become clearer, Campaigners become increasingly valuable. They create energy, build pipeline, influence prospects, generate urgency, and turn clarity into commercial momentum.

6. In early growth and scale-up, build structure, execution, and learning. As the team grows, you need Coordination to create consistency, Doing to execute the process repeatedly, and Evaluating to keep improving. Without these, the sales function becomes too dependent on individual style.

7. In expansion and maturity, strengthen Auditing, Helping, and Advising. Larger sales teams need inspection, coaching, onboarding, performance analysis, pipeline discipline, customer guidance, and cultural continuity. This is where Auditors, Helpers, and Advisors become increasingly important.

A simple way to think about it

Justin Coutts is Head of Talent Solutions at Compono, an Australian people and culture platform that combines hiring, culture, and learning with people insight.