Mainsail’s How-to-Hire Series: A SaaS Founder’s Guide to Building Out Your Leadership Team

Founders pour their hearts and souls into creating outstanding products, proving their worth in the market, and overcoming the hurdles that come with growth. But here’s the reality: you can only go so far alone.

As your company and opportunities for growth mature, you have to add the right people with the right range of skills to the team around you. Without them, you’ll likely never win the race to scale and become a leader in your space.

At Mainsail, we’ve partnered with more than a hundred B2B SaaS businesses to help them realize their full potential. Over the years, we have developed a deep collection of best practices for building successful teams, so we compiled many of them into this series to help you build a growth-oriented leadership team.

The Founder’s Dilemma: Hire for Now or for the Future?

On this journey, many founders eventually face the critical question: should I hire for what I need right now, or for the next chapter of my business? Assuming your company is growing, our answer is to always hire for the future. If you only hire for current needs, you’re already behind.

The real benefit of hiring for the future is that the right leaders will help pull you into the next growth stage. They’ve been there before. They recognize patterns of success. The ideal scenario is to find the right mix of tenured leaders along with less experienced, but intellectually curious and hardworking, talent to scale with you while being mentored by the stronger players.

5 Key Pillars of Effective Hiring

From our experience, we believe that the foundation of an effective hiring process is built on these five elements:

Strategic prioritization: Be intentional about which roles you want to hire for and when. This is part of the broader organizational design that evolves as your company grows. Include key stakeholders to help you develop this plan and never hire too many executives at the same time. You want to be thoughtful about the team and culture you are building, as if you’re putting a puzzle together.
A defined search process: Having a clear, structured approach ensures you don’t miss any crucial steps. Define who is involved in both the search committee and interview panel (those may be the same or slightly different). Identify upfront how many rounds you anticipate and if any materials will be shared later for confidential review, in-person meetings, etc. Try not to make it up as you go.
A position spec and scorecard: Involve key stakeholders – the CEO, board members, relevant department heads and HR – to define the role along with what success will look like for the hire 6-18 months down the road. For example, why do you need or want a VP of Marketing right now and what are you looking for from this role? Be curious and strategic internally to reach a well-defined job spec.
Separately, creating a scorecard is non-negotiable when making any hire. A well-designed scorecard aligns your team on what you’re hiring for and provides an objective way to evaluate each candidate. The scorecard should be a redacted, succinct reflection of your position spec.
Quick calibration. One metric we use to track efficiency is TTIP, or Time to Introduce the Placement. Within 30 days of kicking off a portfolio company search at Mainsail, we aim to introduce the candidate who is eventually hired. This requires calibrating quickly out of the gate, knowing it may ultimately take longer for the candidate to get through the full interview process.
Strong candidate momentum: It’s critical to properly manage candidate momentum in your search process. As you evaluate candidates, be sure to space interview intervals frequently with consistent communication touchpoints. Failure to maintain the right communication strategy with candidates may result in process breakdown, candidate withdrawal or worse, the candidate getting recruited away to another opportunity.

Why This Guide to Building a B2B SaaS Leadership Team?

We created this guide because we know how critical making the right hire can be to the success of a business and we want to share our lessons learned and insights on how, when, and what to look for across your future executive team. Each post in the series focuses on a specific role, from hiring your first CFO to Head of Sales, Head of Customer Experience to Head of Product, etc. We’ll walk you through:

How to know when it’s time to hire each role
What experience level to look for
The top characteristics we see in successful candidates
How to evaluate these traits in an interview
What to expect from each role in the first 6-18 months

Our goal is to help you build a team that leads your business to reach its full potential, far beyond simply meeting your needs today. We want you to find the right people to help you achieve your vision: leaders who complement your skills, challenge your thinking, and help you navigate the complexities of growing and scaling a business.

So, whether you’re considering your first executive hire or looking to round out your C-suite, this strategic guide is for you. Let’s get started.

How to Hire a Head of Sales >>

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