I talk to founding AEs every week. The sellers founders are trying to recruit.
These are the people you’re trying to recruit. The ones with options. The ones who’ve been promoted four times at a company that went from $1M to $10M ARR. The ones who don’t need your job.
And here’s what almost none of the founders I work with realize is happening on the other side of that conversation.
They think the AE is being evaluated. The AE knows they’re evaluating you.
Here’s what they’re looking for. And here’s what you can do about it.
1. Do you have a point of view the market can see?
The first thing a discerning candidate checks isn’t your product. It’s your LinkedIn.
Not your follower count. Your feed. Are you publishing a current point of view on the problem you solve? Or is it a string of product announcements and team-we’re-hiring posts?
A first sales hire I talked to last month was evaluating a company. The CEO has 14,000 followers. Generates zero inbound. The feed is all product. He took one look and passed.
A founder with a visible point of view arrives at every conversation with something most sellers can’t manufacture: a reason to be trusted before the pitch begins. That’s pull. And pull is what makes a top AE want your job.
2. Is there inbound, or am I cold-calling for you?
Top AEs ask one question that most founders aren’t ready for: where do the leads come from?
If the answer is “you’ll build pipeline from zero,” the good ones hear two jobs. Selling, and whatever you didn’t do to create demand. They know that’s two jobs and only one of them is on the comp plan.
I tell every AE I coach: prioritize founder pull as the single most important factor when evaluating a role. If the founder isn’t generating interest, the AE is carrying the company’s GTM gap on their back.
If you want top talent, build demand before you hire. Publish. Speak. Show up where your buyers are. The AE you want is watching.
But I want a hunter, not someone spoon-fed leads.
I hear this from founders all the time. And fair. You want an AE who can prospect, who can open doors, who doesn’t sit around waiting for inbound to show up.
That’s not what founder pull means.
A hunter with a founder who publishes lands more meetings. The cold call starts warmer because the buyer has already seen the founder’s thinking. The outreach gets replies because the name means something. The AE still hunts. But every touchpoint hits harder because the market has already heard of you.
The AE who can hunt is worth more when the market has already heard of you. Not less.
The founders who say “I want a hunter” and then provide zero market visibility are asking the AE to open doors in a market where nobody knows the company exists. The good ones can do it. They just won’t do it for long.
3. Can deals close without you in the room?
This is the one founders resist. They’re proud of being the closer. They should be. It’s how the first ten deals happen.
But a top AE is asking: if I take this job, am I the first seller, or am I also the founder’s understudy?
If every late-stage call needs the founder, the AE knows the motion hasn’t been transferred. They’re walking into a personality-dependent system, not a repeatable one. And they’ve been through that before.
Document your calls. Map your discovery. Write down the objections and the answers that actually land. Build the system before you hire the person.
4. Do you know what you need?
I ask every founder hiring a first seller: if this person could only be great at one thing, what is it?
Almost nobody has an answer ready. Most give me three. Some give me five.
A top AE hears that and thinks: this founder hasn’t decided what they need. Which means the role is undecided. Which means I’ll be set up to fail.
Pick. Pipeline or closing. High volume or deep accounts. Evangelizing a new category or selling into existing budget. You don’t have to be right about all six. You have to have picked.
5. How does your hiring process feel?
The hiring process is the one part of your company a candidate sees from the inside before they decide.
They notice when you said you were excited and then took two weeks to schedule. They notice when the third interviewer asks the same three questions as the first. They notice when nobody can tell them what the next step is.
Being early isn’t the problem. Disorganized is. A strong candidate starts wondering what else runs this way. The onboarding. The pipeline reviews. The comp plan they haven’t seen yet.
Top sellers need to be sold. Run a process that makes them want in.
Why this matters more than your product
In a market where twenty companies do what you do, the product isn’t the differentiator. Your visibility is. Your point of view is. Your ability to create pull is.
The AEs I talk to every week, the ones with options, the ones who’ve been promoted four times at companies that grew through the exact motion you’re trying to build, they’re not reading your feature list. They’re reading your LinkedIn. They’re checking if anyone’s heard of you. They’re deciding whether your market is pulling or whether they’ll be pushing.
You can hire the best AE in the world. If your market doesn’t know you exist, they’ll leave in six months. Not because the product is weak. Because the pull wasn’t there, and they were the one who had to create it.
Build the pull first. Then hire.
The AE you want is already evaluating you. The question is whether there’s anything to evaluate.
If you’re a founder thinking about your first sales hire, the search is only half the problem. The other half is what they find when they look at you.
Fix that first.
If you find yourself uncertain if you are ready to hire, let’s talk. Sometimes tightening the process before hiring can set a seller up for success! Just email dave@100founders.ai and we can discuss whether what you do is transferrable to someone else.