UK and European founders often treat the first US sales leader as the market-entry plan. Raise the round, hire someone credible in America, and the pipeline follows. The sequence is the wrong way round. A sales leader is what you hire once a motion exists. In a market you have not sold into, that motion usually does not exist yet.
Jason Lemkin's order for a SaaS company is specific. The founder-CEO closes the first batch of customers, say the first 10 or 20. If you do not, you will never really know how it is done, and you will not be able to help anyone else. Then you hire two sales reps, not one. You hire a head of sales after those two reps are hitting quota — generally, in his account, once the company is at $1m to $2m in ARR. Hire the VP before that and you are asking them to figure out product-market fit.
The dollar figure is his marker for a company that already sells. It is not a target to copy onto a US expansion plan. The order is what travels.
The same order, in a market you do not know yet.
If the founder-CEO is supposed to close the first 10 or 20 customers, a UK or European company entering the US has a prior question. Has anyone closed US customers at all?
A strong home market does not answer it. Customers in London or Berlin show that someone will buy the product. They do not show that a buyer in the US will buy it, at a price you can support, through a motion a new hire can repeat. Until that has happened, a VP of Sales hired in the US is being given Lemkin's failure brief: figure out product-market fit, rather than accelerate an engine that already works at a small scale.
Sam Altman describes the same mistake from the founder's side of the table. Learn a role before you hire for it. The classic failure is a hacker-CEO hiring a VP of Sales to avoid selling. The US version, for a European company, is a founder hiring a US sales leader to avoid learning the US market. The title makes the avoidance look like a strategy.
Readiness is a short list.
You do not need a US revenue target invented for the search. You need evidence that the market has started to answer.
| What you can point to | What it means for the hire |
|---|---|
| The founder has closed the first US customers | There is a motion to hand over, even if it is still rough. |
| US interest, and nobody has closed it | You are still in founder-led learning. A leader is early. |
| One rep in the US, and it is unclear they are hitting a real number | One person cannot show the job is repeatable. Lemkin hires two before a head of sales. |
| Two people producing in the US | A leader now has something to run. This is when 99% of heads of sales do better. |
| A home team hitting quota, and no US customers | That proves the home market. It does not prove this one. |
Lemkin's $1m to $2m ARR is a useful picture of how late “head of sales” actually is, relative to founder impatience. It is not a US-entry threshold. A European company can be well past that number at home and still be at zero in the United States. In that case the relevant first 10 or 20 are the US customers, not the ones already on the board slide.
He does allow an exception. Sometimes a strong head of sales can be the first sales hire, particularly if the product is freemium and already has revenue, or if the CEO has already taken the company a long way — he points to that same $1m to $2m range. The exception still assumes the selling has been learned. It is not a licence to hire a leader so the founder can skip a market.
The impressive US profile is often the wrong one.
Founders want a candidate whose last employer the board will recognise. That person may be excellent. They may also have sold with a brand that opened doors, inbound that filled the funnel, a layer of management, and a motion somebody else had already proved.
Has this person sold successfully through the stage you are actually entering?
Pedigree and stage fit are not the same thing. The note on who the first startup hires should be makes the distinction for early teams, and it applies with extra force to a first US leader. Someone who ran a large US sales organisation inside a recognised company has not automatically shown they can open a market where the company is unknown, and where the founder is still learning what the buyer says no to.
The evidence worth looking for is narrower.
1. They have sold without the machinery.
Sold, not managed people who sold. Into an account that did not already know the product. Ask what sat around them last time: brand, inbound, RevOps, a price the market already accepted. Then ask which of those will be missing here.
2. They can work with a founder who is still in the deals.
If the first US customers were founder-closed, the next chapter is not a clean handover to a remote executive. The founder is still the person who knows why those customers bought. Lemkin's reason the founder closes the first 10 or 20 is so they can help the people who come next. A leader who needs the founder out of the way on day one is interviewing for a later stage.
3. They are being hired to run a motion, not to discover whether one exists.
If the honest mandate is “go and find out if the US will buy this”, that is a founder problem, possibly with a rep beside them. It is not a head-of-sales problem. Lemkin is explicit that hiring the VP early asks them to figure out product-market fit, and that 99% of heads of sales do better once a few reps have already proved it can be done. Their job is to do it again, and then again. Figuring it out from scratch is not the job.
Two, not one — including in the new market.
Hiring a single US rep and calling the experiment finished is the other version of the same shortcut. One rep can be the right person in a market that was not ready, or the wrong person in a market that was. You cannot tell those apart from a single outcome. Lemkin's reason for two reps before a manager is that you need proof the job can be done, not proof that one hire was lucky or mis-levelled.
For a UK or European company, that often means the founder stays on US deals longer than the board would like, then hires two people who can repeat what has already been done, and only then hires someone to lead them. It may mean the first US hire is a rep with a clear number, rather than a vice president with a hiring plan of their own. What it should not mean is a leadership search designed to spare the founder the learning.
Before you brief the search.
- Which US customers has the founder, or the current team, actually closed? Interest, a pipeline and a conference conversation are not the same evidence.
- If the answer is none, what is this leader being asked to discover? Altman's classic failure is hiring a VP of Sales to avoid selling. A time zone does not change it.
- Do you have two people producing, or a credible plan to, before you ask someone to manage them? Lemkin hires the head of sales after two reps are hitting quota, not before the first rep has started.
- What surrounded this candidate last time that will not exist here? Brand, inbound, management layers, a motion that already worked. Stage fit is the remainder.
A first US sales leader is worth hiring when the market has started to teach you something, and you need someone who can do it more repeatably than the founder can. Hired ahead of that, the search feels like progress. It is usually a delay, at a senior cost, while the company still does not know why a US buyer would say yes.
Sources & further reading
JPS perspective
Readiness first. Then the search.
JPS works with companies opening the US on the first local leader: whether the market is ready for that hire, what the person has to do in the first year, and who is credible there.
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