Kyle Parrish, Figma’s first sales hire, built the company’s zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. Prior to Figma, Kyle spent 5 years at Dropbox in various sales roles. At Dropbox, Kyle successfully launched and scaled the Austin office to 100+ people, and then led the enterprise sales function in San Francisco and New York.

Brett: What do you think a founder should have figured out on their own before they're willing to start to bring in sales folks?

Kyle: I've always believed and I think in the last 12 months it has been really top of mind for a lot of founders and something that I'm seeing out in my network as well is the founder needs to prove, you know, product market fit, I think is a nebulous thing. It means different things to different people. What we've seen in 2023, and even part of 2022 is if it's software that's additive, the forward looking road map is really promising, but serving value today and something that people are saying, hey, this either solves a massive problem I have it helps consolidate a bunch of other products that may be using,

maybe it's in the new wave of AI, whatever it may be. If you don't have that conviction, and you're just building something really cool and, um, maybe the stickiness of the product or the usage that you're seeing under the hood is not there. It's going to be really hard to bring in a sales team because maybe you'll bring in a sales team and maybe they'll be great at conversion.

But the long tail of the business is just not going to be sustainable. And I think this is something that everyone's facing in this day and age. You want to be business critical software, not something that's nice to have. Nice to have has been thrown out in the last couple quarters.

Brett: Going back to what you were saying a second ago, how should someone figure out if they should go the IC salesperson first hire versus somebody who can build a small team underneath them?

Kyle: Yeah, I think the way that I've kind of had this conversation with founders, if you're a little bit earlier on in the journey, but you're kind of hitting that point where you are facing more opportunity costs, just in terms of how you spend your time as a founder. But maybe you don't feel like you have that conviction.

You're not quite business critical in terms of the problems you're solving the ROI that you're providing for these customers. It is somewhat a band aid solution, I think, and that doesn't mean to say negative, but to bring in a salesperson and have them take some of the load of calls and hopefully converting of customers.

It could be someone on more of the CS lens. I've seen it where a founder is successful early on, and they're not ready for sales leaders where they do a lot of the initial sales call and kind of conversion of customers. And then someone takes the, customer journey and the handoff process from there. Ultimately, the same founder that maybe doesn't have formal experience selling,

they don't have formal experience managing salespeople and leading and building sales teams. That's something that will get you maybe another 6 months, maybe another 12 months. But ultimately you're looking for that signal to say, hey, we've got an opportunity to add 3, 4 or 5 salespeople and we know that we can increase the business and the revenue run rate by X.

And when you have that conviction, then it's time start searching for a sales leader that can build that initial team and ultimately hopefully get you the next 18 months, 2 years. I think a lot of founders over complicate things trying to think. Think of someone that worked at a big name company, say Google, Salesforce, whatever it may be, and not really someone who has the right experience, whether it's working in the industry and kind of segment that they're going after, or if it's just working in early stage startups and proven that they've had long tenure in early stage companies, they had to be strategic and balance that with also being tactical.

You can't just live in the strategy as an early stage sales leader, but you also can't just live in the tactical because either one will lead to your demise.

Brett: Do you think the founder should have figured out some level of repeatability where even if they don't have an end to end baked sales process, they should have signs of repeatability that they can hand off to someone? Or do you think sales folks can come in and build the repeatability and the founder doesn't need to have done that before?

Kyle: I think that some level of repeatability needs to exist. And if you're doing sales, and you're doing that founder led motion, you've understood what are the questions that you're asking these customers that will ultimately expose some pain or opportunity. To then bring up the solution, your company, your product, how you solve that, why it's innovative and why they should care.

And really, why now, I mean, there's a lot of companies that can get people excited about their product, but it just maybe isn't a priority and it doesn't have to be today, but it has to be on the near term versus like, hey, this is cool. Come back to me when you have customers a little bit more traction and the products a little bit further down the maturity curve.

Getting to that threshold of certain number of customers. ARR, you should have an idea of what it looks like to do good discovery. What it looks like to convert those customers. And what you're really driving towards in that kind of pitch on the conversion and closing of deals and then how do you make them successful?

If you can't get them successful after the whole pre sales process, then it's all kind of for nothing. So, I think the founders should have some notes. They may not be perfect. I think what the sales leader or the sales person's job is from there is

to take what they've learned and go build on that, and hopefully they have experience doing that in the past and understand what the next phases of the journey might look like.

Brett: Can you share some advice on how to think about structuring that interview process? Let's assume the founder has done this work, they're starting to see repeatability, they feel like they can hand this off to someone. What do you think an interview process should look like for this person?

Kyle: Yeah, it's a really great question. I think the first thing honestly is, are they really interested in what you're doing and what you're building? Do they care about the product? Do they care about the problem you're trying to solve? And that doesn't mean it has to be their passion and they sort of think about it on the weekends and every night.