The job market for early-stage growth leaders in crypto has never been more competitive.

With few moats for open source software, distribution becomes the winning factor for decentralized protocols and the platforms built on top of them. Hiring the right Head of Business Development at the right time can have an outsized impact on a project’s trajectory.

As part of the GTM function at Paradigm, I work with our Head of Talent, Dan McCarthy, to help our founders source and close the best growth leaders in the industry. Here is some of the advice we give founders about hiring their first Head of BD.

1. Don’t break the founder-led sales motion too early.
2. Turn scrappy into scalable.
3. Demand high agency & crypto-nativity.
4. Don’t sleep on tactics.
5. Measure performance with secondary metrics.

Don’t break the founder-led sales motion too early.

Founders will always be the best sales people of their own products. It’s crucial to keep this motion going while landing the first customer(s) and building the MVP for a couple of reasons:

• You’re more likely to close the first deal. When a pre-product startup is selling, buyers are betting on the founder’s ability to deliver on an inspiring roadmap rather than the current state of the product. Founders have the best chance of bringing the technical details, product vision, and overall enthusiasm that are required to convince someone to take the risk of being customer #1 of an unproven solution.
• It helps you build a better product. Sales and product development should be the same process in the early stages of company building. Rather than building in a vacuum, founders should develop an airtight feedback loop with their initial prospects that will shape the v1 product roadmap. Ramping up a new hire in the middle of this process can add unnecessary friction and communication silos.

You’re typically ready to hire your first Head of BD once you’ve validated what your initial user base wants, and now you need to distribute your product to the broader market. This process can start earlier if you’re at a protocol that needs to build a broad external ecosystem ahead of launch; but in general, it’s best to wait until you have a handful of customers that love your product.

Turn scrappy into scalable.

The Head of BD should take the founder’s method of ‘doing things that don’t scale’ to find the first customer, and turn it into a scalable, repeatable sales motion that helps land the next hundred or thousand customers. Below are some parts of the sales process that this hire should own out of the gate:

• Implement a CRM (Excel, Salesforce, Copper, etc.) that will best scale with the company and fill it with data on the entire addressable market.
• Qualify inbound leads, send outbound to new prospects, and loop in the founder to help close the highest-impact deals.
• Run weekly pipeline meetings that give leadership an understanding of market penetration and chokepoints in the sales process.
• Create sales collateral like customer case studies, product updates, onboarding guides, etc., and hypothesis-test selling points that will move prospects down the funnel.
• Serve as the internal voice of the customer for product roadmap decisions, steering the product team towards the needle-moving features and capabilities.

Overall, it’s important to find a Head of BD who is comfortable with both setting up the sales infrastructure and running the end-to-end sales process. Just doing one is not enough.

Demand high agency & crypto-nativity.

We’ve found that some of the best first Heads of BD have been former startup founders themselves, or early employees who created departments from scratch at their previous company. They know that the buck stops with them, and they take extreme ownership of their work and progress against company-wide goals.

Beyond baseline traits like strong communication and organization, consider making crypto-nativity a core focus of your search. Here are a couple of soft skills that will help determine if your Head of BD will stick it out through multiple cycles:

• Adaptability — Early sales in crypto is different from being in a sales role at a large company in an established industry where most of the process, infrastructure, and narratives are already formalized. Crypto growth leaders need to be able to improvise new sales tactics in the face of changing market conditions and narrative shifts, since what may work in a bull market will not work in a bear (and vice versa).
• Tenacity — With the cyclicality of our industry, the candidate also needs to be highly motivated by the underlying mission of crypto and not easily discouraged by delayed results. The winning BD approaches in crypto are often found after successive rounds of failing, learning, and iterating. Candidates who are purely motivated by short-term financial gain will get washed out in the inevitable drawdowns.

It’s rare that you’ll be able to check every box on your candidate wishlist, but having a high-agency, crypto-native Head of BD will set you up for success.

Don’t sleep on tactics.

Most crypto startups overweight strategy and underweight tactics when it comes to growth. I’ve polled several apps about the buying decision for their tech stack, and it’s shocking how often the deciding factor was simply responsiveness — whether to an inbound inquiry, timely follow-up after calls, or answering thorny technical questions.

The compounding effect of good tactics is what creates long-term winners, and it’s crucial to prioritize candidates who can run an organized process that doesn’t let leads fall through the cracks. Here are a few interview questions you could use to gauge their effectiveness at on-the-ground sales:

• What criteria would you use to sort inbound inquiries into low, medium, and high priority, and how would the sales process differ for each?
• What questions would you ask on a discovery call to know if a lead is a good potential fit for us?
• Do you think it’s a good idea to run through a pitch deck on a call with a prospect, or how do you like to lead sales calls?
• How soon after an intro sales call would you follow up with a lead, and what information would you typically send them?
• If a lead goes stagnant, what are some strategies you would try to get them warm again?
• If a lead enters the implementation phase, how would you change our communication platform, style, and cadence with them?

It’s still important for the Head of BD to help set the company’s distribution strategy, but that strategy won’t amount to much if they can’t execute well on the little things day after day.

Measure performance with secondary metrics.

In a nascent industry like crypto, there are numerous external factors that affect reaching a traditional growth target like revenue, TVL, number of customers, or transaction volume. These growth targets are the output of your BD process and are important to track, but it’s equally important to measure the quality of the inputs that help you get there.

Founders should create an empirical north star goal for the BD function to achieve based on the market signal they’ve received from leading early-stage sales. They should also have a set of secondary metrics to judge performance on, to account for unforeseen market shifts, regulatory changes, or other macro-level events in crypto.

Below is an example of how founders could set goals for the BD hire:

• North Star: Reach $5m ARR by the end of the year
• Primary Metrics:

of new paying customers

Average ACV per customer

• Secondary Metrics:

of deals progressed to evaluation stage

of new leads added to the pipeline

of discovery calls completed with prospects

of outbound messages sent to prospects

With this framework, you’ll be able to smooth out some of the external impacts in crypto and ensure that your BD process is operating at a high level.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [X]. All copyrights belong to the original author [@nickmartitsch]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.