Where do US startups find remote sales and account management talent?

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There are two parts to your question. I will answer the second one first. Remote hiring isn't as remote as it once was. After rule in age of telephones, Skype, and FaceTime, you can spend a lot of time with someone evaluating them even though they may be in another city. As for best practices, the most important practice to be established is determining what it is you really need to hire to be satisfied with your new employee. Remember, every criteria you add to the mix reduces your pool of potential solutions to your problems. Once you have a clear idea of what you really need, you need to figure out how you will assess for that experience. If you were going to ask other people to interview a candidate, you need to get them clear on what they are to interview about, and what they need to assess for. Too often, colleagues take job hunters down rabbit holes that they don't deserve to be taken down. Everyone in your organization has to be clear about what they are part of the assessment process his head what they are to interview for otherwise you will turn off way too many people.

The first place to start is to get out there and meet people especially at local business association group meetings. Any place where people are networking is a great way to find someone for the team. Use the resources you already have like checking your college or university alumni association. Of course you could put out an ad on one of the online job boards, but your best opportunity will be to find someone who knows someone so that you can get a strong recommendation. There's always the obvious resources such as LinkedIn, but you'd be better off networking with people that you know to find the exact person that you need.

Hello, I can help out with advice on the technical aspects. Not sure what low-mid budget means for you, but I can tell right off the bat that something like SAP or Salesforce will be overkill. At the base of your tech stack will be the eCommerce platform - i.e. the website - and your back-office - OMS/fulfilment app. For the former, I would opt for a lead developer that can choose the platforms and make sure they can work together. I think getting a small team of 2-3 devs to work closely with merch/sales and content/marketing would save you money and lay a solid groundwork. I can recommend Magento as a solid platform. There's plenty of features to use it standalone, and there are a lot of very good small agencies and a few solid hosting providers. You can even get away with using the free Magento if you get a good team behind it. Need more details from you to get a better understanding of your needs but that should be a good start.

That varies wildly based on sales cycle and product complexity. An easy rule: sales staff should be as much as you can hire and keep costs under revenue. Support should be enough that customer response times are never over 24 hours. If it's taking longer, hire more support if you can afford to. If you can't afford to, you probably need to simplify your product or else improve your sales processes. 😊