Should I hire a sales executive for my travel startup?

Hi, even if you hired a sales executive you would need to give them training on your product so they could effectively sell it. And even then the person would ideally need to know the best way to sell it, as not all sales executives are good at building the sales process itself.

The idea thing for you to do in my mind, is sell that yourself, or hire a sales consultant to help you build the process. You will pay more in the short term for a cinsultant, but the sales should make that money back. Once you are accutley aware of how to best get leads and covert them, you can hire sales staff and have them refine it. By that point you should have some income to be able to pay them Base+.

It is likely you could get commission only sales folks, but in order to do that they need certainty that you at a minimum know how to sell your own product and they can spend the time working for you and making enough money doing so.

Hi:
Sounds like you're applying some existing skills to a new opportunity, which is great.
To turn that opportunity into a viable business, you do need to sell. You. Not someone else.
Learn the sales techniques, apply them to the prospects your marketing has generated, keep using what works and toss what doesn't.
Enjoyable? Maybe. Maybe not.
But by doing it yourself, you'll find out:
* if you like it
* what it takes
* how good your marketing is
* what you'll need to look for if/when you do determine that it would be smart to hire someone to sell for you
If you wish to discuss, send me a PM through Clarity for 15 free minutes.
Cheers,
Kerby

If hiring salesperson can help to close the deals, then I would find ways to do this. Before this, you want to check answers to below questions.
1) Are you able to close the deals without any support?
2) If 1 is Yes, are you having sufficient bandwidth to close the current pipeline?
3) If 1 in No, then you find the salesperson who can help you.
4) You want to do the calculation on sales pipeline and see the overall business opportunity and likely money you need to spend. You can always do scenarios like optimistic & Practical.
5) You might get somebody do this part-time as well if you find the ways.
6) If you don't require face to face meeting, the task could be much easier.

Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions.

Firstly, great job for setting up your company and getting in leads. Depending on how much the product is, what your margins are, you might be able to hire people on a pure commission basis. It's a great way to leverage other people and also get experts to sell your product. If you like I might know a few people who could do that for you but you'll have to have a solid product, good leads and atleast 30% margin on your product. If you need some help, let me know.

I believe you need a sales team very badly. You should be careful while hiring sales executives for your company. When a new salesperson joins your team, you are not only investing in their compensation. If you hired the wrong person, you did not just lose the time and money it took you to get that person on board. You also have severance costs, the lost sales they had not brought in, the reduced productivity of the rest of the team operating in damage control mode, and the opportunity cost of not hiring a better candidate.
You can read more here: https://www.nutshell.com/blog/how-to-hire-a-sales-team/
I strongly suggest that first you hire a CMO work out your marketing strategies and then go on to hire sales executive. This link will help you: https://www.phocuswire.com/travel-startups-chief-marketing-officer-hire
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath