The brief they typed: "Help me recruit our first sales manager. Remote OK, industrial food clients, they'll own the pipeline I currently run from my inbox."

Sales Manager — Operations Consulting (Remote, US)

You'll inherit a real pipeline, not a cold start: warm referrals from six years of delivery work, a documented services catalog, and an owner who will happily hand you every sales conversation she currently squeezes between client engagements.

What you'll own. The full pipeline from inquiry to signed engagement: qualifying inbound, running discovery calls, scoping with the delivery team, proposals (drafted with our internal tools — you edit, you don't start from blank pages), and the follow-up rhythm that services firms always drop.

What good looks like at 90 days. You've closed two assessment engagements, built a qualification standard the owner trusts enough to stop attending discovery calls, and killed at least one deal we should not win.

You're probably a fit if. You've sold services (not just products) to manufacturers or industrial clients; you can read a P&L well enough to talk to an owner about payback; you treat a CRM as a discipline, not a chore.

Comp. $85–95k base + uncapped commission (realistic year-one OTE $130–150k), health stipend, remote with quarterly on-sites.

Where we're posting. LinkedIn Jobs, RepVue, two industry Slack communities (food manufacturing ops), and the firm's own list — referral bonus $2k.

Q1. "Walk me through the last services deal you closed end to end — from first touch to signature."
Listen for: whether they narrate a process or a lucky break; who did the scoping.

Q2. "Our average engagement is $9–40k with a 3–8 week sales cycle. What breaks in your playbook at that size?"
Listen for: honesty about enterprise habits that don't transfer; comfort with owner-operators.

Q3. "Walk me through a deal you lost that you should have lost. What did you stop doing afterward?"
Listen for: qualification discipline, not war stories.

Q4. "An owner says: 'we don't need consultants, we need more hands.' What do you say next?"
Listen for: whether they reframe to cost-of-problem, or argue.

Q5. "What would you need from us in the first 30 days to be dangerous by day 90?"
Listen for: specific asks (call recordings, past proposals, loss reasons) — not "a good CRM."

Round 1 (30 min, owner). Screening questions above. Advance if ≥3 on both pipeline craft and honesty.
Round 2 (45 min, mock discovery). Candidate runs a discovery call; the owner plays a real (anonymized) past prospect — the granola plant with the overtime problem. Scored against the rubric below.
Round 3 (30 min, delivery lead). Scoping collaboration: can they translate what they heard into an engagement the team can actually deliver?

Dimension (score 1–4)	1 looks like	4 looks like
Pipeline craft	"I follow up when I can"	Named stages, exit criteria, kill rules
Consultative selling	Pitches services in minute one	Prices the problem before the solution
Ownership	Asks what the process is	Proposes the process, asks for constraints
Owner-operator empathy	Talks "stakeholders"	Talks margins, shifts, and 6 a.m. scheduling fights

Decision rule: hire at ≥13/16 with no dimension below 3. Two candidates above the bar → pick the one who asked better questions in round 2.

Subject: First sales hire at a firm with too much inbound

Hi [name] — I run a six-person operations consultancy for specialty food manufacturers. Our problem is a good one: after six years of referral-only work, more qualified conversations show up than I can run between client engagements.

I'm hiring our first sales manager to own that pipeline outright. Real inbound, a documented services catalog, proposals that draft themselves, and an owner who wants out of the sales seat — not over your shoulder in it.

Your background at [company] caught my eye because [one specific reason]. Open to a 20-minute call this week?

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