The standard pattern goes like this: founder is closing all their own calls. Calls eat the calendar. Founder hires a closer. Closer underperforms. Founder concludes they hired badly and tries again. Six months and three closers later, revenue is flat.
The problem almost never is the closer. It's that the function was built in the wrong order. Here's the 90-day sequence that actually works.
Days 1-15: Document what you're already doing
Before you hire anyone, write down every step of your current sales process. How leads come in, how they get qualified, what's said on the call, what's sent after, what the follow-up cadence is, what the close rate is, what the refund rate is.
If you can't write this down, you can't hand it over. Founders skip this step because it feels slow, then discover six weeks into a hire that they've been training the closer on a process that doesn't actually exist.
Days 15-30: Fix the funnel before you hire
Audit your show rate. If it's under 70%, fix that before you hire. Audit your qualified-call rate. If half your booked calls aren't qualified, fix that too. A closer can only convert the calls that show up and are real.
Most founders skip this because they're tired of doing it themselves and want to offload. Hiring into a broken funnel just makes the closer the one to discover the funnel is broken — and they'll quit by month two.
Days 30-60: Hire the setter first
Counterintuitive, but right. If you're closing your own calls today and your bottleneck is calendar time, what you actually need is more qualified calls — not someone to take the calls you have.
A good setter (£800-£1,500/month plus commission) frees up 10-20 hours of your week and gives you 30 days of running calls with a clean handoff process. By the time you bring in a closer, you've already debugged the handoff and you have proof that the funnel produces real calls.
Days 60-75: Hire the closer
Now you have a documented process, a working funnel, a setter producing qualified calls, and a clear comp structure. This is the environment where a top closer can actually succeed.
Hire on the framework from earlier in this series — full funnel data, mock discovery, CRM hygiene, cultural fit. Ramp them over 30 days with shadowing in week one, half-quota in weeks two and three, full quota in week four.
Days 75-90: Build the management layer
Even one closer needs a weekly 1:1, a pipeline review, and call coaching. If you, the founder, aren't going to do that, you need to budget for someone who will — a part-time sales manager, a fractional sales leader, or a structured agreement with the closer to self-coach against recorded calls.
Sales functions without a management layer regress to the closer's worst habits within 60 days. The management layer is what compounds performance month over month instead of letting it drift.
What to ignore in the first 90 days
Don't build a sales dashboard before you have data. Don't hire two closers at once. Don't add a new offer. Don't switch CRMs. Every one of these is something founders reach for to feel productive while avoiding the actual work — documenting the process and fixing the funnel.
The first 90 days of a sales function aren't glamorous. They're plumbing. Get the plumbing right and the next 90 days handle themselves.