How to Hire a VP of Sales for a Series A/B Scale-up in APAC

I’ve sat in quite a few meetings where a client is confidently telling me what they’re looking for in their VP of Sales hire and the projected revenue growth they’ll be corralling like it’s a given. But it’s not that simple. It’s usually the single decision that determines whether the next eighteen months are spent building momentum or repairing the damage from a mis-hire.

And the damage is real. Global SaaS data puts the failure rate for first-time VP of Sales hires at growth-stage companies above 60% within the first year to eighteen months. I’d trust that number and even hazard that it’s conservative — I’ve watched it happen across the APAC portfolios I work with. The cost isn’t really the salary or the recruitment fee. It’s the year of runway you don’t get back, the 4 quarters of missing forecast, and the good AEs who quit six months in because their leader is floundering and can’t give them clarity on how to execute.

So let’s talk about how to actually get this right — timing, profile, and the regional quirks that trip up founders who (usually) assume APAC behaves like the US.

Are You Even Ready to Hire a VP of Sales?

Here’s a pattern I see constantly: founders hire a “VP of Sales” when what they actually need is someone to build the first version of a playbook from nothing. Those are not the same job, and conflating them is how good executives end up looking like bad hires.

A genuine VP of Sales is a scale manager. They inherit something that already half-works and turn it into something repeatable across a team. They are not, generally, pioneers — and the ones who present themselves as comfortable doing both are never as good at either as they claim.

Before you open a search, I want to see three things true of your business:

• Product-market fit is proven — you have paying, referenceable enterprise customers, not just pilots you’re hoping convert.
• A repeatable motion already exists — two or three AEs hitting somewhere north of 70% of quota using roughly the same process.
• Unit economics are measured — CAC, ARPU, sales cycle length. If nobody in the business can quote these numbers off the top of their head, you’re not ready.

If you’re still the one closing every deal, save yourself the search fee. What you need is a Head of Sales, or a strong player-coach first enterprise AE, not a VP.

How to Hire a VP of Sales that Fails

This is the part founders get wrong most often, and it’s almost always for a reason I sympathise with: the candidate with the Salesforce or Microsoft logo on their CV feels like the safe choice. It rarely is.

Someone who ran a 200-person team at a company with an established brand and an inbound engine has spent years being an optimiser — refining something that already works well. Put that same person in front of five reps and a product nobody’s heard of, and the skills that made them successful simply don’t transfer. I’ve watched it happen more than once, and it’s not a failure of intelligence or effort. It’s a mismatch of muscle memory.

There is also a strong tendency for founders to want to flip their selling responsibility to a VP prematurely. A big reason for this (in my view) is the increased pressure that comes from securing funding, and the board that comes with it. An impressive-sounding VP from a big company feels safer (particularly if they aren’t from a professional selling background).

What’s different about hiring in APAC

I’ll say something that might sound obvious, but I don’t think gets said enough: APAC is not one market wearing different accents. Treating it that way in a sales leadership search doesn’t work.

Cross-border complexity is real, not theoretical

A VP of Sales who can navigate Australian procurement won’t automatically know how buying cycles work in Jakarta, or how channel relationships function in the Philippines. The US comparison founders often reach for — “sales motions are basically uniform across states” — just doesn’t hold here. Someone needs to have actually done the cross-border work.

Buyer networks matter more than people expect

In Sydney and Singapore particularly, the senior tech buyer community is genuinely small and genuinely tight. A VP of Sales who already has trust with CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs in that circle will shorten your sales cycles in a way that’s difficult to replicate through cold outbound, no matter how good your SDR team is.

Compensation has moved, and founders are often working off stale numbers

Here’s roughly where 2026 packages sit for genuine builder-profile candidates:

• Base salary: AU $260,000–$340,000+ (SG $280,000–$360,000)
• On-target earnings: typically 50/50 split — say, $300k base against $300k variable
• Equity: 0.75%–1.5% at Series A, 0.5%–1.0% at Series B, standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff

I’ve had founders and exec teams push back on these numbers, and I understand the instinct — it’s a lot of dilution and cash for one hire. But underpaying this role is a false economy. You’ll either lose your shortlist to a better-funded competitor or, worse, end up hiring someone who wasn’t actually good enough to command the market rate.

How I’d actually vet the finalists

The trap I watch boards fall into is what I’d call the charismatic seller problem — a candidate who is brilliant at selling themselves in an interview room, which is a different skill entirely from building and coaching a team. Here’s the process I run to get past that:

Start with the numbers, not the narrative

Ask them to walk through the last three years of quota performance in detail. What percentage of their team actually hit quota? What was the split between inbound and team-generated outbound pipeline? What was their average deal size and cycle length? Vague answers here are the first red flag.

Give them a real problem, not a hypothetical one

I like handing finalists an actual scenario built from the client’s current metrics — how would they structure the APAC team over the next twelve months, AE-to-SDR ratios and all, what’s their 30-60-90 day plan to move pipeline conversion, and how specifically would they coach an underperforming rep. Generic answers rarely survive this exercise.

Backchannel

Candidate-supplied references aren’t usually worth the time — nobody hands over a reference who’ll say something negative. The references that actually tell you something are the ones you find yourself: product or engineering leads (did sales promises match what the product could actually deliver?), and the CFO or CEO they reported to (could this person forecast accurately, or were board meetings full of surprises?).

“The profiles that seem to be successful, aren’t just the ones with the right network in wider JAPAC (though it does help open the doors). It’s the ones with proven experience building the wider region in a past role. someone who can articulate their process & method in detail. Not just high level, but gets into the weeds. Hire for a builder, not just the network”

 

– Michael Moreno, Associate Director, Salient

The first ninety days decide more than people think

Once you’ve made the hire, don’t assume the hard part is over — the onboarding structure matters almost as much as the selection process.

• Days 1–30: Shadow more than 20 live customer calls, learn the product cold, audit pipeline health honestly, and talk to everyone on the sales and marketing teams individually.
• Days 31–60: Refine the methodology — MEDDPICC or whatever fits your motion — set a weekly pipeline inspection rhythm, and be honest about where the talent gaps actually are.
• Days 61–90: Start hiring AEs and SDRs, take full forecasting ownership into board meetings, and start showing early ARR movement from the team they’ve built.

If a new VP of Sales isn’t visibly doing something from each of those three phases, that’s worth a direct conversation before it becomes a pattern.

Final Thoughts

None of this is complicated in theory. It’s difficult in practice because the stakes make founders impatient/anxious, competition for talent is fierce, and impatience/anxiety is exactly what produces the mis-hires I described at the start. Take the readiness checklist seriously, hire for stage fit over brand names, understand that APAC is not one homogeneous market, and vet on evidence and numbers – not just the story.

At Salient, all our executive searches are run by partners (like me) with 15+ years of experience and deep networks across the region. Searches are run to our proprietary methodology to convert proven GTM leaders across Sydney, Melbourne, and Singapore, for founders and boards who’d rather get this hire right the first time.