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There's a story we've watched play out dozens of times in ag and food tech, and it almost always follows the same script.
A company has a good product. Pilots went well. There's some early traction, mostly through founder relationships. But growth is plateauing and the board is pushing. Everyone agrees on the next step: hire a senior commercial leader. VP of Sales, Head of Marketing, CCO. Someone who's done this before and knows how to scale.
The company runs a search, finds a credentialed person, and brings them on. Three months in, the new hire is struggling. Six months in, it's clear something isn't working. Nine months in, it's over.
The company blames the hire. The hire blames the company. Both are usually wrong about what actually happened.
The pattern: hire a senior commercial leader, watch them struggle
Here's what the new hire actually walks into.
The ICP has never been formally defined. When asked 'who is our customer,' three people on the leadership team give three different answers. Positioning was done during a fundraise and has been vaguely updated since. The sales process consists of the founder's personal relationships and some inbound from a conference. There's no repeatable GTM motion anyone can describe, let alone execute.
The new hire was brought in to scale. But there's nothing to scale. What exists is a collection of ad hoc wins and a general sense of product-market fit. The commercial infrastructure, the system that turns individual deals into a repeatable pattern, was never built.
So the hire spends their first six months trying to do two jobs at once: design the system AND execute against it. Under board pressure and quarterly targets. Without the institutional knowledge the founder has. In a sector (food and ag) where relationships, seasonality, and channel dynamics are wildly different from whatever market they came from.
Sometimes they figure it out. More often, they burn through a year and a significant chunk of runway, and the company is back where it started. Minus the salary, the equity, the time, and the organizational trust.
Why hiring into an unclear GTM fails
The problem isn't that the hire is bad. It's that the hire is being asked to do something that's almost impossible: make foundational decisions and execute against them simultaneously, in a market they're still learning, with no existing system to work with.
Foundational commercial decisions (who is the ICP, what is the positioning, what is the sales motion, which channels to use, what to prioritize and what to ignore) are the highest-leverage decisions a company makes in its first few years. These decisions compound. Get them right and everything downstream works better. Get them wrong and every hire, every campaign, every dollar of sales spend amplifies the mistake.
When a new commercial leader makes these decisions under execution pressure, without deep market context, and without a framework for evaluating trade-offs, the probability of getting them right is low. They default to whatever worked in their last company, which may or may not apply to food and ag. Or they try to do everything at once and none of it gets done well.
The founder, meanwhile, assumed the hire would just 'know how to do this.' They didn't realize that what they were actually asking for was two different capabilities: system design and system execution. Those are different skill sets, different timelines, and different kinds of work. Conflating them is the core mistake.
What to build before you make a commercial hire
Before bringing on a senior commercial leader, a company needs a minimum viable commercialization system. Not a perfect one. But enough architecture that the hire has something to execute against rather than building from scratch.
That starts with a defined ICP. Not 'farmers' or 'food companies' or 'anyone who needs our product.' A specific segment with a specific problem, a specific buying dynamic, and a specific reason to buy now. If you can't describe your ICP in a paragraph and explain why they're the right first market, it's not defined yet.
Next is positioning that forces a choice. Not 'we're the best solution for everyone.' A clear statement of what you do, for whom, and why it matters that is specific enough that some prospects disqualify themselves. Good positioning repels the wrong customers. If your positioning doesn't exclude anyone, it's not positioning.
Then a first sales motion the team can describe and repeat. Not the founder's relationships. A process. How do we find prospects? How do we qualify them? What does the first conversation look like? What's the decision process? What are the common objections and how do we handle them? This doesn't need to be perfect, but it needs to exist.
And finally, a decision framework for what matters now versus later. What are we doing this quarter and what are we deliberately not doing? What signals tell us to change course? How often do we review and who's in the room?
With these four things in place, a commercial hire walks into a system they can run. Without them, they're designing the plane while flying it.
How to know if you're ready to hire or if you need system design first
Ask yourself three questions.
Can you clearly describe your ICP to a stranger in 30 seconds, and would your co-founders describe the same one? If the answer is no or 'it depends,' the ICP isn't defined. You need system design.
Can someone other than the founder close a deal? If every closed deal requires the founder's personal involvement and relationships, there's no repeatable motion. You need system design.
Can you describe the sales process in steps that someone could follow? Not 'we have conversations and it works out.' Actual steps. If you can't, there's no process to hand off. You need system design.
None of this means the founder has to build the system alone. That's exactly the wrong approach, because founders are typically too close to the product and too deep in the day-to-day to make these decisions with the necessary objectivity. But the system needs to be built by someone with pattern recognition in the sector, not learned on the job by a new hire under quarterly pressure.
How 9 North builds the commercial system before or alongside the hire
This is some of the most impactful work we do at 9 North. We build the commercial system before or in parallel with a company's first major commercial hire, so the hire has something real to execute against from day one.
The work covers the full commercialization architecture: ICP definition, positioning, commercial motion design, channel strategy, decision framework, and internal narrative alignment. We work with the founder and leadership team to make the hard calls about focus and sequencing that are easy to avoid when nobody is forcing the conversation.
Sometimes we complete this work before the company starts the hiring process, and the output becomes part of how they define the role and evaluate candidates. Sometimes we run it in parallel with a new hire's onboarding, so the system is built collaboratively and the hire has ownership from the start.
Either way, the outcome is the same: the commercial leader walks into a system that exists. They can focus on execution and refinement rather than building the foundation from scratch under pressure. The difference in outcomes, in our experience, is enormous.
Questions we hear
Q: When should an ag tech startup make its first commercial hire?
After the GTM system is designed, not before. You need a clear ICP, defined positioning, and a repeatable sales motion before a commercial hire can succeed. Otherwise you're paying someone to do system design under execution pressure, which rarely works.
Q: Why do VP of Sales hires fail at startups?
Most commercial hires at startups fail because they walk into an environment with no defined ICP, unclear positioning, and no repeatable sales process. They're expected to scale something that hasn't been designed yet. The problem isn't the hire. It's the absence of a system to hire into.
Q: Should I hire a commercial leader or a GTM consultant first?
Build the system first. A GTM consultant or commercialization partner designs the architecture (ICP, positioning, sales motion, decision framework). The commercial hire executes against it. Doing it in that order dramatically improves the hire's chances of success.
