You had no sales experience. How did you figure out what kind of salespeople to hire?

I ran a mental experiment. I looked at the companies where enterprise sales was working best and asked myself, are the best salespeople the most technical people? The ones with PhDs? And the answer was clearly no. None of the top performers were technical. So I concluded not only is technical knowledge not an advantage in sales, it is probably a disadvantage. That told me we needed to completely change our hiring profile. I was looking for people who were professionally aggressive, who had exceptional emotional intelligence in high-pressure situations, and who could read and navigate the power base inside a large enterprise organization. Those are very different skills from what I had spent my career developing.