How a French company hires its first salespeople in the US

The short answer: French companies that expand into the US win or lose on their first three sales hires. After placing more than 400 salespeople and sales leaders since 2021 at hundreds of companies, about half of them French-founded, we see the same pattern every time. Hire a doer before a leader. Budget two years. Send a Co-founder across the Atlantic. Pick New York only if your buyers live there. Pay what the US market pays, which is roughly double what a French sales director earns.

Who is writing this

I am Victor Vatus, Founder of Sell Me This Pen. Before that I was the first US employee of Dolead, a French lead generation company. I closed the first 15 accounts myself, because I had to prove I could do the job before hiring the people who would do it in turn. Then I hired the team, wrote the playbook and scaled it, and we went from zero to 12 million dollars in three years. Everything a French Founder is about to do in the US, I did first as an employee, and then I helped others do it as a headhunter.

Our work since 2021 covers more than 400 placements at hundreds of companies. About half of those companies are French-founded, and about 80 percent are French or European. The role-by-role detail below comes from the records we track most closely, where French-founded clients account for just over half of placements.

French-founded companies we have hired for include DataDome, Ringover, Praxedo, GitGuardian, Klaxoon, Gleamer, Diabolocom, Pelico, Kili Technology, Spinergie, DeepIP and Dolead. At French-founded clients, about three quarters of our placements were in the US and most of the rest in Canada. About half were Account Executives and a fifth were business development reps, with the remainder split between account managers, VPs of sales, a few chief revenue officers and some marketing, channel and enablement roles. DataDome alone has hired several VPs of sales and a CRO through us, and Praxedo has hired with us every year for five years.

What triggers the call

There are two common triggers. The first is a funding round where part of the money is meant to conquer the US, and the board expects a US plan. The second is a signal from the market: American prospects are already responding well to the offer, through inbound leads, a first few customers or strong demo feedback, and the Founders decide to go after it properly. French Founders love the American market either way. They know it should be their biggest market in the world, and they are right.

Mistake 1: hiring a leader first

The most common mistake is to look for someone who currently leads a team in your industry and ask them to do individual contributor work for a year or two. Build the playbook, close the first accounts, then lead. It sounds ideal. It does not exist.

Think about it from the candidate's side. A person who manages 10 to 30 people at a stable US company, with a strong salary, is asked to join a startup nobody has heard of, as an individual contributor, to build everything. That is a massive risk for a lot less comfort. Nobody sensible takes that trade.

The person you want is an individual contributor at an adjacent company who is blocked where they are. They are one number on a spreadsheet. Offer them the CEO's ear, real equity and a path to VP of Sales in 18 to 24 months, and the story changes.

Mistake 2: believing someone is waiting for you

In your office, everyone is excited. In the US, nobody is waiting. When I started at Dolead I was thrilled. A French company was coming to North America, how cool is that. I contacted blogs, press organizations and media. Nobody replied. Nobody cared.

That is the reality check every French Founder gets, and it is also your hiring problem. A US seller has options. They can stay at their current job, join a bigger and more stable company, or join a startup in your field that raised two to five times what you raised. Why would they pick you? Nobody knows you, you may have a couple of clients, and you do not know anybody yet. So you need an edge, and you need every signal you can find: a client signed, a quote from a customer, a competitor you beat. Anything works. Do not oversell and do not sugarcoat. Tell them it will be hard.

Culture clashes you can plan for

Americans talk money after two minutes. French professionals tend to keep their guard up and wait before discussing compensation. In the US, candidates ask about pay almost at once, and a delayed answer reads as a warning sign. Plan your comp bands before the first call.

Persuasion works the other way around. Erin Meyer's research in The Culture Map places France on the principles-first end of the persuasion scale: you build the concept, then the application. The US sits at the applications-first end: lead with the example and the result. A French Founder who opens a pitch with the theory loses an American audience.

Directness and hierarchy. Hofstede's country scores show the US more individualistic than France (about 91 against 71) and France higher on power distance (about 68 against 40) and uncertainty avoidance (about 86 against 46). In practice, US hiring managers move faster, decide with less ceremony and expect clear, quick answers.

At-will employment. In France, a manager's notice period is commonly three months. In the US, most employment is at will: either side can end it at any time, and two weeks is the courtesy people follow. This is a real cultural clash for French Founders. They love how fast they can hire in the US, with no long process and no heavy paperwork. It stings the other way around, when a good seller leaves with two weeks of notice and the Founder is used to three months. Plan for it. Build the handover, the pipeline hygiene and the retention conversations into the first year. Get a US employment lawyer or an employer of record to walk you through it before your first offer.

Guidance and autonomy. This one is my observation, from over 400 placements, and I do not present it as science. In my experience French teams tend to work with a lot of initiative and little supervision, while many US sellers expect a playbook and someone to pave the way. It is a generalization and plenty of exceptions exist. It matters because your first US hire will have no playbook and almost no supervision, so you must hire for the first profile.

Sticker shock

Your US enterprise Account Executive will become the highest paid person in the company, sometimes above the CEO. A base salary of 200,000 dollars in New York is about double what a typical French sales director earns, with median pay around 80,000 to 95,000 euros according to French salary sources. Some Founders are not comfortable with that. There is no way around it, so settle the budget and the story before the first offer goes out. We are happy to help you build both.

For your first sales hire, plan 150,000 to 250,000 dollars of base, and the same amount in variable pay, with a realistic plan. We look at the ratio of on-target earnings to quota. A stable company runs 4x or 5x. In your situation, plan on 2x, and 3x may be a stretch. This is an investment. If the first hire pays for themselves in year one and you have revenue, that is already an achievement.

I have seen what the cheap version looks like. A company hires two junior BDRs at 80,000 to 100,000 dollars base, tells them to go crazy with minimal supervision, and no Founder crosses the Atlantic. There is no budget and no plan. Six to twelve months later the Founder calls me: "Vic, I don't understand, it isn't working." Go all in and give yourself three to four years.

A tighter budget can still work, with two concessions. The first is your criteria for the hire: you may need to accept a profile with less seniority or less industry experience than your ideal, or look in Canada or remote on the East Coast, where the same budget goes further. The second is the involvement of the founding team: the less you can spend on the hire, the more a Co-founder has to do themselves, in the first conversations with prospects, in the coaching, and in being reachable at odd hours. Budget and Founder time trade against each other. Cutting both fails.

Where to base the team

Half of our French clients settle in New York. I think that comes from how romantic New York looks to us, thanks to the movies we watched growing up. It is also the most expensive and the most competitive city to hire salespeople in. Unless your buyers are concentrated there, as in advertising where the brands have their headquarters, it makes little sense.

Boston and Miami cost 10 to 30 percent less on all expenses. San Francisco appeals to a small number of clients, but the six to nine hour gap with France is a real handicap. Austin has never really been considered. Atlanta happened once, because a Founder's spouse had a job there. Our top three: New York, Boston, Miami.

Taxes deserve their own paragraph, and here Boston and Miami part ways. Massachusetts earned the nickname Taxachusetts, so do not count on Boston to win on tax. Florida is another story. On the employer side, a new Florida employer pays state unemployment tax of 2.7 percent on the first 7,000 dollars of each employee's pay, about 189 dollars a year. Massachusetts charges about 2.4 percent on the first 15,000 dollars, around 360 dollars before assessments, plus paid family and medical leave contributions of 0.88 percent of wages, shared with the employee. New York's new employer rate runs around 4 percent on the first 17,600 dollars, roughly 700 dollars per employee, and New York City adds a payroll tax once quarterly payroll passes 312,500 dollars. Florida also has no state income tax on wages, so a 200,000 dollar base in Miami puts more in your seller's pocket than the same base in New York or Boston. That helps you close.

For the first hires I recommend hiring remotely on the East Coast. Canada is also an option. A seller with US experience based in Canada can save you 40 to 60 percent, because of the exchange rate and lower salaries.

Send a Co-founder across the Atlantic

I have no precise data on this, only a strong gut feeling from watching dozens of expansions: your odds go up a lot if one of the Co-founders moves to the US within the first one to two years. Better still if you create a hub in one city, with people in the office a couple of times a week. If the team is remote, meet them every month at trade shows or wherever your clients are.

DataDome is the best example I know. They raised a round and already had some traction in the US, with a few people hired remotely. Then their CEO, Ben, moved from Paris to New York with his family. It became a turning point in the company's history. They hired on the East Coast, favored people based in New York, and built an office culture that paid off four years later. They kept hiring from the industry, but knew when to make concessions, for example on location, for the right profile. Their first CRO is the proof. DataDome was a French cybersecurity company of about 150 people with nobody who had held that much commercial responsibility. We opened the search in Manhattan with two must-haves: a cybersecurity background and a record of growing a company from 20 to 100 million dollars in ARR. New York candidates did not fit the budget, so DataDome widened the location and kept both must-haves. We met 70 candidates, and three months in the right person turned out to live in Atlanta. 119 days after kickoff, the offer was signed on a Sunday night. Three years later, the CRO is still in the seat. Ben summed up the search this way: "Incredible efficiency from defining the scope to the closing." They offered good equity, and the Founders brought a record: it was Ben's and his Co-founder's third company, and their most ambitious. Ben told me that if he could go back, he would have come to the US a lot earlier.

How to sell the job to a US seller

Sell the job that comes after this one. That is a trade secret in recruiting. Your candidate already has a seat. What pulls them is the seat they will hold once they have succeeded in yours: in two years you are our VP of Sales. You get the budget to hire your own team, they follow your footsteps because you wrote the playbook, and you have the credibility because you cracked the code. Equity, real influence on the company and a lot of autonomy back that story up.

You are looking for someone entrepreneurial, curious and good with risk, who can personally afford to take some. That person will work with minimal supervision and only a couple of hours of overlap with your day.

What a good first US hire looks like

They call you late at night, your time, with ideas. They report what they noticed, what they want to try and what is not working. They look at data, pivot, try something, measure and adjust. If your phone does not ring, or they do not harass you, that is a bad sign. Revenue matters, but in the first months you can watch earlier signals: meetings booked, opportunities created, conversations held, trade shows attended and what you learned there.

At Dolead, three weeks after I started, we went to our first trade show in Boston, just the CEO and me. We had spent weeks making assumptions about the US based on what worked in France. A guy shows up at our booth and asks: "Do you guys work in ping post?" In lead generation, ping post means offering a lead to several buyers at once. Each buyer bids, and the full lead goes to the winner, in seconds. The other common model is host and post, where the seller agrees a fixed price with one buyer, so there is no bid and nobody else gets pinged. I had no idea. Twenty minutes later another guy shows up and asks the same thing. I answer: "Ping post? Are you kidding me? Of course." That is the job of your first US seller: find out what you did not know, quickly, and bring it back so you can change your pitch, your product and your service. Several of our clients cut 90 percent of their deck to get straight to the point in the US, and the shorter version improved how they sell in France too.

The checklist

1. Settle your story and make sure every leader tells it the same way.
2. Give candidates an edge: equity, influence, a clear path to lead.
3. Hold two years of budget for the hires.
4. Send a Co-founder or executive across the Atlantic.
5. Write a precise scorecard, and decide in advance where you will compromise.
6. Hire doers with strong new business instincts over industry knowledge.
7. Go all in.

Lire cet article en français : Comment une entreprise française recrute ses premiers commerciaux aux États-Unis.

Sell Me This Pen is a sales recruiting firm. We place Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Leaders and anyone client-facing, including Customer Success Managers, at companies expanding in the US and Canada.

FAQ

How does a French company hire its first salesperson in the US?

Hire an individual contributor with a record of new business, ideally from an adjacent company, who wants to build something and can afford the risk. Offer equity and a path to run sales within two years.

How much should I budget for a first US Account Executive?

Plan 150,000 to 250,000 dollars of base plus the same in variable pay, with a realistic plan and a 2x to 3x ratio of on-target earnings to quota.

Where should a French startup open its US office?

New York if your buyers are there. Otherwise consider Boston or Miami, which cost 10 to 30 percent less, and hire remotely on the East Coast for the first roles.

Should the Founders move to the US?

In our experience it improves the odds a lot. One Co-founder or executive should be in the US within the first one to two years.

Is it cheaper to hire in Canada?

Yes. Hiring a seller with US experience based in Canada can save 40 to 60 percent, because of exchange rates and lower salaries.