You Just Raised a Seed Round. Here Is the First 90 Days of Go-to-Market.

The money hit the account, the announcement went out, and now there is a quiet, expensive question sitting on your desk: what do we actually do about sales?

The wrong answer is the most common one. Post a job for a Head of Sales, hire someone impressive, and hand them the problem. It feels like progress. It is usually the fastest way to burn a quarter of your runway learning that the motion you hired them to run does not exist yet.

The median US seed round in 2026 is around $3 million and buys roughly 12 to 24 months of runway. That is enough time to find a repeatable go-to-market motion, but not enough to find it twice. Here is how to spend the first 90 days so you only have to do it once.

The principle: find the motion, then hire for it

A repeatable motion means you can say, with evidence, who buys, why they buy now, what message gets them to a meeting, and roughly what a meeting costs to produce. Until you can say those four things, any sales hire is being asked to discover them, and discovery is founder work. The founder has the product knowledge, the customer conversations, and the authority to change the pitch on Tuesday. A new rep has a quota and a hypothesis.

So the first 90 days are not about building a sales team. They are about producing the four facts a sales team will need.

Days 1 to 30: decide who you are selling to, then prove it

Write down your best guess at an ideal customer profile in filterable terms: company size in employees, industry, the title that feels the pain, the title that signs, and the trigger that makes them look. If you cannot turn it into a list you can actually build, it is a positioning statement, not a targeting decision.

Then test it with real outreach, not surveys. The fastest, cheapest read on whether an audience wants to hear from you is a cold connection request on LinkedIn: a tightly targeted audience accepts 30 to 50 percent of the time, and our own matured campaigns run about 53 percent. Under 25 percent means the targeting is wrong, and no message will fix that. Judge acceptance only on invites at least a week old, since fresh batches always look worse than they are. For the mechanics, see how to book meetings on LinkedIn.

Run two or three candidate segments in parallel. The point of month one is to let the response data pick the winner instead of arguing about it in a meeting.

Days 31 to 60: find the message and the math

Once one segment is clearly accepting, the question moves to replies. Healthy is about one in three accepted connections replying. If acceptance is strong and replies are weak, the message is the problem, which is the easiest thing in outbound to fix. Keep first messages short, grounded in something the specific prospect actually posted, and end with a question that costs nothing to answer. The failure patterns are predictable; we catalogued them in cold outreach mistakes.

By day 60 you should be able to write the funnel down: invites sent, acceptance rate, reply rate, meetings booked. In our live data, 100 well-targeted invites produce three to four booked meetings. Your numbers will differ, but the shape will not, and the shape is what tells you where to work. The full breakdown is in outbound funnel metrics.

Days 61 to 90: decide what to build

Now you have evidence, and the hiring decision becomes arithmetic instead of anxiety.

If your funnel produces meetings at a cost you can live with, you have a motion. The question is how to scale it, and the honest answer for most seed-stage teams is not a senior sales leader. It is more sending capacity on the motion that works, plus someone to work the replies and take the calls. A senior hire to run a proven playbook is a good hire. A senior hire to invent one is a bet.

If the funnel does not produce meetings, you have learned something worth far more than a quarter of a rep's salary: the segment, the message, or the offer needs to change before anyone else touches it.

The three mistakes that eat the runway

• Hiring to discover. Recruiting a VP of Sales into a company that has not found its motion was expensive in 2021. In 2026 it is fatal, because the motion is still moving under them.
• Judging on week two. Outbound has a two-week lag at every stage. Founders who rewrite the message after three non-replies destroy campaigns that were working.
• Confusing activity with a motion. Ten thousand LinkedIn connections and a busy calendar are not a repeatable system. A repeatable system is four numbers you can defend.

The 90-day scorecard

If you would rather not run the experiment yourself

The first 90 days are mostly repetitive work that happens to be strategically decisive: building lists, personalizing openers, sending on schedule, and reading the numbers honestly. That is exactly the job we do for funded teams. Salescadia's GTM engineering engagement starts with a two-week assessment that maps your market, designs the org you actually need, and writes the campaign plan, then we run it on infrastructure we built, with operators who have taken companies from zero to one. You find the motion before you hire for it, and you keep the plan either way.