If you are building a sales team in Brazil from abroad, the first hire sets the ceiling for everything after it. It is also the role where a CV reads most misleadingly, because strong individual sales numbers say nothing about whether someone can build a team that sells.
Commission is part of salary, legally
Sales staff here are typically employed under CLT. Commissions paid with habituality are generally treated as part of remuneration, which means they feed the calculation base for vacation pay, the thirteenth salary and severance deposits.
Two consequences matter for planning. Employer cost of a variable-heavy plan is higher than the headline percentage suggests, and reducing or restructuring commission later is considerably harder than in markets where variable pay sits outside base compensation. Settle the design with Brazilian counsel before the first offer.
A candidate who has never discussed plan design — accelerators, caps, what happens when territories change mid-year — has probably executed someone else's plan rather than built one.
Assess building, not closing
How long did it take a new hire to reach quota, and what did you do to shorten it? Ramp time is the most honest measure of sales management, and someone who has never thought about it was selling rather than leading.
How many people did you hire, and how many left? Followed by what changed after the third departure. People who have genuinely built teams have a theory about why they mis-hire, and the theory came from mis-hiring.
Describe an average performer who became good. If there is no answer, the person likely operates by replacement — which works while candidates are plentiful and breaks when the market tightens.
The player-coach question
Most companies want a sales leader who also sells. That is reasonable for a small team and becomes a trap as it grows: the leader keeps the largest accounts, and the team never develops because there is neither time nor opportunity.
Decide this before opening the role and state it plainly. For a company entering Brazil the answer is usually yes initially — but say so, and say when it changes, because the two profiles attract different people.
Follow-up continues for 90 days. The early signal is granularity: a leader who can say, per rep, where each one loses deals is leading. One who still reports in aggregate is reporting.
