Building a large sales team at once has a constraint that is not the selection funnel: it is ramp. New salespeople do not produce in month one, and thirty hired on the same day ramp simultaneously — demanding a coaching capacity the leadership usually does not have.
Commission is part of salary here
Commissions paid with habituality are generally treated as part of remuneration under Brazilian employment law, feeding the calculation base for vacation pay, the thirteenth salary and severance deposits.
At scale this compounds: a plan designed on head-office assumptions costs more than modelled, across every hire, and restructuring it later is considerably harder than in markets where variable pay sits outside base compensation. Settle it with Brazilian counsel before the first hire.
A badly designed plan does not surface as a complaint. It surfaces as turnover in month three, when the salesperson concludes the arithmetic does not work.
Size against ramp, not against vacancies
The right question is not how many to hire but how many the leadership can develop simultaneously. Above a certain number, coaching becomes reporting and ramp lengthens for everyone.
Entry in waves usually outperforms a single intake, even though it looks slower on paper: smaller waves ramp faster, and later joiners learn from people already producing.
Assessment that scales
Volume does not allow the deep interview an individual hire permits. What works is standardising two or three well-correlated signals and applying them identically: a short commercial conversation simulation, the description of a lost deal with the precise moment it was lost, and an honest availability check against the real routine.
Criteria written in advance and applied uniformly are what allow fast decisions without deciding on impression. Follow-up continues for 90 days, read per person — activity and pipeline quality, since revenue cycles rarely close in that window.
