Scaling Sales, Building a Repeatable GTM Motion, and Fixing Recruiting – With Prem Kumar, CEO of Humanly.io

For early-stage founders, knowing when to scale your sales team is tough. Do you wait for a revenue milestone, or hire early to refine your GTM strategy?

Prem Kumar, CEO of Humanly, has been through this journey. Humanly leverages AI to streamline recruiting, but before scaling, they needed a repeatable sales process. In this episode of The Revenue Room, we discussed when to hire, what makes a GTM strategy repeatable, and why recruiting is broken.

Building a Repeatable Sales Process

Prem’s biggest takeaway: If your sales motion isn’t repeatable, you can’t scale it.

Early on, he and his team handled sales themselves. The key test? Can someone else, with no deep product knowledge, close deals using your process?

Before hiring a sales team, ask:

Do we have a defined ICP?

Can we reliably generate pipeline?

Do we know what messaging resonates?

Can a new salesperson follow our steps and win deals?

If the answer is “no,” you’re not ready to scale sales. Revenue alone doesn’t mean you have a system that works without you.

When to Hire a Sales Team

Many founders wait to hit ~$1M ARR before hiring a founding sales team. Prem sees it differently: if you hire a salesperson before having repeatability, they need to be a builder. Their job isn’t just selling- it’s testing, iterating, and refining the motion.

His approach:

• If your GTM motion is still evolving, hire a process-driven salesperson.
• If your process is proven, hire execution-focused salespeople.
• Align on success, early sales is about building the system, not just hitting quota.

The key: Are you hiring to build the system or execute on a proven one? The answer shapes your hiring strategy.

Fixing Recruiting: Why Most Companies Get It Wrong

At Humanly, Prem tackled a major issue: companies ignore 95% of applicants.

Most hiring teams engage with only a fraction of candidates, leading to missed opportunities and a poor experience. Humanly flips the script: Engage every candidate. Automate first-touch interactions. Add value at every step. Offer insights, feedback, and transparency. Build a talent pipeline, not just fill a role. Keep great candidates in the loop for future opportunities.

Recruiting is following a similar trend to the sales’ evolution. Just like sales teams adopted tools like Outreach and Gong, recruiters need automation and data-driven decision-making.

Final Thoughts

Sales and recruiting have more in common than people realize. Both require:

A clear ICP and structured process

A way to filter and prioritize the right people

Tools and automation to scale without losing the human touch

The biggest mistake in both? Ignoring potential opportunities.

For founders scaling GTM, or sales teams exploring AI, this episode is packed with insights.

Check out the full conversation with Prem here: