I've done inside and outside sales, and have hired employees to do inside sales. I have a number of outside sales / manufacturer reps who I periodically talk too.
- Hiring is not that much different from sales in my opinion. If you are doing recruiting, you have to really sell yourself and your company on why a prospective company should work for you, over other companies. You need to vet many prospective candidates through cold calling, interviews, etc if you don't have enough prospective candidates in mind. In a startup with a lot volatility, a prospective employees first concern should always be bringing food on the table. In addition, you have to sell your company + ideals + yourself even more if you are hiring someone who you've never worked with (e.g. someone on indeed.com posting), and expect to have a probationary period (1-3 months) where you might have to fire them. Ideally, you should know from selling B2C or B2B experience how well that sales person should be performing (how many sales they should be getting per week, etc)
- MBA =/= Sales. MBA is for upper level management on corporate structures, and is not a necessary skill for selling at all. You stated you had advisors for this already
- Looking at your other comments, this sales person is going to be doing hard-sells by phone call, soft sell through website leads. Sales is a hard earned skill. Its really not something you learn in a textbook. The most difficult part of sales in general is dealing with the laborious grunt work task of cold calling people, coping with potentially high amounts of rejection, following up with CRM, etc.
- Your going to have to spend some time educating this employee on the software. Not to profound technical efficiency, but enough to answer all the questions a prospective business might need to know about it (e.g. how much is it [fixed amount, quote by quote basis, how does it help them save money/time/resources in the long run, do you have well known companies / competitors running your product, etc)
- A salesman with potential networks is worth more than someone who does not have a network. A good example of this a bank account manager. When a bank account manager moves banks, they generally take a large % of all their clients with them to the new bank. The same is true for lawyers who move law firms as well. Having someone with an "in" saves a lot of time since you don't have to deal with a decision maker's secretary at a potential business, etc. This "in" is pretty analogous to applying for job at a specific company and not knowing anyone at that company for referral, its a harder road to climb but still doable.
Those are just general things to consider. Have expectations clear in writing moving forward. What responsibilities he will be handling and what compensation he will be getting as a result.