Until now, the founder has been the sales team. The pipeline is a spreadsheet, a free CRM tier, and a lot of memory. That worked, because one person knew every deal. On Monday a second person needs to know them too.
Your new hire will either spend the first month selling or rebuilding what you know from your inbox. Four things decide which.
Every open deal has a next step and a date
Go through the open deals before they start. Each one gets the last touch, the next step, the date of that step, and who it's with. A deal without a next step is a contact, and belongs in a different list.
Stages say what the buyer did
"Demo" and "Negotiation" mean different things to different people. Define each stage by something the buyer did: agreed to a call, named a decision maker, started a pilot, received a proposal. For enterprise sales, give the pilot its own stage with the success criteria written on the deal. Most of your forecast lives there.
Site leads land in the CRM
If the contact form on your site emails a shared inbox, leads wait for someone to copy them over. Send the form straight into the CRM, with the page and the campaign it came from. Then you can see which channel sends buyers, and which sends traffic.
A weekly scorecard
Leads, qualified, won, and what each channel cost, every Monday on one page. Your hire knows what good looks like in week one, and the board deck stops being a weekend project.
HubSpot, Attio, or a build
At Seed or Series A, HubSpot or Attio set up to the definitions above usually does the job. A build earns its cost when the sale doesn't fit a standard pipeline: usage that converts to contracts, a marketplace with two sides, or research that has to run before every first call. Whichever it is, you own the setup and the data, and your hire can explain it to the next one.