Permanent Executive Recruitment · Sales Director
Permanent Sales Director Recruitment
A permanent Sales Director is appointed when a business has decided that sales leadership must be owned internally, continuously, by someone accountable for the number.
Permanent Sales Director recruitment is the appointment of a long-term sales leader accountable for target market, pipeline, sales team performance, forecasting and conversion.
Interpret the executive mandate
A Sales Director exists to make revenue predictable. That means owning where the business sells, who it sells to, how opportunities are created, how they are converted, and how the people doing that work are led and measured.
The most common failure in this appointment is recruiting against a job description rather than against a mandate. Two businesses can advertise the same title and need entirely different executives: one needs a builder who will create a sales function that does not yet exist, the other needs an operator who can raise conversion in a structure that already works.
Before a permanent appointment is defined, the business should be able to say plainly what the Sales Director must change within eighteen months, what authority comes with the role, and who the role reports to and inherits.
When a business may need a permanent Sales Director
These are situations, not qualifying criteria. Some of them point to a different appointment entirely, and we will say so.
The founder still runs sales
Revenue depends on one person's relationships and time. Growth has reached the limit of what founder-led selling can carry, and the business needs a leader who can build capability that survives the founder stepping back.
Sales exists but nobody leads it
There are salespeople, a CRM and activity, but no coherent target market, forecast discipline or conversion accountability. The team performs to individual habit rather than to a plan.
Growth targets have moved
A new investor, board or ownership position has raised expectations, and the current commercial structure was not designed to deliver them.
A new market or product line
The business is entering a new sector, territory or channel and needs a sales leader who can build the pipeline model for it rather than extend the existing one by habit.
Replacing an outgoing sales leader
A planned or unplanned departure creates a chance to define what the role should be now, rather than recruiting the previous job description again.
What a Sales Director typically owns
- Target market definition and commercial priorities
- Pipeline creation, qualification and forecast accuracy
- Sales team structure, capability, recruitment and performance
- Conversion, pricing discipline within agreed commercial policy and win rates
- Key customer, distributor and specifier relationships
- Sales process, CRM discipline and commercial reporting to the board
What success should look like
A forecast the board believes
Pipeline value converts at a rate that can be planned against, and variance is explainable rather than surprising.
Revenue that does not rely on one person
Performance is distributed across the team and the process, not concentrated in the founder or a single salesperson.
A defined market position
The business knows which customers it is genuinely competitive with, and sells there deliberately.
A team that improves
People are recruited, developed and held to standards, and capability is visibly higher after the first year.
Why a permanent appointment may fit
Sales leadership is a relationship business. Customers, specifiers, distributors and the internal team all respond to continuity, and a permanent appointment buys the authority to make decisions whose payback is measured in years rather than quarters.
It is the right model when the requirement is ongoing rather than situational, the business can support the salary, and the leadership task is to build something that must then be run.
- The requirement is permanent, not a gap
- The business can fund and manage a full-time executive
- The mandate includes building a team and a long-term market position
What the brief should clarify
- Why the role exists now, and what it must change
- Whether the mandate is to build a sales function or to run and improve one
- The commercial authority the role carries: pricing, structure, hiring, budget
- Who the role reports to, and what the board expects to see reported
- What the sales team, data and pipeline genuinely look like today
- Target market and territory scope, including any international dimension
Other engagement models for a Sales Director
The role is the same question. The engagement model answers a different one: how long the leadership is needed, how quickly, and how much of it.
Permanent
A long-term senior leadership appointment, owned inside the business.
You are reading this model
Interim
Time-limited, immediately capable executive leadership for a defined situation.
Interim Sales Director recruitmentFractional
Ongoing senior leadership without a full-time executive appointment.
Fractional Sales Director recruitmentCommercial terms are agreed before anything begins. We do not publish standard executive day rates.
Related executive roles
Roles a business is genuinely choosing between when the mandate is still being settled.
Owns revenue architecture across sales, marketing and customer revenue, and the systems that make growth predictable.
Owns pricing, contracts, partnerships and commercial strategy — the terms a business trades on, not the sales team leading the trading.
Leads the sales team's execution of an agreed plan: pipeline, process, activity and performance.
Relevant Evans Sales Consultancy services
Linked only where they genuinely relate to this requirement.
Where Evans Sales Consultancy leads the commercial function directly rather than recruiting someone to lead it.
A fixed-fee commercial review that establishes whether sales leadership is genuinely the constraint before a senior appointment is made.
The wider UK commercial growth capability a new sales leader inherits or builds on.
Recruiting into a new international market? Where the role is defined by a market plan — a Country Manager, an export or technical commercial hire — International Recruitment is the right route.
Executive recruitment enquiry
Discuss a permanent Sales Director appointment.
Tell us what the role has to change and we will come back on whether a permanent Sales Director is the right answer, and what the mandate should actually say.
Common questions
When sales leadership is a continuous requirement rather than a temporary one: the business needs somebody accountable for target market, pipeline, team and conversion every week, and that accountability cannot keep sitting with the founder or managing director.
Target market and commercial priorities, pipeline creation and forecast accuracy, the sales team and its performance, conversion and win rates, key relationships, and the commercial reporting the board relies on.
A Head of Sales usually leads the execution of an agreed plan: team, process, activity and performance. A Sales Director carries wider commercial authority, including market direction, structure and board-level accountability. If the strategy is settled and the gap is execution, a Head of Sales may be the correct and less expensive appointment.
Evidence of the specific task you need: building a function, opening a market, professionalising a team or raising conversion in an existing structure. Sector familiarity matters less than a demonstrated pattern of doing the thing your mandate requires.
On forecast accuracy and pipeline quality as well as revenue, on conversion and margin rather than activity, and on whether commercial capability is measurably stronger a year later.
Yes. Where the appointment is principally about entering or developing an overseas market, International Recruitment is often the more appropriate route, because the role is defined by the market plan. Where the appointment is a senior leadership hire that happens to include international scope, Executive Recruitment is the right home.