Insights — Executive Recruitment — 3 min read
Common Mistakes When Defining the Commercial Director Role
Most disappointing Commercial Director appointments were undermined before the first interview, by a brief that listed responsibilities and never mentioned authority.
In short
The most damaging mistakes are giving the role accountability for margin without authority over price, merging marketing into the remit by assumption, leaving the boundary with finance and sales undefined, writing the brief as a list of everything the Managing Director wants to stop doing, and judging the first year on revenue when the appointment was made to fix profitability.
When a commercial appointment does not work, the post-mortem usually focuses on the individual. In our experience the more common cause sits further back, in how the role was defined before anyone was approached.
These are the definition failures we see most often, and what each one costs.
1. Responsibility without authority
This is the single most common failure. The brief says the Commercial Director is accountable for gross margin. The reality is that pricing decisions above any material threshold are taken by the Managing Director, often in the room, often after the commercial position has been set.
The consequence is predictable: the person who is accountable cannot influence the outcome, and the person who decides is not measured on it. Capable commercial executives recognise this quickly and leave.
2. Marketing arrives by assumption
Marketing frequently ends up in the commercial remit without ever being discussed — because it is customer-facing, because nobody else owns it, or because the previous incumbent happened to have a marketing background.
Marketing can sit in a commercial remit legitimately. What causes problems is including it silently: the candidate is assessed for commercial capability, hired for a commercial job, and then measured on demand generation they were never asked about.
3. The boundary with finance is left to be negotiated
| Decision | Common ambiguity | Better position |
|---|---|---|
| List price | Set by finance, sold by commercial | Commercial sets, finance validates margin impact |
| Discount authority | Escalates informally to whoever is available | Defined thresholds with named authority at each level |
| Payment terms | Agreed in the deal, enforced by finance | Standard terms owned commercially, exceptions agreed jointly |
| Credit decisions | Contested | Finance owns; commercial informed before commitment |
| Margin reporting | Finance reports, commercial reacts | Shared definition, commercial anticipates |
4. The brief is a list of what the Managing Director wants to hand over
A brief assembled from the Managing Director's diary produces a role with no coherent centre: key accounts, pricing, the CRM project, two partner relationships, the tender that is due, and sales management. Each item is real; the combination is not a job.
A better test is to describe what the business should be able to do in eighteen months that it cannot do now, and then work back to the remit that delivers it. Anything that survives that test belongs in the role. Anything that does not is delegation, and should go somewhere else.
5. No stated definition of success
If the brief does not say what the first twelve months must deliver, the business will judge the appointment against whatever is most frustrating at the time — usually revenue, which is often not what the role was recruited to change.
- Say whether success in year one is margin improvement, commercial governance, partner restructuring or bid performance.
- Say what is explicitly not expected in year one, so that the absence of it is not treated as failure.
- Agree how it will be measured, with whatever data actually exists rather than data the business would need to build.
6. Recruiting the previous incumbent again
Where a commercial leader is leaving, briefs are often written as a description of that person. It is comfortable and it quietly excludes the possibility that the business now needs something different — which, given that something prompted the change, is worth examining.
7. Title used as compensation
Offering the Commercial Director title to secure a candidate on a sales management package tends to produce two problems at once: internal confusion about authority, and an appointee whose expectations are set by the title rather than the remit. Where the job is sales management, the honest title recruits better in the long run.
Discuss a Commercial Director requirement
Permanent, interim or fractional. The conversation starts with what the role must own — price, margin, terms and partners — rather than with a job title.
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Written by
International Sales & Market Development Director, Evans Sales Consultancy
Published 17 September 2026 — 3 min read