When Does a Business Need a Sales Director?

Almost every owner-managed business starts with the Managing Director running sales. It works, until it quietly stops working.

The point at which it stops is rarely announced. It shows up in the numbers first.

The signals

• Revenue has plateaued despite the same or greater effort
• The Managing Director is still the best — or only — salesperson
• There are salespeople, but nobody senior manages them
• Nobody can say with confidence what will close next month
• The CRM is a contact list rather than a pipeline
• Sales performance varies wildly between individuals
• Marketing generates leads and conversion is weak
• Quotes go out and nobody follows them up
• There are growth targets but no commercial plan behind them
• New markets or territories keep being discussed and never started
• Sales processes grew organically rather than by design
• The business is recruiting salespeople without a structure to put them in

What is actually missing

In almost every case the missing element is not effort or ambition. It is ownership. Nobody's job is sales performance, so sales performance belongs to everybody and therefore to nobody.

A sales team without leadership is a group of individuals with a phone and good intentions.

Is it turnover, headcount or something else?

There is no revenue figure at which a Sales Director becomes necessary. Businesses turning over two million pounds with three sellers and a complex specification sale often need senior commercial leadership before businesses turning over ten million with one long-standing customer relationship do.

The better test is dependency. If the removal of one person — usually the owner — would stall new business within a quarter, the business has a leadership gap regardless of its size.

What to do before hiring

Recruiting a Sales Director into an undefined role is how businesses waste a year. Before hiring, get clear on where growth is supposed to come from, what the sales process is, what good activity looks like and which numbers matter.

1. 01Establish where next year's revenue is intended to come from, by market and customer type
2. 02Write down what the role will own, what it shares and what sits elsewhere
3. 03Agree the authority it holds over team, pricing and terms
4. 04Capture today's baseline: conversion, forecast variance, margin, concentration
5. 05Decide which engagement model the requirement actually justifies

Which engagement model fits?

A permanent appointment suits a permanent, sustainable role. An interim Sales Director suits an urgent gap, a departure or a period of change with a defined end point. A fractional Sales Director suits a business that needs director-level direction and structure without a full-time appointment — often the sensible step where the role has never existed before and needs defining properly.