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.

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. That work is exactly what fractional sales leadership does first — and it makes any subsequent permanent hire far more likely to succeed.