The Best Salesperson Is Not Automatically the Best Head of Sales

Every sales organisation contains the same temptation: the person who closes the most business is assumed to be the person who should lead the team. Sometimes that works. Often it does not, and the cost is a lost producer and an underperforming leader.

The mistake is understandable. The evidence is visible every month. But producing and leading are different jobs, and the market for people who can do both is small.

Producing and leading are different skills

A strong individual contributor optimises their own pipeline, their own relationships and their own time. A head of sales optimises a system: hiring, onboarding, coaching, territory design, pricing discipline, forecasting, and the difficult conversations that lift or remove people.

The qualities that make someone excellent at the first — competitive drive, self-management, a personal network — are not the qualities that make them excellent at the second. Some people can make the transition. Many cannot, and some do not want to.

What to look for

• Evidence of having built or rebuilt a team, not just carried a number.
• A clear point of view on pipeline and forecasting that survives scrutiny.
• The willingness to coach, and to make unpopular people decisions.
• The ability to work with marketing, product and compliance rather than against them.
• Enough personal credibility that the team believes they understand the work.

That last point matters. Sales teams are unforgiving of leaders who have never carried a quota. The strongest heads of sales usually have, but they have also stopped measuring their own worth by their personal number.

The interim option

If a business needs a producer replaced rather than a team led, it may not need a head of sales at all. If it needs the system rebuilt, it may be better served by an experienced sales leader on an interim basis while the permanent search runs properly, rather than promoting the top producer as a stop-gap and hoping.

Ask the harder question

Before you promote or hire, ask what the sales function actually needs in the next twelve months: more personal production, or a better machine. The answer determines whether you are recruiting a player or a coach. Confusing the two is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in commercial hiring.