Company sales management means planning sales, organising salespeople’s work and correcting problems with people and deals. Day to day, this is handled by the business owner, an employed head of sales or an external team given responsibility for management. The choice depends on which work the owner is prepared to keep: managing salespeople, assessing the head of sales’ decisions or discussing results with a team that takes responsibility for the quality of the head of sales’ work.
When you cancel a meeting about a new business area to deal with yet another dispute in the sales team, the desire to hire a head of sales is understandable. Today you need to decide who will continue negotiations with a buyer. Tomorrow, what to do about a salesperson who has broken an agreement again. The new person needs to free up your time.
But after hiring, different questions will come to you. The head of sales will suggest a way to put things right, and someone must judge whether it will work. If you have to work it out again, some of the workload will indeed go away, and some will remain. That remaining part is what you should discuss before looking for candidates.
I believe you should choose based on the work you are willing to do after handing over sales. A strong head of sales is a good choice for a business owner who is prepared to manage them. If you have no spare time even for that, you will need a different mix of people to do the work.
What remains the owner’s responsibility in every case
The owner decides what kind of business they are building: who they sell to, which products they develop, how much they are willing to spend and which deal terms cannot be compromised. The head of sales prepares proposals and calculations, but the decision to close a business area, change prices or increase the budget stays with the owner.
Day-to-day questions sit at another level: who to assign a customer to, how to help an employee, what to change after negotiations have broken down. These are handed over to the head of sales. Between these levels is another: assessing whether the head of sales is explaining the problem correctly and choosing the right actions.
Here is an example for comparing the options. The head of sales proposes replacing a salesperson because deals are repeatedly lost after a proposal is sent. Before you decide, they must show exactly what the employee is doing wrong, what they have already been taught and what has changed after they received help. If training amounted to telling them to try harder, the next salesperson will face the same conditions. If the requirements were clear, help was provided and the error keeps recurring, there is a basis for discussing a replacement.
Such a review takes time and requires the ability to assess sales work. In a small company, the owner handles it. If there is a commercial director, they do. With an external team, you need to find out in advance who reviews disputed decisions by the head of sales. The job title is of little help here: you need someone who follows the review through until the problem is fixed.
When the business owner manages sales personally
Managing sales yourself is justified if you have deliberately set aside time for it in your week. You know how much attention the team needs, have time to help them and choose this work among the other tasks in your business. The absence of a head of sales says nothing bad about a company in itself.
The limit of this option shows up in your calendar. If product discussions, negotiations with a partner and the search for a new business area repeatedly give way to salespeople’s questions, the company is already paying for your management through delayed decisions. Having the money for a head of sales is only half the choice; the other half is what you intend to do with the time you free up.
It is enough to name one task that has been pushed aside and its deadline. For example, prepare a decision on launching a new product by the end of the month. If this requires freeing up two regular blocks of working time, it is a specific requirement for the future way of managing sales. The phrase “I want to spend less time on sales” sets no such requirement.
We have separately discussed whether a business owner can manage sales without a head of sales. Here, the choice is different: are you prepared to keep giving sales the time they actually take?
When to hire a head of sales
An employed head of sales is suitable when the company needs someone closely involved in daily work and has someone internally who can set their tasks and assess the results. They get a team, authority and access to data. The owner stops assigning tasks to salespeople and discusses the department’s results with the head of sales.
A strong head of sales brings their own explanation of why things have gone off track and suggests a way forward. This significantly reduces the owner’s workload. But the ability to assess the proposal must remain within the company: otherwise, the most confident explanation automatically becomes the correct one.
When choosing a candidate, it is more useful to discuss one unsuccessful episode from their work than to collect promises of growth. Ask them to name their decision, the sign that it was wrong and the correction that followed. If their answer blames only the market and employees, the main thing remains unknown: how they change their own way of managing when it does not work.
You will also need to take part at the start. The head of sales needs an explanation of how the product works, limits on what can be delivered and agreements with key buyers. This is a one-off demand on your time to hand over the work. It should be distinguished from the ongoing duty of going through every conclusion the head of sales reaches all over again. When hiring, agree on both: how many meetings are needed at the start and which questions will come to you afterwards.
This option breaks down when the owner hires a head of sales hoping to stop assessing sales work altogether, and there is no one else in the company to do that assessment. Then any difficulty leaves a choice between taking their word for it and getting personally involved in every detail.
When to hand management over to an external team
An external team is appropriate if you want to hand over both the daily work and the review of the quality of the head of sales’ decisions. The task here goes beyond finding a person. The provider must explain who manages the salespeople, who helps the head of sales correct mistakes and who answers to the owner for the overall result of the work.
It is easier to compare proposals using the same situation involving the replacement of a salesperson. Who on the provider’s side will examine the grounds for the decision? Who will insist that the employee is trained first if this step has been skipped? Who will make sure what was agreed is carried out? The answer “We’ll discuss it with you” leaves this work with the owner, regardless of the size of the team shown in the presentation.
For its part, the company provides access to data and communications, states its limits and gives the head of sales the right to act within agreed boundaries. If every task assigned to a salesperson requires your permission, using an external team will preserve the same queue of questions waiting for the owner. Remote access to the CRM system alone does not remove that queue.
An external team’s weak point is the gap between advice and execution. The review ends with a recommendation, while someone inside the company has to make it work. So before starting, name the person who sets tasks for salespeople and checks and accepts the completed work. The handover procedure when the head of sales changes also matters; this risk is discussed separately in the article why sales fall without a strong leader.
How to compare options by the owner’s time
An illustrative example, not a RENTROP case study. The owner spends 12 hours a week on sales and wants to spend only three. Their calendar shows the following breakdown:
- Seven hours — salespeople’s questions, help with negotiations, setting and reviewing tasks.
- Three hours — finding the causes of recurring problems and choosing how to fix them.
- Two hours — decisions on the product, commercial terms and spending.
In the candidate’s proposal, the first seven hours move to the head of sales, while the detailed review of causes and ways to fix them stays with the owner. That gives 12 − 7 = 5 hours. Hiring will reduce the owner’s workload, but this particular option does not fit within the desired three hours.
Then there are three honest choices: continue spending five hours, ask the current commercial director to assess the head of sales’ work or find a provider who will take on that review as well. If the provider takes the seven hours of daily questions and the three hours of working out and assessing how to fix problems, the owner is left with two hours of commercial decisions. The calculation assumes that the agreements are actually carried out; time to get the head of sales started is added separately.
These hours are used as an example. A strong employed head of sales can prepare decisions in a way that lets the owner discuss them much faster. And an external team can burden a client with endless calls. So compare the proposed way of working and what is actually expected of you, without giving either format a favourable number in advance.
To make your own calculation, ask an assistant or the person currently in charge to record your meetings and requests about sales over five working days. Each needs its duration, the reason for your involvement and the person expected to handle it after the handover. All you have to do is identify which decisions you will keep and see whether they fit into the time available.
A brief you can use to compare a candidate and a team
You can send this text to both the candidate and the team before agreeing on the work. Three working days is the suggested deadline for preparing a response, not a promise to get sales working properly in that time.
I am handing over the daily management of an existing sales department. I want to understand in advance how much involvement you will need from me at the start and after the handover. Within three working days, prepare a proposal covering the following points.
- The first week. What information and meetings do you need from me, who prepares them and how much time does each meeting take? Separately list the missing data that your side will gather independently.
- Routine work. Which recurring questions from salespeople will you take on? Name who makes decisions on them and tells the team the outcome.
- A mistake by the head of sales. Analyse this example: after unsuccessful negotiations, the head of sales suggests replacing a salesperson. What grounds must they present, who will assess their conclusion and who will organise the correction if the problem was caused by the way sales were managed?
- My involvement. Which decisions will remain with me, how often will they be needed and what will you prepare before coming to me? Also name the events that mean you cannot wait until the next meeting.
- Accepting the handover. Suggest a date and signs that will show the stated questions no longer need my involvement and that salespeople receive answers on time.
A good response names specific people responsible, states the owner’s time commitment and sets out how to handle a disputed decision. If both proposals require you to review the same questions, the external format adds no advantage in itself.
After the work starts, a quieter chat also needs an explanation. By the date agreed for accepting the handover, the head of sales brings a list of requests that used to come to you: who has answered instead and what the outcome was. Fewer messages while unresolved tasks pile up mean the work has stopped. Fewer messages with decisions made on time show that the work has actually been taken over.
If the business owner no longer wants to manage the head of sales
When there is no time for either the daily questions or the constant work of correcting the head of sales’ decisions, filling one vacancy is not enough to complete the task. At RENTROP, we offer turnkey sales management: the team takes responsibility for the department’s daily work and the quality of management so the owner stops being the main head of sales.
If what you need is specifically a head of sales selected to suit your business, there is a separate offer: an outsourced head of sales. RENTROP selects the person, and payment consists of a fixed amount and a percentage of the result; if you are not a good fit for each other, it provides a replacement free of charge.
You are free to keep sales yourself, hire a head of sales or hand management over to a team. But the meeting about a new business area will stay in your calendar on only one condition: you have named in advance the person who will see an issue in the department through to a solution without you having to get involved in the salespeople’s work again.