Give your head of sales the right to choose the team’s daily actions within agreed limits and take responsibility for making sure they are carried out. This delegation of authority allows the business owner to stop approving every step the department takes. Strategy, prices, the budget and new commitments for the business remain the owner’s decisions.
If you have appointed a head of sales but keep correcting their decisions, first distinguish a breach of an agreement from a choice that differs from yours. Did the head of sales miss the deadline for replying to a customer, or reply on time but differently from the way you would have? Did they change a price without permission, or offer one of the options the company has authorised its salespeople to sell? These actions have different consequences. Without this distinction, a conversation about independence becomes a demand to guess what the owner would choose.
I believe authority has only been delegated when a decision the head of sales is allowed to make remains in force even if you disagree with the approach. Otherwise, they have no choice but to get your answer in advance. Letting someone choose and then treating every difference as a mistake is too expensive a way to hire yourself an assistant.
Delegating tasks
Delegating tasks gives an employee specific work with a result to deliver and a deadline. Delegating authority also gives them the right to choose actions, decide how to use agreed resources and resolve recurring issues without asking for permission again.
Asking the head of sales to collect the salespeople’s proposals by Friday is a single task. Putting them in charge of preparing proposals each day means allowing them to choose the order of work, require missing information to be provided and return a document to a salesperson for corrections. The owner stops being the person who authorises each of these actions.
A to-do list alone does not achieve this handover. It is easy to write “supervise salespeople” on it while leaving the owner to decide on every action after an error is discovered. The head of sales then points out problems, while the owner continues to lead. This underlying imbalance is examined in “Stop being the head of sales in your own business”. Here is the next step: define which decisions by the head of sales actually take effect.
For a start, you can use a table like this. It separates routine work from changes to the terms on which the company sells.
| Issue | The head of sales decides independently | The owner’s decision is required |
|---|---|---|
| Proposal | Choose a suitable option from those approved; return a proposal for revision | Change the price or add a commitment that is not in the agreed terms |
| Salespeople’s work | Assign tasks and set their order within the available working time | Increase staff numbers, change pay or the budget |
| A deal that is dragging on | Change the way the customer is contacted; join the negotiations | Promise the customer exceptional terms beyond what is allowed |
| An employee’s mistake | Review the action, assign training, increase supervision of the specific area | Make a staffing decision as the employer |
| A customer’s refusal | Choose the next step within the company’s offer | Change the product or the rules for working with an entire customer segment |
The table must be agreed with the specific head of sales. If, in the row about tasks, you have kept the right to change any order of work without explanation, the work in that row is still yours.
Delegating the leader’s role
Delegating the leader’s role frees the person taking on that role from carrying out some tasks personally, but leaves them responsible for organising the work and accepting the result. In sales, this applies to both levels: the owner hands daily management over to the head of sales, and the head of sales distributes work among the salespeople.
A role can be assigned by a formal order in a day. The right to decide is established through repeated actions at work: the head of sales chooses the approach, the team carries it out, and the consequences are reviewed against requirements known in advance. If every cycle ends with a return to the owner’s preferences, authority remains conditional.
I am not suggesting that you start with all of sales at once. Choose a recurring part of the work where the terms are already clear: for example, approving standard proposals for customers. This lets you see how well the head of sales can make decisions without giving them the right to change the whole business.
Before you start, you need three things: access to data, the team’s time and a clear procedure for contacting specialists. The right to demand an exact specification is useless if an engineer only accepts requests from the owner. Here the owner will have to agree with the relevant department who will respond to the head of sales and within what time. Otherwise, every request will bring the owner back into the correspondence.
You can judge how ready the head of sales is by how they explain a choice. Take a completed proposal from your company and ask them to identify what is allowed in it, what information is missing and where an owner’s decision will be needed. If the head of sales sees only the total amount, it is too early to hand over the entire approval process. First, examine the missing condition, then give them another document. Being able to repeat your explanation does not yet show that a person can recognise the boundaries independently.
Delegating responsibility
Delegating responsibility establishes who is responsible for achieving the result, reporting deviations and correcting the work within their authority. The owner retains responsibility for the business conditions they set themselves: the team’s resources, the product, prices and the budget.
The sales plan remains the department’s goal. But holding the head of sales to account only for the final amount is not enough: the same shortfall can result from weak negotiations or from the company’s refusal to fulfil an order the customer needs. The head of sales must show where the course of the sale changed, what they did and what decision is now required from the owner. Pointing to someone else’s restriction without reporting it in time does not excuse how they did their job.
The first unsuccessful decision after authority is delegated needs particularly careful review. Taking back the entire area of work is the easiest option. But first, establish exactly what happened.
| What happened | What shows this | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| The head of sales chose a different permitted approach | Agreed terms were followed, required information was taken into account | Compare the consequences of the approaches; keep the right to choose |
| The head of sales missed a required fact | The necessary data was available when the decision was made but was not used | Correct the way decisions are prepared and examine the repeated mistake |
| A condition emerged that was not covered by the rules | None of the permitted options covers the customer’s request | Add to the rule and state who decides until the addition is in place |
| The head of sales went beyond the permitted limits | The proposal contained promises that had not been agreed | Stop such promises, restrict that specific authority and set the conditions for restoring it |
This is not a demand to tolerate every mistake. It is a demand to identify it. If the head of sales again promises a customer something the company has forbidden, trust in them does need to be reconsidered. If they keep to the agreements but choose a different way of speaking to the customer, the quality of that approach is what needs reviewing. Simply differing from the owner does not constitute a breach.
How do you delegate tasks?
Hand over a task by setting out six conditions: the result, the deadline, the right to choose, the limits, the resources available and how to report an obstacle. Then ask the person doing the work to explain in their own words what they will do independently and what they will bring to you.
Use the following template to hand over the approval of proposals. This is a draft working agreement: before you begin, fill in your deadlines and the documents currently in use.
- 1. Result. The customer receives a proposal with a suitable scope, a price in line with current terms and a deadline confirmed by those fulfilling the order. The version sent is kept in the CRM system.
- 2. Deadline. The proposal is sent by the date promised to the customer. If required information is missing, the head of sales arranges for it to be obtained before that date or agrees a new deadline with the customer in advance.
- 3. Right to choose. The head of sales assigns the preparation, returns the document to a salesperson, chooses one of the permitted options and authorises it to be sent. A second signature from the owner is not needed for a standard proposal.
- 4. Limits. Changes to the price, the set of commitments and an unconfirmed completion deadline require a separate decision. Links to the current price list and agreed proposal options are attached to the task.
- 5. Resources. The head of sales can see the correspondence and agreements with the customer, can use the salespeople’s time and knows who is responsible for technical questions.
- 6. Obstacle. For anything beyond the permitted terms, the head of sales tells the owner what has happened, proposes a solution and gives a deadline for a response. The prohibited promise is not made to the customer before a reply arrives.
This record does not require every draft to be approved. It does make it possible to trace the terms on which it was sent. To make the agreement work, remove the old requirement for the owner’s signature from the task template and notify the team. Otherwise, the new procedure will apply only in conversation, while the old one will remain in every task card.
Separately, write down who handles questions when the owner is unavailable and which decisions that person is allowed to make. For a decision reserved for the owner alone, there must be an agreed waiting period and a procedure for informing the customer. The owner’s silence does not count as permission. It also takes up time in the deal, and that time cannot be put down to the head of sales being slow.
Delegating tasks to employees
Delegating tasks to employees requires one clear person in charge of the work handed over. If sales have been handed over to the head of sales, assignments to salespeople and acceptance of their completed work go through them; direct intervention by the owner must be a separate exception, with an explanation.
The owner has the right to point out a mistake in a proposal. There is then a choice: rewrite the document themselves and send it to the salesperson, or tell the head of sales which condition has been breached. In the second case, the head of sales organises the correction themselves and works out why the mistake made it into the proposal. In the first, the salesperson gains a second place to get a final answer.
If urgent intervention is needed, there is no reason to delay saving the deal. But immediately tell the head of sales exactly what you changed, why there was no time for the usual procedure and when they will resume making decisions. One intervention must not quietly become a permanent duty to bring every similar question to you.
Delegating authority to the head of sales also does not require taking independence away from salespeople. A salesperson agrees the next contact and prepares a standard proposal independently. The head of sales sets out which proposals need their review and which are sent under the existing rule. Otherwise, the owner will be freed up, but the entire queue of approvals will simply move to one person.
How do you delegate properly?
Delegating properly means increasing independence based on work results and deciding in advance the grounds for intervention. Checks must be frequent enough for the head of sales to correct a deviation before it becomes an unfulfilled promise to a customer.
When you start with standard proposals, assign the head of sales a daily review of deadlines and exceptions. For the owner, an agreed review once a week and immediate reports of issues beyond the head of sales’ authority are enough. If a sale requires a decision within a day, that issue does not wait for the weekly meeting. This is a working procedure for getting started, not a promise to master management in a week.
The review needs three numbers: how many decisions were made independently, how many required the owner and how many had to be corrected because the agreed terms were breached. For issues referred to the owner, a reason is needed. A count of zero questions is not a reason to celebrate in itself: the exceptions where the head of sales really has no authority to decide must also remain visible.
Count your own time too. Over equal periods, for example five working days before the handover and five after, record the minutes spent on approvals, reading the review and urgent interventions. Time saved = minutes previously spent on this area − minutes now spent on the same area. For example, before the handover this work took 300 minutes, and afterwards it took 120 minutes: 180 minutes were freed up. If there are fewer messages but each one requires you to go through the entire deal again, you have not freed up your time yet.
When the head of sales keeps to the agreed terms but the owner continues to review their decisions every day, the owner needs a way to hand over this regular work too. At RENTROP, turnkey sales management includes daily management of the department and checks on the quality of the head of sales’ work. The owner gets the chance to stop being the company’s chief head of sales.
The owner has a right to object: their business still has to pay for a mistake. That is exactly why the limits on decisions are set in advance, breaches are reviewed and authority that poses a risk is restricted. But if every permitted choice stands only until your own alternative appears, the head of sales is better off waiting for you — and they will be right.