VP of Sales: Job Description, Responsibilities and How to Hire

If your sales growth has stalled or become hard to predict, you may be considering a sales leader above your managers and reps. A VP of Sales is that person: the executive who owns the sales number and builds the team, process and forecast that deliver it. A good hire takes sales off the CEO's or founder's desk and makes revenue easier to plan. A poor one, warns Insight Partners, the venture and growth investor, can delay a company's development by months.

This guide is for the CEO or founder making that hire. It explains what the role covers, how it differs from a sales director and a chief revenue officer (CRO), and what the market pays. It includes a job description template you can adapt, the common mistakes in hiring a sales leader, and a plan for the first 90 days.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What a VP of Sales does

A VP of Sales is accountable for sales results. Sales managers run teams of reps day to day; the VP decides how the sales function in their remit is organized, staffed, measured and paid, and answers to the CEO, or to a CRO where there is one, for the number.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track VPs of Sales separately. Its description of sales managers (opens in a new tab) provides a fair outline of the job: preparing budgets, analyzing sales data, projecting sales, setting goals for the sales staff and monitoring progress, and planning training. In large organizations, it notes, sales managers may oversee regional and local sales managers and their staffs. At VP level, these duties cover the sales organization in the role's remit, which may be the whole company or a region or business unit.

Sales leadership usually builds on earlier work in sales. The BLS says sales managers typically need a bachelor's degree and work experience as a sales representative, and that employers usually prefer several years of sales experience. For a VP role, look further: experience leading other managers in a sales motion like yours.

In practice, a VP of Sales usually owns:

• The forecast and the plan: the annual sales target, how it splits across segments, territories and quarters, and a forecast the CEO and finance can rely on.
• The team: hiring, coaching and, when needed, replacing sales managers and reps, and the structure they work in.
• Quotas and compensation: quota setting, territory design and the commission plan, within a budget agreed with the CEO and finance.
• The sales process: how deals are qualified, worked and closed, the CRM data behind it, and the training that keeps it consistent.
• Key deals and accounts: joining the largest opportunities when an executive is needed, and owning important customer relationships.
• Alignment across the company: agreeing lead definitions with marketing, passing customer feedback to product, and handing new customers to customer success.

VP of Sales, sales director or CRO?

Titles vary between companies, so define the scope before you choose the title. The table shows how the roles usually divide in a company large enough to have all of them.

Some see the CRO as a head of sales under another name. Korn Ferry, the executive search and consulting firm, describes the difference (opens in a new tab) in three parts. On scope, "A VP of Sales has one priority - sales," while a CRO treats sales as one component of the machine that drives revenue. On horizon, sales teams usually work to quarterly goals while CROs look 18 months to two years ahead. On numbers, a company typically has one CRO but may have several VPs of Sales, by size or geography. In a smaller company one person may do both jobs until the company scales, but Korn Ferry's view is that "CROs cannot sustainably keep the big, cross-functional picture in mind and run sales simultaneously."

The question I would settle first is who owns pipeline generation. When I handed off the sales seat at Lead Cookie, I learned the hard way that handing off sales is not the same as handing off marketing. Sales closes deals; marketing generates them. Once I stepped back, I let our marketing momentum carry us until lead flow slowed, and only then realized marketing was still my job. If your new leader is expected to fix lead flow, retention and expansion as well as closing, define a CRO mandate, or spell out how a VP of Sales will share that accountability with the marketing and customer success leaders. Write that into the description, so candidates know which job they are applying for.

A VP of Sales usually fits when marketing and customer success already have capable owners and the gap is a sales team that needs structure, management and a reliable forecast. A CRO usually fits when the problems sit between those functions, for example leads that sales rejects or customers who leave soon after the handover to customer success. Korn Ferry ties the choice to size and complexity. In its view, a company with dozens of salespeople or fewer and a simple set of products may not need a CRO yet. One with over a hundred salespeople, two different sales organizations after a merger, or very different customer groups should consider one. Treat these as prompts, and decide from the problems the hire must solve. If you need CRO-level leadership before a full-time hire makes sense, fractional and interim CRO firms are another route.

A VP of Sales job description template

The template below covers the usual parts of a job posting, with prompts for the details that separate one VP of Sales role from another: your stage, your sales motion and the results you will judge. Fill in each line before the role is posted or briefed to a recruiter.

A summary to adapt for the posting: "We are hiring a VP of Sales to lead [teams, regions and segments] and achieve [first-year outcomes]. Reporting to [the CEO or CRO], you will develop our sales managers, own the sales plan and forecast, and work closely with marketing and customer success."

Two choices in this template matter more than the rest. The first is the required experience. Insight Partners lists hiring for three or more years out rather than today (opens in a new tab) among the most common sales-leader mistakes, so name the stage and the motion as well as the years of experience. The second is the success measures. A candidate who knows how they will be judged can tell you, before accepting, whether the target is realistic.

What a VP of Sales is paid

Pay for the role varies widely with company size, industry, location and how much of the package is variable. Two public sources give a frame for the cash part of it.

The BLS figure includes sales commissions and bonuses for meeting production targets. It excludes nonproduction bonuses (opens in a new tab) and benefits, and provides broad occupational context for sales managers; Built In gives a separate, self-reported view of VP pay. Pay also differed by industry: the BLS median for sales managers ranged from $100,000 in retail trade to $174,440 in finance and insurance, with $173,700 in professional, scientific and technical services and $156,150 in manufacturing. Built In's averages are self-reported, the page does not give the number of responses, and its total is the sum of the two averages. Neither source reports equity.

Use both as a starting point, then benchmark against companies like yours. Agree the range and the split between base and variable pay before you approach candidates, and decide how the variable part is earned: on bookings, revenue, margin or retention. Pay the VP on the result you want them to own. The BLS notes that sales managers are usually paid a combination of salary and commissions or salary plus bonuses.

How to hire a VP of Sales

Sales leadership hires tend to go wrong in familiar ways. In 2021 Insight Partners published the five pitfalls it saw most often across the sales-leader interviews it takes part in, and the steps below build on them.

1. 1

   Understand the job before you hire for it

   You need to understand a function well enough to do it before you can hire someone to run it, a point I made about sales on my podcast in 2021. A CEO who has never looked closely at how the company wins deals will find it hard to judge whether a candidate's plan fits. Damian Thompson, my sales coach when I wrote about this in 2020, made a related point: you can't just hire anyone to come in and build your sales process, and the people who can are expensive or already well paid elsewhere. So decide whether you need someone to build the process or to run and improve one that works, and search for that. Before the search, know how your deals are won and lost, where the pipeline comes from and what your best reps do differently.

2. 2

   Hire for the stage you are in

   Insight Partners warns that many companies make the mistake of hiring a late-stage CRO or SVP of Sales for an early-stage company. A late-stage leader is often used to sizable marketing and sales operations teams and established tools, while an early-stage leader must build the process and often the tools themselves. Ask candidates to describe the company they did their best work in, and compare it honestly with yours. One of Insight's interview questions tests this directly: "Walk me through how you would train your next 5 hires." A tactical answer about what the candidate will do personally is a good sign at an early stage.

3. 3

   Be careful promoting your best rep

   Insight's first pitfall is the battlefield promotion: "Rarely will your best sales rep make a good sales leader," because building a sales organization takes different skills from selling. If you do promote from within, Insight's advice is to put the person through sales management training.

4. 4

   Weigh management experience above industry knowledge

   A candidate from a competitor may know your market and still never have built a team. Insight's view is that if your reps already know the industry, the leader does not always need to. Industry experience matters more when there is no team yet, or when the leader must also carry a quota in a highly specialized market.

5. 5

   Use a scorecard, several interviews and real references

   Put the criteria and their weights in writing before the first interview, including the few that are non-negotiable, and score every candidate against them, internal ones included. Insight names three elements of a successful executive hiring process: scorecards, multiple interviews and reference checks, including backchannel references beyond the names a candidate provides. If culture matters, name the specific traits you mean, as Insight does with grit and tenacity.

6. 6

   Test candidates on your real problems

   Give finalists a real situation from your business: a team well behind its number halfway through a quarter, a segment that stopped converting, a forecast that keeps slipping. Ask what they would look at first, what they would change and how they would bring the team with them. Ask each one about a target they missed and what they learned from it. A strong candidate explains their own decisions; a weak one describes what the company did around them.

7. 7

   Read the career history for patterns

   Short stints are not disqualifying on their own; Insight observes that sales leaders sometimes have a shelf life of 18-24 months. Ask why each move happened and check the answers with references. A leader who stayed long enough to live with the consequences of their hires and processes has more to show you.

Questions to ask each finalist:

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Across the selection research reviewed by Sackett and colleagues, structured interviews had higher corrected mean validity than unstructured interviews. These are correlations with job performance, not percentages of successful hires or a forecast for this particular executive role.doi.org (opens in a new tab)

Plan the first 90 days

Agree what success looks like before the new leader's first day, then review it together as the first months unfold.

In a 2020 post I described handing the sales seat at Lead Cookie to a new salesperson. It was my second attempt. The first had failed: I handed over too early, about 10 months into the business, the process lived in my head, and I tried to hand everything over in about 1.5 months. The second time I set one goal: in 90 days, the new salesperson would handle closing deals from inbound to operations on his own. We worked to it in three phases: training and shadowing, then him running calls with me watching, then him running them alone. That was a salesperson taking over from a founder. A VP of Sales joining a larger company is a bigger hire, but the principle carries. Write the 90-day outcome down, agree it with the new leader and review it together.

For a VP of Sales, a 90-day plan might cover:

• The first 30 days: meet every manager and most reps, sit in on deals, review the pipeline, the forecast and the commission plan, and meet key customers.
• By 60 days: a written assessment of the team, the process and the pipeline, shared with the CEO, with the first changes agreed.
• By 90 days: a sales plan for the rest of the year, any changes to the team underway, and a forecast the CEO can test against results.

Watch a few numbers every week while the new leader settles in. At Lead Cookie we tracked new leads, sales calls held and deals closed each week, so we could tell whether the salesperson was the problem or something else was. We knew that when leads dropped, the other two numbers would soon follow. A VP of Sales will choose their own measures, but agree a short weekly set at the start, so that neither of you is guessing at the first quarterly review.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

If you had to write the VP of Sales mission today, could you say in two sentences what the role must achieve in its first year?