Head of Sales job description

B2B sales — Head of Sales
Owns the whole number: territory design, hiring, and go-to-market.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Prospecting
- Account Research and Targeting — You spot patterns across won and lost accounts, adjust the targeting criteria for your segment, and show the pipeline effect of the change over a quarter.
- Outbound Prospecting — You design sequences other sellers adopt, run a controlled test of one message or channel variable, and report which variant produced more meetings and why.
- Cold Outreach Messaging — You review outreach written by other sellers, name exactly why a message will not land, and supply a rewrite that measurably improves their reply rate.
- Discovery and Qualification — You define the qualification standard the team applies, calibrate it against closed-lost analysis, and hold reviewers to it when a large deal fails the bar.
- Inbound Lead Handling — You redesign the routing or response rules for your segment and show the effect on speed to first contact and on conversion to qualified opportunity.
- Referral and Network Development — You build a referral motion other sellers can copy, covering who to ask and when, and show the pipeline it produced beyond your own accounts.

Deal Management
- Solution Demonstration — You lead demos on complex or competitive deals, orchestrate a specialist alongside you, and prepare individual attendees before the session.
- Buying Committee Mapping — You set how the team maps and records buying committees, and use the aggregate to show where deals repeatedly stall for want of access.
- Champion Development — You develop more than one champion on a large deal, prepare them for internal opposition, and recover the deal when one of them leaves mid-cycle.
- Sales Objection Handling — You collect the objections that recur across the team, feed them to product and marketing, and see the answers land in enablement material.
- Commercial Negotiation — You set the discount and concession policy, approve exceptions against a stated rationale, and can show the margin effect of that policy over time.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You write proposals for deals spanning several workstreams or legal entities, and shape them so the document works unaccompanied in a board paper.
- CRM Pipeline Hygiene — You spot the data problems across a pipeline you do not own, chase the specific records that distort the number, and explain why they matter.
- Competitive Positioning — You own the competitive narrative for a segment, keep it current from live deal evidence, and retire claims that no longer hold up.

Customer Success
- Customer Onboarding Handover — You can hand over accounts where scope was contested or the buyer was difficult, and name the risks delivery should watch for. You repair handovers others have done badly and improve the template when the same gap keeps recurring.
- Account Relationship Management — You can hold senior relationships in complex or political accounts and warm up one that has gone cold. You bring the right internal people into the relationship so it does not depend on you alone.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can turn round accounts that have decided to leave, or agree a clean exit where that is the honest answer. You report the real reasons for churn to the business, not the reason the customer gave first.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can expand into parts of a large customer where you have no sponsor, and structure the terms so the original contract stays intact. You show others how to find room in accounts they thought were finished.
- Customer Escalation Handling — You can set how escalations are triaged, owned and reviewed across the organisation, and make sure the underlying causes reach the teams that can remove them. Other leaders call you into their worst accounts.

Commercial
- Pricing and Discount Discipline — You can set the discount bands and approval rules the organisation works to, and change them when the evidence shows they cost more than they protect. You defend margin in front of people who would rather book the revenue.
- Territory and Account Planning — You can set how planning is done across the sales organisation and how plans are held to account. You reshape coverage when the market moves rather than waiting for the year to end.
- Sales Contract Literacy — You can work through customer paper and heavily amended terms, and explain the commercial effect of a clause to your own side. You are who other sellers ask before they concede a term.
- Sales Forecasting — You can set how the organisation forecasts, what a commitment means and what evidence has to sit behind it, so the business can spend against the number. You explain variance plainly instead of hiding behind averages.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can set how deal reviews are run across the organisation and develop the people who run them. You can show that the way your teams coach has changed how deals are won, not only how people feel.
- Sales Enablement — You can decide what the organisation invests in to make sellers productive, and show the effect on ramp time and performance. You get product, marketing and sales to agree one story rather than three.
- Quota and Territory Design — You can set the organisation's approach to quota, territory and compensation shape, matched to the company plan and what finance can fund. You redesign it when the current shape produces behaviour the business does not want.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.