Head of Sales job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Decide what the organization invests in to ramp sellers faster, and show the effect on ramp time and performance.
- Set the organization's approach to quota, territory and compensation shape within what finance can fund, and redesign it when it rewards behavior the business does not want.
- 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.
- Redesign the routing or response rules for your segment and show the effect on speed to first contact and on conversion to qualified opportunity.
- Set how the team maps and records buying committees, and use the aggregate to show where deals repeatedly stall for want of access.
- Collect the objections that recur across the team, feed them to product and marketing, and see the answers land in enablement material.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Sales Team Lead level (level 4 of 5) or equivalent

REQUIRED SKILLS
Prospecting
- Account Research and Targeting — You can 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 can 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 can 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 can 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 can 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 can 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 can lead demos on complex or competitive deals, direct a specialist alongside you, and prepare individual attendees before the session.
- Buying Committee Mapping — You can 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 can 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 can 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 can set the discount bands, concession rules and approval route the organization sells under, and revise them when margin data shows they cost more than they protect.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You can 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 can 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 can own the competitive narrative for a segment, keep it current from live deal evidence, and retire claims that no longer hold up.
- Product and Solution Expertise — You can set what sales may promise about product capability and fit, agreed with product and legal, and revise it when a deal shows a claim failed.
- Closing and Purchase Agreement — You can set the team's closing standard, including which closing tactics are not allowed, and review deals that stalled after a verbal yes.

Account Management
- Customer Onboarding Handover — You can hand over accounts where scope was contested or the buyer was difficult, naming the risks delivery should watch, and improve the template when the same gap recurs.
- Account Relationship Management — You can hold senior relationships in complex accounts and restart contact with one that has had no senior meeting for six months, bringing in internal colleagues so it does not depend on you alone.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can turn around an account that has decided to leave, or agree a clean exit, and report the real reasons for churn to the business.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can expand into parts of a large customer where you have no sponsor, structuring terms so the original contract stays intact.

Commercial
- Territory and Account Planning — You can set how planning is done across the sales organization and how plans are held to account, reshaping coverage when the market moves instead of at year end.
- Sales Contract Review — You can work through customer paper and heavily amended terms, and advise other sellers on a clause, with its commercial effect, before they concede it.
- Sales Forecasting — You can set how the organization forecasts, including what a commitment means and the evidence behind it, and explain variance plainly.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can set how deal reviews run across the organization and develop the people who run them, showing the change in how deals are won.
- Sales Enablement — You can decide what the organization invests in to ramp sellers faster, and show the effect on ramp time and performance.
- Quota and Territory Design — You can set the organization's approach to quota, territory and compensation shape within what finance can fund, and redesign it when it rewards behavior the business does not want.
- Sales Team Hiring and Performance — You can set the hiring profile, ramp targets and performance standard for the sales organization, and decide when a seller exits.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and set the estimating method other teams use.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can report the organization's most exposed outcomes to its leaders as they stand, including bad news, and answer for them.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

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

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates by creating the forums and norms that teams use to share information.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together by putting in place routines and forums they use across the organization.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

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