On the Belgian market the two titles sometimes describe exactly the same role and sometimes two quite different jobs. The confusion is not harmless : it distorts applications, it distorts package expectations and, more seriously, it distorts the definition of the mandate. A company advertising for a Head of Sales while thinking of a classic sales director will attract scale-up profiles who withdraw at the second interview. Before launching a Head of Sales recruitment, it is worth knowing what you mean by the word.
In short
- Head of Sales is an anglophone title, used by technology companies and subsidiaries of international groups ; sales director belongs to the vocabulary of the traditional Belgian company.
- Six axes genuinely separate the two roles : scope, horizon, reporting line, team size, P&L responsibility and relationship to direct selling.
- The Head of Sales still sells personally ; the sales director rarely sells, they arbitrate.
- In Belgium the title has no legal weight : the joint committee’s job classification sets the framework, not what is on the business card.
- The choice of title shapes the reachable pool and how candidates read the role : decide it after the mandate, never before.
Two vocabularies, two histories
The sales director title comes from a corporate tradition in which the commercial function is one directorate among others, represented on the executive committee, with a stable scope and a team structured by region or product line. It usually implies significant seniority and a direct line to general management.
The Head of Sales title comes from another world : fast-growing technology companies, where functions are named in English, organisations change every eighteen months, and the commercial leader is as much an operator as a manager. In that context, “Head of” means “responsible for”, without implying a hierarchical level : you can be Head of Sales with three people or with thirty.
In Belgium the two vocabularies coexist in the same employment pool, often in the same city. A candidate will see both adverts in the same week and has to guess what is behind them. Removing that ambiguity is the company’s job, in the job description.
The six axes that genuinely separate the roles
| Axis | Head of Sales | Sales director |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Sales, sometimes a single segment or market | Sales, often marketing, sometimes customer service |
| Horizon | Quarter and half-year ; execution | Year and three-year plan ; commercial strategy |
| Reporting line | Founder, managing director or CRO | General management, seat on the executive committee |
| Team | Three to fifteen people, often direct reports | Middle managers, two-tier structure |
| P&L | Accountable for revenue, rarely for full costs | Accountable for revenue and commercial profitability |
| Direct selling | Yes, on key accounts | Exceptionally, in support |
The P&L line deserves a second look as well. Many companies announce a sales director role while keeping pricing, discount authority and the commercial budget at general management level. What they are describing is a Head of Sales with a flattering title, and experienced candidates work that out in the first hour of conversation.
The most discriminating line is the last one. A Head of Sales who refuses to carry strategic deals personally will not work in a forty-person company. A sales director who spends half their week at client sites is not steering their organisation. That point deserves to be raised explicitly in interview, because the two populations experience it very differently.
The expert’s view
We’re specialists : Sales, Marketing, Management. Not generalists. When a generalist agency recruits a Sales Director, they read the CV. We know the actual job – the real trade-offs between prospecting and farming, what it means to lead a distributed trilingual team across the Benelux, how to build a commercial strategy that holds in complex B2B. That field-level understanding is what separates a placement that lasts from one that breaks at 18 months.
Neighbouring titles and their false friends
Four labels orbit these two roles and further blur the reading of Belgian job adverts.
- VP Sales. An American title, generally above Head of Sales, with several managers reporting in. In Belgium it is sometimes used by subsidiaries to add weight to a role whose scope remains national.
- Sales Director. A literal translation of the French title, but often used in international groups to designate a regional or divisional head with no seat on the executive committee.
- Chief Revenue Officer. Scope extended to all revenue : sales, marketing, sometimes partnerships and renewals. This is a commercial general management mandate, not a variant of Head of Sales.
- Country Manager. Head of a country for a foreign group, with a strong commercial component but also local administrative, legal and social responsibilities.
The rule that applies to all of these is the same as for operational sales roles : the title says nothing about the mandate. We showed this for field profiles in our comparison of Key Account Manager and Business Developer ; it holds even more strongly at leadership level.
What Belgian law says : nothing, and that matters
A point foreign executives often discover : in Belgium, a job title carries no legal consequence in itself. What counts is the joint committee the company falls under and the job classification applied within it. The Federal Public Service Employment publishes the list of these committees and their scope.
In practice, classification reasons in terms of job levels – autonomy, complexity, responsibility – not titles. Two people carrying the same label can fall into different classes, with different minimum scales. For an employer the practical consequence is simple : the title is for communication, the job description is for the contract. Confusing the two creates difficulties at the moment of a pay review or a termination.
What the title changes for the candidate
For candidates, the title carried for three years shapes the next role. A commercial executive who has served as Head of Sales in a technology company will be read as a growth profile : good at building, comfortable with uncertainty, less obvious to project into a large matrixed organisation. Someone who carried the sales director title in an industrial company will be read the other way round.
That reading is sometimes unfair, but it exists, and senior candidates are perfectly aware of it. Some decline a role with an interesting scope because the proposed title feels like a step backwards. Others accept a flattering title on a narrower mandate, then leave within a year when reality asserts itself. In both cases the gap between title and mandate produces a fragile placement.
The subject also touches pay. A title suggesting a wider scope than reality raises package expectations, while a modest title on a demanding mandate drives good candidates away before the first conversation. Consistency between title, mandate and range is one of the points we check at the brief, alongside the package structure described in our analysis of Belgian commercial packages.
The particular case of foreign subsidiaries
Belgium has a high proportion of commercial subsidiaries of international groups, and those organisations produce a specific variant : a title defined at headquarters, a mandate defined locally, and sometimes a considerable distance between the two. The Belgian sales leader then carries a group-harmonised label with no real autonomy over pricing, range or hiring.
For an experienced candidate this is the number one point of vigilance, ahead of remuneration : what do they actually decide? An employer who answers that precisely – latitude on discounts, hiring budget, participation in range decisions – gains credibility and shortens their process. An employer who dodges it loses the best candidates at the third interview.
The trilingual dimension changes the job
There is a Belgian variable that neither title captures, and that determines success more often than either : leading a team that does not share one language. A commercial organisation covering the whole country typically has Dutch-speaking salespeople in the north, French-speaking ones in the south, and reporting in English. Team meetings, coaching sessions, performance reviews and difficult conversations all happen across that divide.
Running such a team in English only produces a specific failure mode : everything formal works, and everything informal stops. People stop volunteering the half-formed observation about a client, the doubt about a forecast, the concern about a colleague – precisely the information a sales leader most needs. A manager who can switch into each person’s own language gets a different quality of information, and both populations notice immediately which kind of leader they have.
This is one of the reasons why the Belgian pool for these roles is smaller than the number of adverts suggests, and why we test language in situation rather than trusting a line on a CV.
Which title should your advert carry?
The choice is not neutral, because it determines who recognises themselves in the advert. Three criteria settle it.
- The pool you are targeting. If you want someone from software publishing or a scale-up, the English title speaks louder. If you want a profile from industry, distribution or traditional B2B services, the local title inspires more confidence.
- The actual working language. Advertising a role in English in a company where everything happens in French and Dutch creates a mismatch candidates detect in the first interview.
- The level you want to signal. “Sales director” signals a seat on the executive committee. If that seat does not exist, the title will produce oversized applications and late refusals.
A useful reflex : write the five results expected at twelve months first, then choose the title that matches. The other way round, the exercise almost always produces a generic job description.
Assessing : two mandates, two sets of questions
The skills overlap substantially, but the dominant ones differ. For a Head of Sales mandate, you verify the ability to build from little : putting a sales process in place where none exists, hiring the first salespeople, producing a reliable forecast without historical data. For a sales leadership mandate, you verify the ability to steer through managers, to arbitrate between segments and to defend a pricing policy over time.
Two questions often separate candidates cleanly. “Tell me about the last sales process you designed from scratch, and what did not work in the first version.” And : “What was the last commercial decision you took against your team’s advice, and how did you hold it?” The first tests construction, the second authority. Role-plays and driver analysis complete the picture, as part of our assessment practice.
Moving from one role to the other
One further signal is often decisive : how the candidate talks about their salespeople. Someone who recounts the deals they personally rescued describes an operational Head of Sales profile. Someone who recounts how they helped a manager progress describes a leadership profile. Neither is better ; they simply answer different needs, and it is the brief’s job to say which one you are looking for.
Many companies live through this transition without naming it : the Head of Sales hired at fifteen people finds themselves leading thirty-five three years later, with two middle managers. The job has changed, the title has not, and the incumbent has not necessarily been supported through the shift. It is a known point of fragility : the best builder is not always the best organisation manager.
Two answers exist, and they are not mutually exclusive. Support the incumbent with training and coaching focused on management, starting with the executive committee before moving down to the teams. Or hire a sales director above them, having the conversation openly rather than letting it be guessed from the org chart. The first option takes time, the second takes courage ; taking no decision costs more than either. The timing question is covered in our article on when to hire your first Head of Sales, and the landing in a Head of Sales’ first priorities.
