In brief
In a Belgian SME, the priority missions of a Managing Director Commercial are not limited to “selling more”. They consist of structuring what has never been structured, and doing so in an order that sabotages neither the existing team nor the quarter’s results.
- The first 30 days are devoted to factual diagnosis: real pipeline, performance per salesperson, customer segmentation, pricing, conversion rate by funnel stage.
- The following 60 days are used to prioritize the 3 to 5 projects that will produce the most impact over the next 12 months, and to establish team rituals (one-to-one, pipeline review, forecasting).
- The missions to deliver from the first year typically consist of five major priorities: segmentation and qualification of accounts, coherent variable compensation plan, documented sales process, team skill development, and data-driven management system.
- The most common mistake in SMEs: entrusting the Commercial Director with operational missions that should have remained with the Sales Manager. The Commercial Director does not carry an individual quota. If they do, they are no longer a Commercial Director.
The confusion that undermines the function in SMEs
In a large company, roles are structurally separated. The Commercial Director manages strategy, budgets, teams, pricing, product mix. The Sales Manager manages execution. The salesperson sells.
In SMEs, these three functions collide. Very often, the Commercial Director recruited in an SME inherits a mix of strategy, direct management and sales on strategic accounts. This versatility is legitimate provided it does not dilute the function. The empirical rule we apply in briefing: maximum 30% of the Commercial Director’s time on direct sales. Beyond that, they no longer have the bandwidth to structure, and the company pays at director price for what it gets from a senior salesperson.
Clearly defining priority missions means first defining what the Commercial Director will not do.
The first 90 days: the two-phase grid
Days 1 to 30: the diagnosis
The worst thing a new Commercial Director can do during their first 30 days is arrive with solutions. They must arrive with questions. Six diagnoses must be completed by D+30:
- The real state of the pipeline, opportunity by opportunity, with a realistic probability rate (not the CRM one, the one they will have recalibrated after individual discussion with each salesperson).
- Individual performance of each salesperson over the last 12 months: signed revenue, margin, conversion rate, visit frequency, average basket size, post-signature behaviour.
- Real customer segmentation, not marketing‘s or the slides’: who pays, who pays late, who consumes sales time without return, who is mature for upsell.
- Effective pricing grid: catalogue price vs actually practiced prices, average discount rate, granted exceptions, drift over 24 months.
- Sales funnel: conversion rate at each stage, average cycle duration, breaking points, opportunity sources.
- Internal ecosystem: how sales work with marketing, delivery, customer service, finance. Where are the frictions that consume sales time.
These six diagnoses take six to eight weeks maximum if the Commercial Director dedicates their days to them without getting absorbed by daily operations.
Days 31 to 90: the prioritization
By D+60, the Commercial Director must have decided on their 3 to 5 priority projects for the next 12 months. Not 10 projects. Three to five. This is the most important discipline exercise of the position: giving up what will not be done this year.
By D+90, these projects must be documented (objective, indicator, milestone, required resources) and presented to the Management Committee. And management rituals must be in place: structured monthly one-to-one with each salesperson, weekly pipeline review, monthly forecast, monthly commercial committee.
We are specialists: Sales, Marketing, Management. Not generalists. When a generalist firm recruits a Sales Director, they read the CV. We, on the other hand, know the reality of the job, the real trade-offs between prospecting and retention, what it means to manage a trilingual team across the Benelux, how to structure a commercial strategy that holds in complex B2B. It is this field knowledge that separates a placement that lasts from a placement that breaks at 18 months.
The five structuring missions of the first year
1. Segment and qualify the portfolio
In B2B SMEs, the Pareto matrix is almost universally true: 20% of customers generate 80% of the result. But this information sleeps in the CRM without being actioned. The Commercial Director’s first structuring mission is to transform this data into commercial allocation.
Concretely: segment the portfolio into 4 or 5 tiers (strategic, growth, maintain, defend, exit), assign each tier a level of commercial investment, and redeploy resources toward segments with higher potential. This simple project typically frees up between 15 and 25% of sales time by stopping over-serving accounts that do not pay off. It is mechanical, measurable, and rarely done in an SME where commercial history dominates rationality.
2. Build a variable compensation plan that aligns behaviours
The inherited variable plan in an SME is often historical patchwork: commission on signed revenue, without margin weighting, without accelerator, without minimum margin threshold, sometimes capped in a demotivating way. The Commercial Director must rebuild it so it drives the behaviours the company really wants to see.
The empirical rule: a good variable plan is understandable on one page, mentally calculable by the salesperson at month-end, and aligned on 3 indicators maximum (typically: revenue, margin, and a strategic indicator such as number of new accounts opened or penetration on a priority range).
This subject is dense enough to deserve its own detailed reading. See our complete analysis on calculating the variable portion of a Commercial Director.
3. Document the sales process
In an SME, the sales process is often in the head of the managing director and two senior salespeople. Nobody else knows how the product really sells, how to handle a price objection, how to build a winning proposal. This informality kills growth capacity. Recruiting a new salesperson means asking them to reinvent in 6 months what took 10 years to build.
The Commercial Director must document a standardized sales process: funnel stages, qualification criteria, proposal structures, objection FAQ, opening scripts, argument models by segment. Not a bible. A short manual (30 to 50 pages) that allows onboarding a new salesperson in 8 weeks instead of 8 months.
4. Develop the existing team’s skills
This is the most often neglected mission. Many Commercial Directors arrive and look at the team wondering who to keep and who to replace. The right sequence is reversed: first give the team the means to develop skills, and only decide on movements after 6 to 9 months of observation, during which the salespeople have had a fair chance to reveal themselves in the new framework.
This involves structured field coaching (the commercial director accompanies each salesperson on a customer visit once a month, with structured debrief), targeted training on weak skills identified in the diagnosis, and clear objectives with monthly review. This management mode requires discipline. It transforms a team in less than a year.
5. Establish a data-driven management system
In SMEs, commercial reporting is often a monthly Excel file filled in manually, late, and discussed after the fact. The Commercial Director must install a management system that makes pipeline, conversion, margin and forecast visible in near real-time.
This does not necessarily require a new CRM. In half the cases, the tool already exists and is poorly used. The mission consists of making the data reliable, defining 5 to 7 KPIs shared by everyone, and establishing a weekly ritual of reading these KPIs. What gets measured gets managed. What does not get measured drifts.
What must absolutely be avoided assigning to the Commercial Director
Several missions are regularly assigned to the Commercial Director in SMEs when they are not their responsibility, which dilutes the function and limits its impact.
- Leading commercial ownership of strategic accounts. Except in exceptional cases of an account at immediate risk of loss, the Commercial Director accompanies, supervises, opens doors, but does not lead accounts. Otherwise, their team does not learn and does not have the accounts to grow.
- Second-level customer service. If the Commercial Director spends their days managing escalations from unhappy customers, it is because the organization has a delivery problem, not a commercial problem. Having the commercial directorate absorb this problem means treating the symptom and maintaining the cause.
- Complete recruitment of the sales team. The Commercial Director must validate profiles, conduct final interviews, decide. They should not do pre-selection, sourcing, first interviews. This is full-time work that diverts them from management. This issue is addressed in our analysis on Recruitment of a commercial director and more broadly on using a specialized partner for team recruitments.
- Participation in all committees. A Commercial Director who spends 60% of their week in meetings does not manage, they attend. Three strategic committees per month are largely sufficient. The rest is delegable or eliminable.
Summary table: missions by order of priority
| Period | Mission | Expected deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| D 1 – 30 | 360° diagnosis | Factual internal report: pipeline, individual performance, segmentation, pricing, funnel |
| D 31 – 90 | Prioritization of priority projects | 3 to 5 priority projects with milestones, presented to Management Committee |
| Months 4 – 6 | Segmentation and redeployment | Account matrix, commercial allocation plan by tier |
| Months 4 – 9 | Variable plan overhaul | Documented, simulated, deployed plan for next financial year |
| Months 6 – 12 | Sales process documentation | Sales playbook usable for onboarding |
| Ongoing | Team skill development | Monthly field coaching, individual plan per salesperson |
| Months 3 – 6 | Data-driven management | 5 to 7 shared KPIs, weekly ritual, reliable forecast |
Conclusion: the mission that is never in the job description
Beyond the five structuring missions, there is a cross-functional mission rarely articulated but which determines everything else: protecting the team’s sales time. A Commercial Director’s greatest contribution in an SME is neither their ideas, nor their processes, nor their network. It is the number of hours they free up for each salesperson to do real commercial work, by eliminating unnecessary meetings, automating manual reporting, arbitrating what should escalate and what should not escalate.
This discipline is invisible. It is measured indirectly by the “useful commercial hours / hours worked” ratio of the team. When this ratio goes from 35% to 55%, revenue follows, mechanically.
And of course, all this structuring work only yields results if the recruited or promoted profile genuinely has the means to do so. This is exactly the question addressed in our analysis on the choice between internal promotion and external recruitment of a Commercial Director, and in our reading of the budget to plan for recruiting an experienced Commercial Director in Belgium.
