The question comes up in almost every strategy meeting at a young company : when do you stop selling yourself and hand the commercial function to someone whose job it is? Hired too early, a sales leader has nothing to structure and costs a great deal. Hired too late, they inherit a team already settled into bad habits and a founder who will not let go of the wheel. Hiring a Head of Sales is a question of timing, and that timing depends on specific signals.
In short
- The right signal is not a revenue figure but repeatability : does the same approach produce the same result with different clients?
- Until the founder has sold fifteen or so times themselves, they do not yet know what to ask of a Head of Sales.
- A funding round, founder fatigue or a competitor’s hire are false signals : they trigger premature recruitments.
- The profile changes radically with the stage : first salesperson, structuring Head of Sales and scale-up sales director are not the same job.
- In Belgium, the narrow domestic market often means internationalisation has to be part of the mandate from the very first hire.
The only signal that really counts : repeatability
Before delegating sales, you need to know what you are delegating. A company that has signed fifteen clients by fifteen different routes does not have a sales process : it has a series of opportunities seized by a convincing founder. Handing that to a sales leader amounts to asking them to invent the job, which is neither their mandate nor what they were hired for.
Repeatability is verified on four points. Can you describe your typical client in terms other than “companies with this problem”? Does the sales cycle have a roughly stable duration? Does the message that worked with client number eight work with number twelve? And do you know the two or three objections that always come back? Four yeses mean there is something to industrialise. Two noes mean you should keep selling yourself.
The five signals that the moment has come
- The founder has become the bottleneck. Qualified deals are waiting because only one person can run them. This is the most reliable signal, because it is measurable : count the opportunities waiting on their calendar.
- The message is stabilised. Positioning, demonstration and the answers to the main objections are written down and transmissible to someone who did not found the company.
- There are already one or two salespeople to manage. A Head of Sales with no team is a very well-paid senior salesperson ; from two people onwards, the management job genuinely exists.
- The addressable market exceeds current capacity. If your existing team can cover the entire reachable market within eighteen months, you do not need structure, you need a new market.
- Sales forecasts are systematically wrong. A company that cannot forecast its quarter within 20 % has a method problem, and that is exactly what a sales leader comes to fix.
The expert’s view
Our first call isn’t about validating your brief. It’s about challenging it. Most agencies take the order, go sourcing, and come back with ten CVs. We put the requirement back on the table first : is the role properly defined, does the scorecard hold up, is the market aligned with your range? If the brief drifts, so does the sourcing. This discipline isn’t comfortable for everyone, but it’s what’s kept us in business for 33 years in an industry where half of all firms don’t make it past five.
The three false signals
The funding round
A round finances a hire ; it does not justify one. Investors often ask for a rapid commercial ramp-up, and the temptation to hire a sales leader within three months of closing is strong. If repeatability is not there, the fresh money will pay someone to build a sales process on an unvalidated model. Public bodies supporting technology companies, such as those listed by Digital Wallonia, make the same point : validate the model before scaling it.
Founder fatigue
“I no longer have time to sell” is an understandable motive, but it is an organisational problem, not a sign of commercial maturity. A founder who delegates sales because they no longer enjoy it will hire badly : they will look for someone to take the burden away, whereas a good Head of Sales will, in the early months, ask for more of their time, not less.
The competitor who is hiring
Seeing a competitor announce the arrival of a sales director triggers fast, poorly framed decisions. You know neither their stage of maturity, nor the real mandate, nor the reason for the hire – which may be a founder’s abrupt departure. Copying a competitor’s calendar is the worst available planning method.
Founder-led sales : how far?
Selling as a founder is not a stage to get past as quickly as possible ; it is a source of strategic information. It is by selling that you discover why prospects say no, which promise lands, which segment pays more. A founder who has personally run fifteen full cycles can write a precise brief ; one who has run three will write a generic job description and be unable to assess the candidates.
Nor does the transition happen in one step. The pattern that works best : the founder stays present on strategic accounts and high-stakes negotiations for six to twelve months, while the Head of Sales takes over the process, the team and the forecast. That split must be written down, otherwise it produces exactly the conflict it was meant to avoid.
Which profile for which stage?
| Stage | Relevant role | What is actually expected |
|---|---|---|
| Model unvalidated, first clients | Senior salesperson, no management | Sell, test, feed back market intelligence |
| Model validated, two to five salespeople | Head of Sales | Structure the process, hire, forecast, manage |
| Fast growth, several markets | Sales director or VP Sales | Manage managers, arbitrate segments, build an organisation |
The classic mistake is hiring the profile from the row above or below. An experienced sales director from a large group, dropped into a company of fifteen people, will try to install processes sized for an organisation that does not exist. Conversely, an excellent salesperson promoted to team lead without management experience discovers a job they have never done. The distinction between these titles is set out in our article Head of Sales or Sales Director.
The Belgian constraint : a narrow domestic market
A Belgian technology company reaches the limits of its national market faster than a French or German one. The consequence for hiring is direct : the first Head of Sales frequently has to carry two mandates at once, structuring sales in Belgium and opening one or two neighbouring markets, usually the Netherlands, France or Germany.
That double requirement narrows the pool considerably. You need someone able to sell abroad themselves, to recruit in a language they master, and to manage a distributed team. On this kind of mandate the language question is not cosmetic : a sales leader who does not work in Dutch cuts themselves off from half the Belgian market, and English alone is not enough in traditional industrial segments.
Internal or external : promoting your best salesperson?
The temptation is real, and it has arguments : the person knows the product, the clients and the culture, and the promotion sends a positive signal to the team. The limits are just as real. Selling and making others sell are two distinct jobs : the first rests on personal performance, the second on getting results through other people. An excellent salesperson promoted without preparation often keeps selling, takes back their team’s deals and leaves the steering aside.
Internal promotion works under three conditions : the person has already shown an appetite for helping colleagues, they are supported by structured coaching during the first six months, and the company accepts losing part of its commercial output during the transition. Otherwise it loses twice : its best salesperson and its structuring project.
An objective assessment usually settles the question within days. In-depth interview, management role-plays on real company cases, driver analysis : the exercise does not indicate whether the person is competent – you already know that – but whether they will find in the management role what makes them work. That is exactly the purpose of our internal assessment practice, including for internal mobility.
Selling the role to the candidate you actually want
There is an asymmetry founders underestimate. The sales leaders worth hiring are, almost by definition, employed and performing somewhere else. They are not reading job boards, and a first-time management title is not what moves them. What does move them is scope : a market to open, a team to build, a product they can believe in, and a founder who will let them decide.
Which means the pitch has to be concrete. “Join a fast-growing company” is noise. “Build the commercial organisation for a product with forty paying clients, a 78 % renewal rate and no structured sales process yet, with a budget for three hires in year one” is a proposition an experienced candidate can evaluate. Vagueness at this stage is read, correctly, as a founder who has not decided.
The same applies to the numbers you share. A candidate at this level will ask for churn, cycle length and gross margin before accepting, and will interpret a refusal to share them as a warning sign. Companies that hire well at this stage treat the recruitment process as the first exercise in the working relationship, not as a filter to get through.
What a premature hire costs
The direct cost is visible : a sales leadership package, a possible severance payment, and six to nine months of implicit search cost. The indirect cost is less so. A Head of Sales who fails leaves behind a demobilised team, salespeople hired against criteria that did not match the real need, and a founder taking the function back a year later.
There is also a reputational effect in an ecosystem our size. The Belgian market for commercial leaders is small : a departure after eight months gets around, and complicates the next search. It is one of the reasons we would rather postpone an assignment by two quarters than launch a search on a need that is not ripe.
Preparing the hire before launching it
One further risk is specific to young companies : hiring a Head of Sales while the product cannot yet be delivered on the terms promised. The sales leader sells, the company cannot follow, the first clients complain, and it is the salesperson who carries the failure. Checking delivery capacity is part of the pre-hire diagnosis, even though it has nothing to do with the commercial function.
Three documents are enough, and they can be written in a day’s work. A scorecard : the four or five results expected at twelve months, expressed as verifiable indicators. A split of roles with the founder : who keeps which accounts, who decides what, for how long. And a package range validated by the board, including the variable share and, where relevant, participation in the capital – a subject governed in Belgium by specific rules, detailed in our article on structuring equity for a Head of Sales.
These three documents also serve as a test. If the management team cannot agree on the scorecard, the need is not ripe, and no search firm will compensate for that disagreement with the quality of its sourcing. We would rather say so on the first call than in the third month of a search, when the ideal candidate discovers in interview that the shareholders do not expect the same things from them. Once the hire is agreed, the next question becomes the landing : we cover it in a Head of Sales’ first priorities when taking over.
