Before you hire a sales director, find out what they'd have to fix

Why do you want to hire a sales director?

It's the first question, and the one most often skipped. Are they replacing someone? Then who was there before, and why did they leave? Is it an expansion into a new market or line? Is there a problem nobody is solving? Or is it growth the current team can no longer absorb?

Each answer leads to a different recommendation. Replacing someone inside a system that works is a hire. Hiring someone to "fix sales" inside a system that doesn't exist is a bet, and usually an expensive one.

Five bets, and what each one assumes

How much does a sales director earn in the UK?

The average base salary for a sales director in the UK is around £78,400 a year, with a typical range of £44,100 to £139,300 depending on experience, location and employer (Indeed UK, around 1,200 salaries reported, updated 28 September 2026). Payscale puts the average base at £71,300, from 176 profiles (updated 14 February 2026). On top of base salary come commission or bonus, employer costs and the cost of finding the right person.

But salary is the easy part to calculate. What no job advert shows is the cost of getting it wrong.

What does a sales hire that doesn't work out really cost?

Beyond salary, a sales hire that doesn't work carries sunk costs that are usually larger:

• The talent you missed while you chose the wrong person.
• The training time, yours and that of everyone on the team who helped bring them up to speed.
• The data and context you gave them, which leave with them.
• The deals not won, the customers not looked after and the contracts not renewed while they learned, or didn't fit.
• The learning curve, which starts again with the next hire.

It's opportunity cost, and it hits time, the team and your customers.

What has to be in place for a sales director to perform?

For anyone to perform in any role, and a sales director more than most, there has to be a well-defined system:

• Rules of the game everyone understands. How work gets done, what gets measured and where to look.
• Clear, measurable and realistic objectives. Ambitious enough to make an impact, reasonable enough to be credible.
• A clear relationship with other departments, above all marketing and whoever delivers the service.
• Tools to do the job, starting with a CRM that actually gets used.
• A team, if they're expected to lead one.
• Clarity on what's expected in the first six months.

The most important item on the list is the system. A good sales director without one spends their first months building it, and doesn't always have the mandate to do so.

What does a fractional CRO do, and when does it make sense?

A fractional CRO (or fractional sales director) is an experienced sales or revenue leader who works for your company part-time, usually without being on the payroll.

It makes sense when:

• you're not ready to hire full-time yet, but you already have the problem;
• you want to learn how to work with a sales leader before bringing one in;
• you can access a more senior profile than you could afford full-time;
• an uncertain market argues against taking on the cost and commitments of a permanent hire for now.

It works if you can work with someone who isn't in the building every day: sharing enough information and accepting that they won't be there full-time. If you can't, a fractional is a way of postponing the decision, not taking it.

What can an agency give you, and what can't it?

Companies tend to expect two things from an agency: what they hired it to do, and whatever the company itself is missing. The first is reasonable. No agency delivers the second.

Agencies are specialists, with strategic capacity limited to their own field. A media agency won't solve a marketing problem. An SEO agency won't solve anything that isn't on the website or in the content. None of them will fix disorganisation between departments or indicators nobody looks at.

The other common cause of failure is never defining success. If the company and the agency measure different indicators, each can hit its own numbers while the relationship falls apart.

Should you outsource sales?

Outsourcing sales works in few sectors. It tends to work when:

• you accept a commission-based model, and fully variable pay works for you;
• owning the data and the know-how of your sales process isn't critical to your business;
• the person selling brings a book of customers you don't have, as in insurance.

In most B2B companies, the customer relationship and the knowledge of how you sell are too critical to leave outside. Outsourcing them means giving up control of the part of the business that teaches you the most.

System and person: the car and the driver

A system and a person don't compete; they need each other.

The system sets the rules of the game so people can work without filling gaps: business rules, clear objectives, procedures between departments so nobody has to improvise, and one place where everyone knows what to look at. People can't design the system they operate in; you can't be player and referee at once.

And a system can't do what people do: build relationships, sell consultatively, earn a customer's trust. It's like a car and its driver. You need the car to get anywhere, and you need the driver to make it move.

Three cases where the arithmetic decided

Cases from RevOps Studio diagnostics, anonymised.

A creative studio. To reach its original target through project work, the managing director would have needed around twelve times the selling hours she had available. Hiring a project manager would have eaten half the target profit. The decision was not to hire yet, and to give every account an owner and a follow-up rhythm. The hire was left for when cash flow allows.

A marketing services company. Hiring more salespeople would have sustained new business, which already worked, but wouldn't have touched the real problem: customers weren't coming back. Reaching the target by hiring alone, without improving repeat business, meant new business had to almost double that year.

A digital services agency. The owner ruled out hiring and chose to grow by buying capacity from freelancers. The diagnostic didn't challenge the decision, but it made visible what it assumed: a margin nobody yet knew, a quality control that didn't exist, and a growing dependence, because a single relationship could come to account for between 50% and 59% of the business. Outsourcing capacity is a legitimate bet if you know the margin at which you buy what you sell.

How do you know what the person you hire would have to fix?

It's hard to see from the inside. When you're in the thick of it, you can't see the wood for the trees, and every CEO has their own biases about where the problem is.

An outside view helps. A diagnostic of how your process, departments and indicators are doing tells you where the problems are, who they affect and how they can be solved, before you put anyone in charge of solving them.

It's even more useful when you've just taken over as managing director, or a fund has just bought the business. Getting to the information through interviews, digging around and working past the natural resistance to change takes months. In your first months, a diagnostic with numbers you can take to the board is a sound investment.

What if you want to grow without growing the team?

It's a decision that shapes the business, and it isn't all or nothing. There are moments when hiring is the best thing you can do, and others when hiring too early holds growth back and can lead to a cash squeeze.

The useful question is which part of the team to hire and which to outsource. That depends on what's core to your business, meaning what you need in-house to deliver value, and on the moment you're in. At launch, you may need someone in sales before someone in marketing. At maturity or scale, perhaps the reverse. And the sales side can grow variably, in line with your maturity and how established you are in the market.

Neither hiring everyone nor hiring no one: do it sensibly, weighing the cost and the consequences of each option.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a sales director earn in the UK? The average base salary is around £78,400 a year, with a typical range of £44,100 to £139,300 (Indeed UK, around 1,200 salaries, 28 September 2026). It varies widely by sector, company size and the variable part of the package.

What does a sales director do? Sets the sales strategy and targets, leads the sales team, manages the pipeline and the forecast, works with marketing and with whoever delivers the service, and looks after key accounts. To do that well, they need a system to work in.

When should you hire a sales director rather than a sales manager? A sales director answers for sales strategy and the overall commercial result; a sales manager runs the team's day-to-day execution. In companies with a small sales team, it's often the same person. Hire a director when the problem is direction, not execution.

What does a fractional CRO do? A fractional CRO is a senior sales or revenue leader who works for your company part-time. It makes sense when you already have the problem but can't, or shouldn't yet, take on a full-time hire.

Should you outsource your sales team? Only in a few sectors: when a commission model works for you and knowing your sales process isn't critical. In most B2B companies, the customer relationship matters too much to leave outside.

How do I know what I need before I hire? Find out where your revenue breaks. The Revenue Diagnostic walks your sales chain with your own data and tells you which stage fails, what it costs and what to attack first, in under four weeks and with a closed scope.