Sales Director Development
Your first time in the sales director's seat
In growing businesses, the sales director is often promoted from within. It is usually the best sales manager, someone who has earned it and whom the business trusts. What is easy to miss is that they have rarely worked under a sales director themselves. Either the role is new, or the person who held it before was never shown how to do it either. So they are asked to do a job nobody has modelled for them, in a business where nobody can teach it.
A pattern repeated in too many growing businesses
The skills that make someone a strong sales manager cover only part of what a sales director does. The rest, such as setting direction, working as a peer to the rest of the leadership team, shaping the function as well as running the team, and answering for the numbers at board level, has to be learned somewhere. Without anyone to learn it from, a capable person can struggle for a long time before anyone understands why.
When it doesn't work out, the usual answer is to bring in someone from outside, with all the cost, disruption and risk that comes with replacing a leader and starting again.
Learning the role from someone who has held it
I've held the sales director's seat, and I work alongside people stepping into it for the first time. We work on the real situations in front of you as they come up, from next week's board meeting to how the function should be shaped over the next couple of years.
Along the way we look at the patterns you have brought with you from the role below, and at the ones the sales function has settled into, so you can keep what serves you and grow beyond what doesn't.
The format, frequency and length are tailored to suit the business, the sales director being developed and the budget.
If you made the promotion
You chose this person for good reasons, and you want it to work. Replacing them would be expensive and unsettling for everyone, including the team they lead. Supporting them through their first year or two in the seat is usually a much smaller investment than starting again, and it gives them the one thing they have been missing, which is someone who has done the job.
A clear picture of the sales function
Sometimes it helps to see the sales function clearly before deciding where to focus. The Sales Map has a set of instruments built for that, and we may use one or two of them along the way.
Let's talk
Whether you are the new sales director or the person who appointed them, a 20-minute chat is the best place to start.