Sales Leadership Search
Chief Sales Officer and VP Sales Search, Brisbane
You need a senior sales leader when growth can no longer depend on the founder, a couple of rainmakers, or heroic individual effort. The mistake is hiring somebody because they carried a big number at a big company.
What a Sales Leadership does in a mid-market business
A Chief Sales Officer or VP Sales owns revenue as a system: people, process, forecasting, pipeline quality and accountability. In South East Queensland's scale-up and mid-market businesses, the appointment is usually made when founder-led selling has reached its ceiling and growth needs to become repeatable.
The trigger
When founders and boards hire a Sales
The founder is still the best salesperson
Flattering, and a hard ceiling. Every deal that needs them is a deal the business cannot repeat.
The forecast is a work of fiction
When nobody can predict the quarter within a reasonable margin, the issue is discipline rather than effort.
Two people carry most of the revenue
Concentration risk in a sales team is the same as concentration risk in a customer base, and it is treated far less seriously.
New hires are not reaching productivity
Salespeople joining and quietly failing usually means there is no machine for them to plug into.
The assessment
What a strong Sales appointment looks like
- 01
Builds a repeatable machine. People, process, forecasting, accountability and pipeline quality, in that order.
- 02
Has sold at your deal size and cycle length, not one an order of magnitude away.
- 03
Coaches. The best sales leaders we place spend most of their week in deals with their team rather than in a dashboard.
- 04
Forecasts honestly, including the bad quarter.
- 05
Does not need a huge brand and an army of support behind them. If they do, they are probably not right for a 100-person business.
Sales compensation in South East Queensland
Total package ranges drawn from our own Queensland search data, reviewed quarterly. Equity, options and carried interest sit outside these figures unless noted.
Sales Manager or Head of Sales
Total package including on-target commission. Player-coach in most cases.
$160,000 to $210,000
VP Sales, scale-up
Base plus on-target earnings, usually a 60/40 or 70/30 split.
$230,000 to $320,000
Chief Sales or Chief Revenue Officer
Executive appointment carrying marketing or customer success alongside sales in many cases.
$300,000 to $420,000
Fractional or advisory
Common while the business builds process before hiring the permanent leader.
$1,400 to $2,200 per day
Ranges come from our Queensland search data, reviewed quarterly. Total packages exclude equity, options and carried interest unless noted.
The Queensland market
What we see in the Sales market here
The single most common failure pattern in this discipline is the enterprise sales leader who inherited brand, marketing, pre-sales and a category-leading product, then moves into a business with none of those things. The number they carried says very little about what they built.
Brisbane's genuine scale-up sales leadership pool is small. We regularly widen searches interstate, and relocation works well in this discipline because good sales leaders travel to their market anyway.
Incentive design matters as much as the appointment. We have watched strong sales leaders fail because the plan rewarded closing volume in a business that needed contract quality.
Questions we are asked
Sales hiring questions, answered
When the constraint is repeatability rather than effort. If growth depends on the founder being in the room, or if new salespeople keep failing to reach productivity, the business needs someone whose job is building the system rather than closing the next deal.
Hire a VP Sales when the problem is the sales function itself. A Chief Revenue Officer makes sense when marketing, sales and customer success are pulling in different directions and one accountable owner would resolve it. Appointing a CRO before the sales machine exists usually just moves the problem up a level.
Our South East Queensland data shows VP Sales packages between $230,000 and $320,000 at on-target earnings, Chief Sales and Chief Revenue Officer appointments between $300,000 and $420,000, and Head of Sales roles between $160,000 and $210,000 including commission.
Sometimes, and it needs testing carefully. We look for evidence of what the person built rather than what they carried, and for a period where they operated without brand, pre-sales support and a marketing engine behind them. That is the part that decides whether the move works.
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