Head of sales: what the role means, when to hire one and the first-year plan

This guide is for founders deciding whether to hire a head of sales, people offered the title, and sellers whose buyer is one. It explains what the title means at different stages, what the job involves in its first year, when to hire one, how the role is measured and paid, and the arithmetic that should shape the first plan. There's a job description template you can copy and a worked example from a SaaS company.

What "head of sales" means

The title has no fixed rank. It usually means the most senior person in charge of the sales team, but what that involves depends on the company:

The rest of this guide focuses on the first two, where the title is most common. Larger companies tend to use sales director or VP of sales for the same seat, and the sales director guide covers those roles.

What a head of sales does in the first year

1. Learn how deals are really won. Sit in on every live deal, read the notes on past wins and losses, and talk to customers about why they bought.
2. Write the sales process down. Stages, exit criteria for each, qualification questions and the handoff to onboarding.
3. Define who to sell to. Turn the founders' instincts into an ideal customer profile the team can build lists from.
4. Hire and ramp the first reps. Decide the profile, run the interviews and own the onboarding plan.
5. Design the pay plan. Quota, on-target earnings, commission rate and what counts as a booking.
6. Build the forecast. A CRM the team actually uses, a weekly pipeline review and a number the CEO and board can plan on.
7. Fix the pipeline sources. Inbound, outbound, partners, referrals: how many qualified opportunities each needs to produce.

When to hire a head of sales

Hire when the founders can describe how they sell, not when they're tired of selling. Signs you're ready:

• The founders have closed enough deals with similar customers that a pattern is visible: the same buyer, problem and objections.
• You can say roughly how long a deal takes and why deals are lost.
• You have, or can fund, pipeline for at least two reps.
• The founders want to spend their time on product or fundraising, and can still join key deals.

If none of those is true, a head of sales will be asked to find product-market fit through selling, which is a founder's job. The founder-led sales guide covers that stage. And beware hiring a VP from a large company too early: someone used to running managers with marketing and SDR support behind them may not want to prospect, write the first email sequence or close a $15K deal.

How a head of sales is measured

For context, The Bridge Group's 2026 survey of 158 B2B companies found 48% of account executives at quota, a median ramp of 6.2 months and 3.7 years of experience asked for at hire.

Head of sales salary

No federal occupation code is called head of sales: the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification lists sales director, regional sales manager and similar titles under 11-2022 Sales Managers, but not this one. Federal coding follows the work performed, and a head of sales does the work of 11-2022, so its figures are the best context. They aren't head of sales pay. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025:

These figures include commissions and production bonuses, not stock options or other equity. At a startup, ask how the package splits between base, variable and equity, what the variable is paid on, and the vesting schedule and size of any option grant relative to fully diluted shares.

Job description template

About the role
We're hiring our first head of sales to take [company]'s sales from founder-led to a repeatable team. You'll own new revenue, build the sales process and hire the team, while closing deals yourself in the first year.

What you'll own
- New [ARR / bookings] target of [amount] for [year], set together in your first 60 days
- The sales process, from first meeting to signed contract, written down and used by the team
- Hiring and onboarding [number] account executives in your first [months]
- The pay plan, the CRM and a weekly forecast for the CEO and board

What you'll do in your first 90 days
- Join every live deal and take over [number] from the founders
- Interview [number] customers about why they bought
- Present a first-year plan: hiring dates, pipeline sources and target

You'll fit if
- You've sold [product type] to [buyer role] at companies of [size]
- You've closed deals of [deal size] yourself in the last two years
- You've hired and coached at least [number] reps

Compensation
[Base range], [variable at target], [equity range], [location or remote]

Write the pay range into the posting. It may be required: New York, for example, requires employers with four or more employees to list a compensation range for advertised jobs.

Worked example: the first-year plan at a SaaS startup

Illustrative example. The company and numbers are invented to show the arithmetic.

Priya joins Shiftboard (shiftboard.example), a SaaS company with $2.4M in ARR, all sold by the founders. The board has pencilled in $2.0M of new ARR for the coming year. Her first job is to test that number against capacity.

She assumes each AE carries $600K of new ARR a year ($50K a month), produces nothing for three months, half for the next three and full quota from month seven, in line with the 6.2-month median ramp.

(An AE starting in month 1 produces 3 × $25K + 6 × $50K = $375K in the year; one starting in month 4 produces 3 × $25K + 3 × $50K = $225K.)

She recommends the middle option, so she can check the first two hires are working before adding two more. At 70% average attainment, the AEs book $1.2M × 0.7 = $0.84M. She and the founders close about $0.5M of existing pipeline, for $1.34M in total. She proposes $1.34M as the plan, not $2.0M.

Then pipeline. At a $30K average deal and a 20% win rate, $1.34M needs 45 deals and 225 qualified opportunities, about 19 a month. Founder-driven inbound produces 8, so 11 a month have to come from outbound. That's the case for an SDR or for AEs who prospect, and it goes into the plan as a number. For outbound at that pace, Bebop can build the account list from a plain description of the ideal customer and research each account.

What to expect in the first 90 days

• By day 30: has joined every live deal, interviewed customers and written down how deals are won and lost.
• By day 60: has a written sales process, an ideal customer profile and a draft pay plan; first hiring is under way.
• By day 90: presents a first-year plan with hiring dates, pipeline targets by source and a forecast based on evidence.

Bookings in the first 90 days mostly reflect pipeline the founders built. Judge the plan and the process, not the quarter.

Common mistakes

• Hiring a head of sales to find product-market fit. Selling can't fix a product nobody needs yet.
• Hiring reps before the process exists. Each rep invents their own, and you can't tell what works.
• Copying a large company's comp plan. Accelerators and complex splits make sense at scale, not with three reps.
• Accepting the board's number without the math. A target that ignores ramp guarantees a miss in month nine.

Next step: if the founders are still closing every deal, start with the founder-led sales guide and hire when the pattern is clear.