Does your company sell software or professional services to sales directors, chief revenue officers (CROs), or sales teams?
Perhaps this includes some CRM software, sales automation, sales enablement software, or another sales technology (sales tech)?
If so, you've likely experienced these three marketplace realities firsthand:
- 83% of a typical B2B purchase decision -- researching, comparing options, and evaluating pricing -- happens before a potential buyer engages with a vendor. (Gartner)
- 70% to 80% of B2B decision-makers now prefer to make decisions digitally. (McKinsey & Company)
- “Thought leadership remains critical to customer engagement, but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.” (Edelman and LinkedIn)
The following post is excerpted from a webinar: How to Market and Sell to Sales Directors (Watch the Webinar Recording)
How Sales Directors Research and Make Purchase Decisions Has Changed
However, most sales software and professional services firms -- especially startups, scaleups, and small businesses -- are completely unprepared to confront this once-in-a-generation change in purchasing behavior.
In this post, you’ll learn about
- the State of Sales Directors, Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), and Sales Teams,
- how to compare chief revenue officers vs. sales directors
- the salaries of sales directors vs. VPs of sales vs. CROs
- sales leaders’ pressure to deliver repeatable, scalable growth
- sales managers’ direct reports
- coaching, feedback, and development responsibilities, as well as
- CROs’ sales careers and driving predictable growth
Compare Chief Revenue Officers vs. Sales Directors
So first up, when it comes to the state of sales directors, CROs (chief revenue officers), and sales teams in general, you have CROs responsible for all revenue generation across the entire company.
One of CROs' most significant challenges is aligning marketing, sales, customer success, and product.
Imagine being a pilot on a disruptive flight where everyone's just going crazy and doing their own thing.
Or imagine being an orchestra conductor, and everyone's playing their own song.
That's the challenge facing most people; a CRO role is all-encompassing.
And at a startup, scaleup, or small business, you often don't know what you don't know.
There's so much to figure out in a relatively short time.
Now, when you zoom in, sales directors get more tactical.
Sales directors spend a lot of time planning sales targets and figuring out the quotas for different levels of reps.
The plans cover sales development and closing, including different organizational tiers.
Sales directors often prepare forecasts and oversee lead generation and sales plan execution.
They also tend to spend a lot of time on recruiting. Sales directors spend anywhere from 25% to 50% of their time on recruiting -- incredibly important.
Sales directors should be spending a lot of time on talent development; that's an area of debate about how often that gets prioritized.
The Relative Popularity of Sales Leaders and Executives
When we think about the relative popularity of how people search online for the term sales director, sales leader, or chief revenue officer, by far and away,
Google Trends shows that there are way more people searching for the term sales director, compared to a very distant second sales leader, and Chief Revenue Officer, one level below that.
This is directly out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
How many sales directors are there worldwide in the US and in EMEA?
How many VPs of sales?
How many chief revenue officers?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator says about three million people in a sales function work at director-level seniority.
This data may not be perfect because some of that stuff combines self-reporting and inferential machine learning. But about 3 million worldwide.
Regarding VPs of the sales function, VP seniority, LinkedIn Sales Navigator says there are about 700,000.
About 690,000 worldwide in a CXO seniority within the sales function
About 270 worldwide and getting specific to those that have triggered the algorithm to recognize them as a chief revenue officer.
There are about 14,000 worldwide.
In some cases, there are larger percentages in the US versus EMEA. In some cases, there's less.
But you can see on a relative basis how many people in sales, professional sales, and leadership are concentrated in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or the US.
Sales Director Compensation is a Huge Deal
Another interesting thing to think about is the compensation.
We know compensation is a huge deal.
And designing a comp plan can be an incredibly effective way to motivate, depending on whether you get it right.
But a lot of people are super-curious about salaries.
And we know in the environment that we're in now, where many states within the US are starting to require disclosure of transparent salaries.
There needs to be more debate about how much of an honest foot forward companies are giving what some of them are offering a narrow, appropriate band.
Some say, "Oh, we pay anywhere between, I don't know, $15 an hour and $1.5 million", that you're effectively giving no disclosure.
But anyway, there are a lot of companies that track salary.
Job Board Salary Data for Sales Leaders
So Indeed, certainly is one of them (the job board). And Indeed, finds that a sales director has a base of about $96,000 in the US and a high of about $178,000 based on 7,400 responses.
For a vice president of sales, you see a base of about $163,000 and a total of $265,000.
The chief revenue officer had a much smaller number of responses.
However, it's showing a base that's lower to be a CRO than a sales director versus a VP of sales and a base somewhere in the middle.
The reason that number didn't quite add up.
The more responsibilities you take on, the more teams are responsible for, and the more you own all of the revenue generation for the entire company -- a lot more responsibility -- there's a lot more stress and pressure.
What It Takes to Be a Sales Leader and Sales Director
So how does Forrester Research see this?
“Sales leaders face myriad pressures, but at the core is a singular imperative: Have a sound strategy for delivering repeatable, scalable sales growth.” (Forrester)
Gartner has a slightly different take on what it takes to be a sales leader, a sales director.
“Sales managers are being asked to achieve the unachievable. Imagine you’re a frontline sales manager with 6 to 8 direct reports. You spend about 35% of your day in meetings, almost as much time reading and responding to 120+ emails, and nearly 10% coaching and giving your team feedback. Now imagine that learning and development says you should be spending four times as much time developing your people.” (Gartner)
Sales managers are being asked to achieve the unachievable, the impossible.
Imagine you're a frontline sales manager or sales director with six to eight direct reports.
What's the difference between a sales manager, sales leader, and sales director?
In many companies, it's a matter of semantics.
In other companies, it's very telling.
In a larger enterprise, there would be finer gradations between a team lead, a sales lead, a sales manager, and a sales director.
In a startup, scaleup, or small business, where there may be as few as two, three, or four people on the sales team, 10 or 20 people on the sales team, you typically have some level of tiering of leadership.
But there is a blurring line many times between a sales manager, a sales leader, and a sales director
But imagine you're a sales manager or sales director with six to eight direct reports.
You spend about a third of your day in meetings and almost as much time reading and responding to emails.
So another third of your day.
So you spend two-thirds of your day, like five or six hours, just going to meetings and responding to emails and Slack messages.
And nearly 10% of your time coaching and giving feedback to your team.
Now imagine learning and development, which, fortunately and unfortunately, in most startups, scaleups, and small businesses, there is no dedicated learning and development person...
A great process or system has often yet to be developed around sales.
But in larger organizations, you'll have a formal onboarding and formal learning and development function.
So learning and development professionals come down to the sales leaders, and they say, "Hey, you should be spending four times as much time developing your people."
So instead of spending ten percent on coaching and development, giving feedback, watching film reviews, and things like that, you should spend 40% of your time.
Almost half of your job should be developing your team.
Now, Salesforce believes that CROs have risen through a successful career as independent contributors only to face an entirely new challenge taking over every revenue-generating function for the business that drives predictable growth.
“CROs have risen up through a classically successful sales career, only to face an entirely new challenge: take over every revenue-generating function in the business to drive predictable growth.” (Salesforce)
Everything from marketing to sales development to account executives, onboarding, customer success, and product-related functions.
Everything basically that drives revenue
Learn More When You Watch the Full Recording
How to Market and Sell to Sales Directors (Watch the Webinar Recording)
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