Enable growth by moving the CEO from centre stage to supporting cast.

Once a Head of Sales is hired the CEO must focus on creating the conditions for repeatable sales success.

The CEO is typically the original salesperson, go to market lead and sales manager in an early stage business; the focus for all sales and customer related decision making. The stories of their success will be legendry and charged with emotion. The arrival and impact of a new Head of Sales can be a challenging time for the business, often requiring a change of focus and behaviour from the leadership team.

Here are four high impact tasks the CEO takes on to support their Head of Sales deliver sales results.

Invest in the sales agenda

The Head of Sales is now accountable for delivering the numbers, but many factors influence the scale and speed of success. The business has demonstrated it can solve valuable customer problems and celebrated early customer wins but now the expectation is that customer wins are easily repeatable, and success is predictable. The stakes have grown.

Hiring a Head of Sales is a confident move but the hire will not deliver sales success single handed. The CEO must actively champion the sales plan and invest money and resources into onboarding programmes, coaching modules, sales tools, pre and post-sales support with the intention of setting and maintaining the highest standards of performance.

The CEO must work with the Head of Sales to identify or refine the preferred sales process and methodology, then support the recognition and adoption of both across the whole business. Clear and consistent messages are needed to promote understanding and alignment, backed by the CEOs personal intervention where there are ‘man made’ blockages. The Head of Sales will have the experience, resilience and skills to deal with such roadblocks, but the point is for the business to have a single plan which is clearly sponsored by the CEO.

Define performance indicators and reporting

The Head of Sales and CEO must quickly agree targets and milestones to track both leading and lagging performance indicators that recognise the realities of current capabilities and resources. These should be the cornerstones of the sales narrative as well as calling out where course correction is needed.

It’s important to be clear where performance data will come from, when and in what format. It’s likely that early stage business performance reporting and inspection will have been rudimentary but the CEO, driven by rising salary costs and the added interest of the board, will want to inspect past performance, pipeline and forecast, and the effectiveness of individual resources and campaigns. If the Head of Sales is accountable for performance they must have the tools to track and report efficiently.

The CEO may well be enthused by their own sales achievements and many become frustrated that primary hires don’t perform to the same level but stop short of recognising that the role and associated expectations have changed gear. There is no benefit to standing on the side lines demanding to know why sales haven’t doubled yet. Instead, the CEO can double down on learnings and insights and ensure they are acted upon in the days and weeks that follow.

Super charge the engagement strategy

Sales centric CEOs enjoy immersing themselves in customer challenges and aspirations. It’s where the best ideas are born. The CEO must recognise they are now in the role of envoy or special agent and not sales rep.

The Head of Sales should direct the CEO towards engagements where they can make the biggest difference including the delivery of specific messages or asking of specific questions. They are now an enabler of a sales engagement strategy. The CEO can also be an excellent resource for the development of references.

The biggest value comes from using the CEOs executive access to identify themes and challenges in the customer business that can be positively developed or risks that need to be mitigated. They might also be able to use this extra layer of understanding to differentiate the vendor either by their behaviour or their proposition. The best salespeople will take advantage of the added discovery and storytelling firepower they now have onboard.

The Head of Sales should encourage the CEO to join deal and account reviews. The CEO might fear their presence will cause sales reps to reign in their contributions or dilute their imagination in deference to their presence. This is rubbish! Sales reps should be comfortable engaging at that level and their ideas should be sufficiently robust to withstand exec level scrutiny. If they are not, then new questions must asked. The CEOs contribution should be that of a support act, contributing from a position of service with the ambition to enable wide scale success across the team.

Set the cultural cues

The CEO doesn’t define culture or present it back to the company as if it’s a coaching module. They must listen to the living, breathing worker bees, tribal elders and influencers, and recognise that they are the culture on every customer call, in every email, in every document, every hour of every day.

The CEO must create the cues and be the exemplar for the culture they want to be recognised by staff, partners and customers. It has often been said that culture is best defined as what happens when the CEO isn’t in the room and we can recognise in the most successful businesses that the adoption of language and the demonstrable beliefs and behaviours that drive initiatives, responses and attitudes are led from the very top.

The cultural cues that matter most to the Head of Sales and their team are those that create certainty and confidence. Sales success will depend on the salespeople, and the proposition they represent, being distinctive to their customers for all the right reasons. They need the CEO to be an active listener and seen to do what they said they would do with minimal obscure ‘management speak’ if things don’t quite work out. Clear values need to be established and pursued with rigour by the CEO. Terms such as collaboration are very much in vogue but are meaningless until the CEO is seen to promote the internal and external benefits, support qualified initiatives and course correct any misalignment that inhibits the customer’s ability to find, understand, buy or use the product or service.

Margin notes...

The theme here is not one of removing the CEO from the sales effort. It is one of challenging the CEO to create the environment in which numerous salespeople will be repeatedly successful. The best CEO’s I worked for recognised they needed to hire the best people in specific roles and support them to succeed and they loved being given instructions for where and how they could contribute to winning new business. Of course, a CEO will inspect and challenge any opportunity or request instinctively but, above all else, they want to win!

‍