Talent & Ramp
Hire the VP of Sales. Do not hire them into a vacuum.
The company has outgrown the founder selling every deal. You are interviewing. Someone asks whether you should fix the sales process first or let the new VP fix it.
Our answer is to diagnose and document the sales system before the VP starts, and to keep the search running while you do it.
A senior sales search takes ninety to a hundred and twenty days. A serious diagnosis of the sales system takes three weeks. This is not a scheduling conflict it is a sequencing decision.
Why these hires fail.
Published estimates put sales leadership tenure around nineteen months, down from roughly twenty-six a decade earlier, according to analysis Gong ran on sales leader turnover. Most of that research comes from technology companies rather than contractors, distributors, and manufacturers, so read it as a direction rather than a number you can bank.
Companies that have just changed hands show it most clearly. AlixPartners research, cited by Russell Reynolds in October 2025, found that fifty-four percent of portfolio company CEO exits happen within two years of a deal, and sales leadership usually turns over faster than the CEO seat.
But the pattern is not about ownership. In thirty years of building sales systems inside companies, we have rarely seen a first sales leader get a second full plan year, whether the company was family owned, sponsor backed, or still run by its founder.
The failure is almost never talent. It is the vacuum.
A new VP starts on a Monday. Nothing about the process is written down. The CRM holds a hundred open opportunities with no next step and no date. She owns a number and has no evidence for how that number gets made. So she spends six months doing archaeology. She interviews the reps, reads two years of old bids, works out why the company wins, and figures out which accounts matter.
That work has to happen. A three-week diagnostic does it faster, does it better, and leaves the company holding the result.
Then she gets judged on the quarters she spent excavating. Two quarters of discovery, one of building, one of results that land too late. That arithmetic ends more tenures than any performance problem does.
The vacuum builds a system you do not own.
A VP hired into a vacuum builds something. She is competent, she is under pressure, and she will not sit still. But she builds it the way she has always built it, in the format she carries in her head and in her own spreadsheets.
It works. Sometimes it works well. And when she leaves, it leaves with her. You recreated founder dependency one level down and paid a base plus commission for the privilege.
The company should own the sales system. The VP should run it, improve it, and be measured on it. That distinction is worth about one leadership transition in lost time.
You cannot write the job description yet.
Without a diagnosis you do not know what job you are hiring for. You know you want a VP of Sales, which is about as specific as saying you want a truck. Three different people hide under that title.
The Builder. No system exists. The job is excavation and installation. Stages, exit criteria, account grading, CRM logic, and a weekly rhythm that did not exist before.
The Operator. The system exists and is documented. The job is running it with discipline, coaching to it, and holding the line when a senior rep decides the stages do not apply to him.
The Grower. The system runs. The job is scale. New territories, new segments, more reps, a layer of management underneath.
Most companies this size believe they are shopping for a Grower. They describe the role as taking the company from twenty-five million to sixty. Most of them need a Builder first.
There is a second problem underneath that one. Builders who want to operate the same system for four years are the rarest profile in sales leadership. Builders like building. Once the thing is built, plenty of them get restless and leave at exactly the point the system needed steady hands.
The way out is the same move. Build the system as company property before the hire, then hire the Operator you actually needed.
A scorecard turns the job description from a template into an evidence-based mandate with the top three priorities named. That does more for your candidate pool than another two weeks of sourcing.
Built but buried.
Most companies have more sales system than they think. It is buried.
It sits in the founder's head, in the order of questions he asks on a walkthrough that nobody has written down. It sits in an estimator's pricing instincts, which decide every week which bids are worth chasing. It sits in fifteen years of won and lost bids in a shared drive that nobody has read as a data set. It sits with the service manager who knows which customers call right before they cancel.
That is real system. Nobody owns it, nobody has written it down, and one retirement takes it out of the building.
So the pre-VP work is excavation rather than invention. Nobody needs to introduce a methodology to a company that has been profitable for twenty years. The work is writing down what already works in a form a new person can run.
Measuring built against buried changes the hire and the ramp. A company that is eighty percent built and buried needs someone who can operate and codify. A company at twenty percent needs a Builder who tolerates ambiguity. Those are different people on different comp packages.
And a VP who inherits documented judgment ramps in weeks, while one who inherits silence ramps in quarters. Same person, same salary, a completely different first year.
The CRM trap.
This is the most expensive mistake in the sequence and the one we see most often.
Many of these companies are mid-transition on an ERP or a CRM at the same moment they are hiring commercial leadership. Sometimes an acquisition triggers it. Sometimes the old system hit end of life, or the company outgrew the spreadsheet.
Whatever process exists at migration gets written into the new system's configuration. If your stages are undefined, the implementation partner defines them for you, or an operations manager picks the vendor defaults.
Then you pay twice. Once to configure the new CRM around the old broken process, and again to unwind it after the new VP tells you the pipeline data is unusable.
Stages and exit criteria are the CRM build spec, not an input to it. If your implementation is already scheduled, that is the strongest argument for running the diagnosis this month.
The questions to ask before you decide.
Ask these out loud, to more than one person, and compare the answers.
Can two people in your company give the same answer for what makes a deal eighty percent likely to close? Ask the owner and the top rep separately.
Would you bet a hiring decision on your pipeline numbers? Not a forecast conversation. An actual hire, funded off that number.
Who owns the revenue number today, and what happens the week after a miss? If the honest answer is that everyone talks about it, you do not have accountability. You have a meeting.
Is a CRM or ERP decision already in motion? If it is, who is writing the stage definitions that get configured?
If your top rep or top estimator gave notice tomorrow, what would you lose that nobody has written down?
Who runs the weekly pipeline review between now and the VP's start date?
What would a strong candidate ask to see in her first week, and could you produce it? Stage definitions, win and loss data, an account grading, and ramp time on the last three hires. Most companies can produce none of it.
That last question is the one that matters most. The document a strong candidate wants in week one is the same document that would have told you which candidate to hire.
The pre-work that sets a VP up to succeed.
None of this requires the VP to be in the seat, and all of it becomes an inheritance rather than homework.
A baseline scorecard across the six areas. Strategy and ICP. Process and Playbook. Talent and Ramp. Data and Systems. Comp and Accountability. Leadership and Culture. Score it with evidence before anyone new arrives, then re-measure at day ninety so the VP gets credit for movement instead of arguing about it.
Documented stages with exit criteria. Write them so a rep can recite them. Exit criteria are evidence rather than feelings. A scoped proposal delivered. A decision maker met. A site walk completed. If you cannot verify it by looking at something, it is not a criterion.
An honest account grading. Grade every account against criteria leadership agreed on rather than against last year's revenue. Decide which get coverage, which get a cadence, and which get left alone.
Win and loss data pulled and read. Two years of bids, closed and lost, read as a data set rather than surveyed after the fact. You already own the record.
The comp plan reviewed against the behavior you want. Most plans at this size pay for booking volume, and then leadership wonders why nobody protects margin.
A weekly rhythm leadership has already committed to. Pipeline review and coaching cadence, running before the VP starts rather than promised for later.
Hand a new VP those six things on day one and you remove two quarters of archaeology from her tenure. That is the return on the pre-work.
A documented system recruits for you.
Owners worry that a defined system will scare off strong candidates. The opposite happens.
Strong candidates have been burned by the vacuum before. They took the job where the mandate was to grow it, found out in month four that nobody agreed on what the company sold or to whom, and spent the rest of their tenure fighting for basic data. A scorecard, documented stages, and a weekly leadership rhythm tell a candidate that the mandate is clear and that the basis for judging her is written down.
We hand that pack to incoming VPs often enough that the reaction has become predictable. More than one has called it a Christmas present. What they are reacting to is the year they will not spend finding out what everyone in the building already knew.
A candidate who is put off by an installed system has told you something useful. Either he plans to rebuild everything in his own image, which is the founder dependency problem again one level down, or he prefers ambiguity because ambiguity makes accountability hard to pin. You learned it in the interview instead of in month fourteen.
This fails when leadership delegates the system.
One warning, because we have watched this go wrong more than any other way.
Systems do not fail on design. They fail when leadership stops showing up.
Hiring a VP of Sales is not the same as handing off the sales system. The VP runs the rhythm. Leadership still attends it. An owner who skips the pipeline review after week six has told the whole company what that review is worth, and no amount of process design survives it.
We measure leadership commitment before installing anything, because it predicts the outcome better than the quality of the process does. If you are hiring a VP so the sales problem stops being yours, the hire will not do that.
Run them in tandem.
Start the search. Do not pause it. Good candidates take months to find, and this work does not slow that down.
Run the diagnosis alongside it. Four weeks covers the interviews, a pull of pipeline and win-loss history, and a scored baseline across the six areas with leadership commitment measured next to it.
By final-round interviews you have a mandate instead of a template, you know whether you are hiring a Builder or an Operator, and you have something real to put in front of the candidate you want. By the time she starts, the archaeology is done. She leads in month one instead of month seven.
If you want to see where your sales system stands before you decide either question, the free assessment scores you across the same six areas in about five minutes. If the hire is already in motion, a fixed-fee diagnostic produces the baseline and the named mandate in three weeks, whether you ever work with us or not.