Head of Sales vs VP of Sales: Which Title Fits Your First Sales Leader

What Is the Difference Between a Head of Sales and a VP of Sales?

A head of sales runs the selling. A VP of sales designs the organization that does it. The head of sales carries a number, closes deals and coaches a few sellers through a process they wrote. The VP of sales leads the managers who coach the sellers, and decides how the team is built, hired, paid and forecast. At a small company the two jobs blur, which is why founders treat them as one seat with two names. They split the moment the team needs a second layer, because someone then has to stop selling and start designing.

Compare them on three things:

• How much they sell. A head of sales closes a real share of the number. A VP of sales joins a few large deals as the senior sponsor and carries no quota.
• Who reports to them. Sellers report to a head of sales. Managers or directors report to a VP.
• What they design. A head of sales writes the process and runs it. A VP designs the structure, the hiring plan, the pay plan and the forecast.

What Each Title Means

Sales titles drift because nothing fixes them. A young company picks the title that wins the candidate, a large company picks the one that fits its ladder, and people moving between the two carry the title with them but not the scope. Read each title below as a description of the work, and check the work when you read a candidate's history.

Head of Sales

A head of sales is a player and a coach. They carry a personal number, close some of the largest deals themselves and coach two to five sellers on the rest. They also write the process down: the stages a deal moves through, what has to be true to move it forward, and what a good first call covers. In most B2B companies this is the first senior sales seat, and it exists because the founder can no longer do all the selling. The hard part of handing the founder's deals to a seller is that the founder's way of selling lives in their head. A head of sales turns it into something a new seller can learn.

The scope is narrow on purpose. A head of sales does not redesign the team or present the forecast to a board. Their job is to make the current team hit its number and prove the process works, so the next hire has something to scale.

Director of Sales

A director of sales runs a team against a plan someone else set. The target, the territories, the pay plan and the hiring budget arrive from above, usually from a VP of sales. The director turns that plan into results through people: coaching managers or senior sellers, running the weekly pipeline review, catching slipping deals early and reporting what is real.

A good director is an operator, not a designer. They are judged on whether the team delivered, not on whether the plan was right. That makes the seat valuable in a company with a plan, and a trap in one without. Hire a director to report straight to the founder, with no structure, quotas or forecast method in place, and they have two bad options. They can build those things without the authority to make them stick, or wait for the founder to do it. Hire a director when a VP or head of sales sits above them, or when you are ready to write the plan yourself.

VP of Sales

A VP of sales designs the sales organization and leads the people who run it. They decide how the team is split, by region, customer size or product. They set the hiring plan and the profile of each seat, design the pay plan with finance, and own the forecast that goes to the CEO and the board. Their direct reports are managers or directors, not sellers.

Much of the job is redesign. In a 2024 Gartner survey of 234 senior sales leaders, sales organizations ran four transformations on average in two years, and only 11 percent drove commercial success while doing it. The same survey found that firms that simplified their seller roles were 4.5 times more likely to be top performers. That is the VP's real work: changing the structure without losing the quarter.

So hire a VP when you need the design, not when you need more deals closed. Give a VP a job that is mostly selling and coaching four people, and they will either do a head of sales job under a bigger title or start redesigning a team too small to need it.

Head of Sales vs VP of Sales vs Director of Sales, Side by Side

The three titles differ less in seniority than in what each one designs, runs and answers for. Here is how the work usually divides.

Read a column top to bottom and you have the core of a job description. Read across a row and ask which column your hire will be in a year from now. That answer is a better guide to the title than the one the candidate held last.

Is a Head of Sales Higher Than a VP?

Not as a rank. "Head of" means the top of a function wherever that function sits. At a 20-person company, the head of sales is the most senior sales leader and nobody sits above them but the CEO. At a 2,000-person company, a head of sales for one region or product line can sit two levels below a VP. The title says the person runs the whole of something. It does not say how big the something is.

The usual ladder changes with company size. The table below is illustrative: the pattern is common, not fixed.

Inside one company the order is usually sales manager, director, VP, then a chief sales officer or chief revenue officer. A chief revenue officer has a wider remit that takes in marketing and retention, which is why the step from VP to CRO is a change of job, not a raise in rank. When a candidate calls head of sales a step down from VP, ask what the seat owns. The answer settles it faster than the title.

What the Tenure Data Says About Each Title

VPs of sales stay in the seat longest. In a 2026 study of 166,654 top sales seats, VPs of sales lasted a median 35 months and heads of sales 26. The seats were held by 143,761 people at companies with 10 or more staff in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and started between 2015 and 2025. Across all titles the median was 32 months, and 72.4 percent of leaders were still in the seat at 18 months.

The gap is not just a matter of company size. When the study held company age, size, start year and country fixed, heads of sales left 36 percent faster than VPs and chief revenue officers 25 percent faster. The study covered only the top sales seat, so directors are not in it.

Company age matters too, and the spread is wider than for title. Top sales leaders at companies under five years old lasted a median 24 months, rising to 25 at five to nine years and 29 at 10 to 19. At companies 20 years or older, they lasted 41.

Two more findings are worth having in mind when you write the offer. First-time leaders lasted 35 months and repeat leaders 27, so a long list of past top seats is no sign someone will stay. And across 22,054 companies that lost their only sales leader, headcount ran about 10 percent behind similar companies four quarters later.

None of this shows cause. The study is a comparison, not an experiment, and a company in decline, or one being acquired, would show the same pattern. Still, the pattern fits a plausible reading. A head of sales title often marks a seat whose scope was never settled, so it gets redefined as the company grows, and the person in it is either stretched past the job or replaced by a VP. A VP title usually arrives with a defined remit and a plan to run. Read that way, the number is an argument for settling the scope before you settle the title.

Which Title Fits Your First Senior Sales Hire

Pick the title from the job the person will be doing in 12 months. Four questions decide it, and the answers usually point to one column.

Then read the pattern:

• Mostly the first column: the title is head of sales, even if the candidate has held a VP title before. This is the answer for most first senior sales hires.
• Selling now, designing within the year: hire a head of sales and write a path to VP into the offer, with the conditions that trigger it.
• Running someone else's plan: a director, but only if that someone exists. If the plan's author would be you, make sure you have the time to write it and keep it current.
• Mostly the last column: a VP, with managers in place or planned within the year and a board or buyer who will hear the forecast from them.

Timing matters as much as the title. A VP hired before the point where a VP of sales has a team and a process to lead spends the first year doing a head of sales job, and the title you promised starts to work against you. They feel underused, and the sellers they were meant to lead are not there yet.

When the four answers split across all three columns, the problem is rarely the candidate. It usually means the company has not decided what sales should look like a year from now, and deciding which sales seat to fill next and what it owns has to come before the offer, not after it.

Do this: write the four answers down for the job as it will be in 12 months, then put them in the offer as the scope, above the title.

Do this: ask every finalist the same four questions about their last role. Where their answers differ from yours, you have found what the job will teach them, or what it will not let them do.

Changing the Title as the Company Grows

The first title will change. Decide now how it will change. There are three paths, and each one needs something true before it works and something written in the offer today.

The second path is the one founders least like to put in writing, and the one that does the most damage as a surprise. A head of sales who signed knowing a VP might come can plan for it. One who learns it from a job posting has every reason to leave, and the process knowledge leaves with them.

Promotion from within works best when the person built the team they now lead. Testing whether a candidate built a team or inherited one matters just as much for an internal promotion, because a team built under them is the best evidence they can design the next one.

Do this: add one paragraph to the offer that names the path you expect and the review date when you will decide.

Title Mistakes That Cost You the Next Hire

• A VP title used to win a candidate for a four-person team. The strong leader you need next will not join under them, and the one you have will resist anyone hired above them. If the candidate wants the title, write the route to it into the offer: the team size and results that earn it.
• Copying a large company's ladder. A ladder built for 500 sellers gives a five-person team three layers of titles and too few people actually selling. Use the fewest titles that describe the work, and add a layer only when someone has managers to lead.
• Reading a candidate's last title as their scope. A VP at a 15-person firm and a director at a 2,000-person firm may have done the same job. Ask how many people reported to them, who set the plan and who presented the forecast.
• Two people both called "head of". A head of sales and a head of business development will each believe they own the number. Give every number one owner and title the other seat to match.
• A director reporting to the founder with no plan above them. They were hired to run a plan, and there is none. Either write it first or hire the level that writes it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a head of sales higher than a director of sales?

Usually, inside the same company. A head of sales owns the whole sales function, or a whole part of it such as a region, while a director runs a team against a plan someone else set. In a large company, a regional head of sales and a director can sit at the same level.

What is the difference between a head of sales and a sales manager?

A sales manager coaches a team of sellers and runs their daily pipeline inside a process someone else owns. A head of sales owns that process, carries a number of their own and decides how the team sells. In a small company, the head of sales is often the only sales manager there is.

Is a chief sales officer higher than a VP of sales?

Yes. A chief sales officer is a C-level seat that reports to the CEO, and in larger firms VPs of sales report to it, often one per region or segment. A company with a single sales team rarely needs one, because a VP of sales already covers the whole function there.

What is the difference between a head of sales and a CRO?

A head of sales runs selling: the team, the process and the number. A chief revenue officer owns every function that produces revenue, including marketing, sales and customer retention, and answers to the CEO for all of it. A head of sales is often a company's first sales leader. A CRO rarely is.

Can a head of sales be promoted to VP of sales?

Yes, when the job has changed and they have changed with it. The test is whether they have hired and coached sellers who hit target, and whether they can design the pay plan, structure and forecast rather than just run them. Write those conditions in early, so the promotion is earned, not negotiated.

Final Thought

The right sales title follows from the constraint the hire removes. If the constraint is the founder's deal load, you need a head of sales who sells and starts to coach. If the sellers and the plan are in place but nobody has time to coach, you need a director to run the team. If the team works but its structure, pay plan and forecast will not carry the next stage, you need a VP to redesign them. Name the constraint first, and the title stops being a negotiation. That is the U of the UNLOCK Method: uncover the real constraints. Mark is a 6x founder with three exits, one of them a nine-figure PE rollup. As a fractional CRO, he takes the revenue seat, finds that constraint and rebuilds the sales motion around it, then hands the seat to the leader the company needs next.