Met a Sales Head this week who owns a ₹22Cr target. Here is what he controls:
The number
₹22Cr. Reported monthly. Explained quarterly. Reviewed annually — usually in a conversation about whether he stays.
Anything that produces it
- — Cannot approve a discount above 5%
- — Has no budget to spend
- — Cannot hire people he actually wants
- — Spends 75% of his time in meetings that are not sales
He owns the number. He doesn't own anything that produces it
This is not a performance problem. It is a design problem. And it will survive every Sales Head hired into it.
The ten-minute test
If you have a Sales Head, run this now. It takes ten minutes and the answer will be unambiguous.
The Authority Audit
List the five decisions that most affect your revenue number
These are the ones I typically see in founder-led B2B companies. Your list may differ slightly — the exercise is to name them specifically, not to use mine:
- → Discount approval beyond the standard rate
- → Pricing exceptions for strategic accounts
- → Territory and account allocation within the team
- → Alignment and working rhythm with the marketing team
- → Who gets hired into the sales function
- → Who gets moved out of it
Next to each one, write the name of the person who can make that call without asking anyone
Not who approves it. Not who it goes to after. Who can make the decision and act on it — without escalating upward first.
Count how many times your name appears
Twice or fewer
Your Sales Head is running sales. The role is designed to produce the number.
More than twice
Your Sales Head is reporting on sales. You are still running it.
Why this matters more than most founders realise
A Sales Head hired into a role without decision-making authority develops a specific set of compensating behaviours over time. He becomes very good at explaining why the number moved. He gets skilled at presenting pipeline in a way that buys time. He learns which conversations with the founder produce approval and steers toward those.
None of these behaviours produce revenue. All of them look like performance problems from the outside.
A man who can't change the inputs can only explain the outputs
The result is a cycle that repeats with every hire into the role. A new Sales Head joins. He spends the first three months understanding the constraints. He spends the next six working around them. By month nine, he is explaining a forecast miss — and the founder is wondering whether the hire was right.
The hire was fine. The role was the problem.
The fix is a redesign, not a replacement
This does not mean handing over everything. There are decisions that should stay with the founder — commercial terms beyond a certain size, strategic account relationships, the direction of the overall commercial strategy. The question is not "does the founder let go of everything" — it is "are the five decisions closest to revenue production owned by the person accountable for the revenue?"
Define the authority in writing. Not in principle — in a document that both sides have read and agreed to. Discount band the Sales Head can approve without escalation. Hiring decisions where his recommendation is the decision. Marketing alignment where he owns the working relationship.
When the authority matches the accountability, the Sales Head stops explaining the output and starts changing the inputs. That is what running sales actually looks like.