The Head of Sales resume,
and the plan it was measured against.
A Head of Sales owns a number other people close, and a plan agreed before the year started. The page usually narrates the year: a record quarter, a landmark contract, a patch rebuilt from nothing. What a chief executive reads for is the gap between what was promised in January and what arrived in December.
The org chart under the number
The title covers two structures. In one you run sellers directly, six to twelve of them, close enough to sit inside every negotiation. In the other you run managers, and the work becomes design — patches, numbers, pay plans, the model deciding who calls whom. Companies hiring for the second rarely interview somebody whose page reads like the first, because the two fail in unrelated ways.
Scope is the other early read. A national number, one market, one segment or a named list of buyers all carry this title. Give the geography, how many buyers were in play, and whether the carve was yours to redraw. Then say where each commercial decision ended: who set the numbers, who approved a discount past the threshold, and who decided a manager had to go.
The whole number you carried, how many people carried a piece of it, and how many layers of supervision sat between you and them.
Scope in countable terms: markets, segment, buyers in play, and whether the carve was yours to redraw or handed down finished.
Where decisions ended. Number setting, pay design, hiring, exits and discount authority sit in different places in different companies.
The kind of sale being supervised: first-time buyers at a stated contract value, growth inside existing customers, reseller-led, or a book coming up for renewal. They break for unrelated reasons.
What the forecast said
Everything below was written down at the time, in a system somebody else administered, and reviewed by people still contactable. That is the standard: a figure you would put in front of the same audience twice, including for the quarter that went wrong.
Delivery against the number you were assigned, and that number against the board plan. Assigned at 1.15x plan and landing 96% is a different year from assigned at plan and landing 96%. Only one leaves the company short.
Forecast accuracy across four quarters: what you called in week two against what actually closed. It is the figure used to decide whether the company can be planned around you.
Coverage at the start of each quarter and what you did in the ones that opened thin. It is where a leader's calls are exposed months before the result confirms them.
Win rate with the count of contested deals behind it, and how it differed across your two most frequent competitors. A percentage with no denominator and no opponent describes nothing.
Deal size and the time from first meeting to signature, for the year you arrived and the year you left. Both move only when a group changes how it sells, which is why they read as leadership evidence rather than luck.
Revenue kept and grown inside existing customers, reported apart from new business, because fresh names can mask a book that is leaking underneath them.
What a reference call would not confirm
Three sentences appear on almost every senior sales page. Each was true the day it was written. None survives a conversation with somebody who was in the building, because each returns a group result to one person.
“Beat my number every year, closing at 137% of target.” Set by whom, against what plan, and how did the other sellers finish? A personal percentage answers for one seat in a job made of many.
“Rolled out a new CRM and a single sales methodology across the business.” Tooling and vocabulary are not results. Say what stage conversion did afterwards, what forecast variance did, and how many managers kept running their own version.
“Closed the three biggest contracts in the business myself.” A leader who is also the strongest closer has a succession problem. Say what everybody else delivered in the same window, and who handles those buyers now.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Overachieved every year, closing the biggest deal in company history at $2.1M.
Ran three managers and 19 sellers against a $46M assigned number, itself 1.15x the board plan. Landed 101% and 94% across two years, with 13 of 19 above 90% in both. The $2.1M contract was 4% of the year, and no single customer went past 6%.
Restructured sales territories to improve coverage and drive growth.
Redrew 19 patches into 14 on account potential rather than postcode, moving 340 customers and cutting the biggest patch from 210 names to 90. Coverage at quarter open went from 2.4x to 3.6x, and sellers above 90% from 42% to 68% inside three quarters. Two people left during the change.
Managed the sales pipeline and provided regular forecasts to the leadership team.
Moved forecasting off seller confidence onto four exit criteria per stage. Week-two calls landed within 4% of actual in six of eight quarters, against a prior range of minus 18% to plus 11%. Slippage fell from 31% to 14% of the committed number, after writing $12M of qualified pipeline out in the first quarter.