How to Manage a Sales Director: Change What You Ask
Selling@Zero Distance
You Didn’t Hire a Sales Director.
You Hired a Forecast.
Every Friday, same room, same hour, same meeting.
Years ago I was on a sales team that met its director every Friday morning. The agenda never changed. What’s the forecast. What are the risks on the forecast. What are the potential upsides.
Then, if there was time, a word about the team. Who was sick. Whether any big project was moving.
That was it.
Those meetings were boring when things went well. They were worse when things went badly, because nothing said in that room changed anything. We could explain why a deal had slipped. We could not talk about what the customer had actually told us, or what we would do differently on Monday. There was no slot for that.
It took me a while to understand why.
Every Friday afternoon, our director reported consolidated numbers to the CEO. Our meeting existed so that he could. It had no other purpose.
Here’s the thing.
Our director wasn’t lazy or incompetent. He was doing exactly the job he’d been hired for. The CEO had asked for a forecast, and he’d built a machine that produced one.
The confusion at the top
Most founders who recruit a sales director share the same picture of the role.
The director carries the numbers with the team. So the CEO uses them for what numbers are for: forecast, risk, visibility, decisions. Where are we. What might slip. What might land.
It sounds like management. It’s actually a reporting layer.
Follow the chain. The CEO asks the director where we are. The director asks the team. The team spends Friday defending a number. The number goes up the chain on Friday afternoon. Nobody in the chain has learned anything about a customer.
Two things are lost at once.
The CEO loses the field. Everything they know about customers now arrives as a consolidated spreadsheet, filtered twice.
And the director loses the room to do the actual job, because every hour spent producing a number to defend is an hour not spent next to a rep in front of a client.
What the job actually is
The role of a sales director is not to carry the numbers. It’s to maximise the team’s ability to perform.
Tim Gallwey, whose work shaped how I think about this, puts it as an equation: performance equals potential minus interference. A director who only manages numbers adds interference. A director who removes it multiplies what the team already has.
Our Friday meeting was pure interference. It took the eight most alert people in the company, put them in a room, and asked them the one question that couldn’t help them: how confident are you in your number.
Now think about Laurent, from the last article. The CEO who reached for a bonus instead of a question. He did eventually hire a director. The brief was simple: deliver the numbers. A year later, that director runs a Friday meeting exactly like mine.
Not because he’s a poor manager. Because the CEO’s question became his meeting.
Change the question, and the meeting changes with it
One thing before going further, because it’s the objection every CEO raises at this point.
None of this means the numbers don’t matter. The opposite. You work this way because the numbers matter.
A number isn’t produced in a Friday meeting, or in a spreadsheet, or in the CEO’s office. It’s produced in one place only: the conversation between a salesperson and a customer. That’s point zero. Every figure in your forecast is the residue of one of those conversations, and everything else, the pipeline, the report, the board slide, depends on what happened there.
So if you care about the number, you look after point zero. The forecast tells you what came out. It tells you nothing about what went in.
That’s the part most CEOs miss, and it’s the lever.
The questions a CEO asks the director are the questions the director has to ask the team. If the CEO asks for the forecast, the Friday meeting is about the forecast. If the CEO asks something else, the director needs different answers, and the meeting turns into something else.
So the way to manage a sales director is not to manage the director. It’s to change what you ask.
Before your next one-to-one, sit down with these:
1. What surprised the team about customers this month? If the answer is nothing, nobody is listening. Or nobody is being asked.
2. What have we learned about how they decide, and what has changed? Not pipeline stages. The real thing: who’s in the room now, what takes longer, what got easier.
3. Which rep improved, on what, and how do we know? If the director can’t name one, there is no learning system under the numbers.
4. What would the team say the real blocker is, and have we asked them? Then the harder version: what would the customers say?
5. Where were you in the field this month, and what did you see? A director who hasn’t sat in a customer meeting in four weeks is managing a spreadsheet.
Ask these and something shifts. The director stops arriving with a number to defend and starts arriving with things they’ve noticed. The Friday meeting has to change, because the Friday report has changed. And the conversation moves from short-term achievement to long-term capability, which is the only thing that moves the numbers durably.
The third possibility
There’s a version of this that works from day one, and I’ve seen it rarely.
The new director arrives and, for the first weeks, builds nothing. No new process, no new dashboard, no import of the system from the last company. They spend the time understanding the dynamics between three parties: the team, the customers, and the CEO. How each one actually decides, what each one is afraid of, where they pull against each other.
Only then do they start establishing a system. And they do it by aligning all three at once, not by pleasing the one who signs the paycheck.
Very few sales leaders are trained to operate this way. And very few CEOs have the patience to let them, because they hired someone to make things move and the first month looks like nothing is moving.
Both sides are responsible for that. The director for defaulting to the report. The CEO for asking for it.
The distance you’re maintaining every Friday
There’s a distance between a sales team and its own management. Most CEOs don’t see it, because they’re the ones producing it, one forecast request at a time.
Selling@Zero Distance™ treats that gap as a sales problem, not an HR one. A team that spends Friday defending numbers to its director, so the director can defend them to the CEO, has no one left facing the customer.
You didn’t hire a sales director to tell you where the numbers are. You hired one to look after point zero, the only place the numbers actually come from.
So, before your next Friday, one question is worth sitting with.
What’s the first question you’ll ask your director,
and what will it force them to ask the team?