What Does a VP of Sales Actually Do?

Ask five Ontario owners what does a VP of Sales do, and you will hear five answers that mostly describe a very senior salesperson. He closes the big accounts. He jumps on the deals the reps cannot land. He is the one in the room when the whale is on the line.

Grant the fair part. A VP of Sales can sell, and sometimes should, especially in a small company where everyone carries a bit of the bag. I have carried a team's quota myself, so I am not going to pretend selling is beneath the role.

But here is the hidden problem. If the honest answer to what a VP of Sales does is "closes the biggest deals," you did not hire a VP of Sales. You gave your best closer a title and a raise, and you are about to discover that closing deals and building a sales organization are two different jobs that happen to share a vocabulary.

So what does a VP of Sales do all day?

The real job is building and running the system that makes selling repeatable without him in the room. Strip it down and it is six things.

Strategy and go-to-market. Deciding which segments, which products, which channels, and what the number should even be. This is the work that sets the direction for everyone below.

Team design and hiring. Deciding how many reps, in what roles, in what territories, and then hiring and keeping them. The VP owns the shape of the team, not just its results.

Forecasting and pipeline discipline. Producing a forecast the executive table and the bank can trust, which means an honest pipeline and a process that does not rely on one person's optimism.

Compensation and territory design. Building comp plans and territories that pull the behaviour you want, because reps do what they are paid to do, not what the mission statement says.

Coaching and development. Making the existing team better rather than replacing it, which is where most of the durable gains actually live.

Cross-functional leadership. Fighting the necessary fights with marketing over lead quality and with operations over delivery, so that sales is not quietly sabotaged downstream.

Notice how little of that is "close the deal." The VP's output is a team and a system that close deals, which is a different thing entirely. For the altitude distinction between this role and the ones below it, see VP of Sales vs sales director vs sales manager.

Why does the "senior rep with a title" version fail?

Because the two jobs reward opposite instincts. A great rep is rewarded for doing it himself, right now, better than anyone else. A great VP is rewarded for getting other people to do it well without him. Promote the instinct that made someone a great rep into a leadership seat and you often get a leader who hoards the best deals, cannot delegate, and measures the team against his own numbers.

This is not a character flaw, it is a design flaw, and it has a name in the research. The best individual performers do not reliably make the best managers, because the skills that drive individual results are not the skills that drive a team's results (Benson et al., 2019). I will unpack that trap in full in a companion piece on whether to promote your best rep or hire externally.

The cost shows up in the team around him. Manager quality is the single biggest driver of how an engaged team performs, and Gallup's company research attributes a large share of the variance in team engagement to the manager alone. Put a reluctant or ill-suited leader in the VP seat and you do not just waste one salary, you suppress the output of everyone reporting to him.

How do you tell a real VP of Sales from a senior rep?

1. Look at what happens when he is away. A real VP has built a system that runs for two weeks without him. A senior rep with a title is the system, so everything stalls the moment he takes a holiday.

2. Ask for the forecast, not the hero story. The VP work shows up in a reliable forecast and an honest pipeline, not in the one legendary deal he personally saved last quarter.

3. Measure the team's improvement, not his personal numbers. If the reps around him got measurably better, that is leadership. If only his own number is impressive, that is a closer. Fit to the leadership role, not raw sales ability, is what predicts whether this works (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005).

4. Define the mandate in those terms before you hire. Write the outcomes as "build, hire, forecast, coach," not "sell." Specific, role-appropriate goals are what drive the right performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). A clear leadership scorecard beats a résumé of personal quota attainment, which is the whole argument of the sales leadership competencies scorecard.

5. Hire and assess for the actual job. Because the VP job is system building, assess for system building, with structured, job-related methods rather than a conversation about his biggest wins (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).

This is the heart of what I do as a Fractional VP of Sales and HR in Guelph, Ontario. When I run a retained sales leadership search for an Ontario SMB between 20 and 500 employees, I am assessing for the engine builder, not the top closer, because the two look alike on paper and behave nothing alike on the job.

In short

What a VP of Sales does is build and run the system that makes selling repeatable: strategy, team design and hiring, forecasting, compensation and territory, coaching, and cross-functional leadership. Closing deals is a small part at best. If the person you hired mostly closes big deals himself, you have a senior rep with a title, and the team around him will show it.

Key takeaways

• What does a VP of Sales do: build the engine (strategy, team, forecast, comp, coaching, cross-functional), not personally close the biggest deals.
• The VP's real output is a team and a system that sell without him, so the honest test is what happens when he is away.
• The best rep does not reliably make the best leader, because individual and team skills differ (Benson et al., 2019).
• Manager quality drives a large share of team performance, so the wrong VP suppresses everyone below him (Gallup company research).
• Define and assess the role as "build, hire, forecast, coach," using structured, job-related selection (Locke & Latham, 2002; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).

Frequently asked questions

Should a VP of Sales still carry a quota?

In a small company, often a small one, yes. The danger is a full personal quota, which pulls him back into individual selling and away from building the team. If his comp depends mostly on his own deals, you have designed a senior rep, not a VP.

What is the difference between a VP of Sales and a sales operations leader?

A VP of Sales owns the strategy, the team, and the number. A sales operations leader owns the tooling, data, and process that support the team. They overlap on forecasting and comp design, but ops enables the engine while the VP owns its direction and results.

How soon should a new VP of Sales produce results?

Expect system and team changes in the first quarter or two and the payoff in the quarters after that. The VP job is leading indicators first, pipeline and team quality, then the revenue that follows. If you need a number saved this month, that is a rep task, not a VP mandate.

Can a VP of Sales run marketing too?

Sometimes, in a small SMB, under a combined revenue or commercial title. Be careful: the two functions fight over lead quality for a reason, and collapsing them can bury that healthy tension instead of resolving it. Combine them only if the person has genuinely led both.

References

Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085-2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022

Gallup. (2015). State of the American manager: Analytics and advice for leaders. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx

Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis of person-job, person-organization, person-group, and person-supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281-342. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262

Work with Ashley

Ashley Wesley, MA, CHRL, CIM, is a Fractional VP of Sales and HR based in Guelph, Ontario. He helps owners and leaders at Ontario companies with 20 to 500 employees hire sales leaders who build the engine rather than hoard the deals, through retained sales leadership search and selection. Start at ashleywesley.com.