Executive Search for Sales & Account Management Leaders

Sales VP searches move fast at the top of the funnel and stall at the bottom. Candidates are not hard to find — sales leaders are visible, networked, and often actively considering their options. Response rates to well-constructed outreach are higher than in almost any other function. The pipeline fills.

Then it empties.

The candidates who looked right at the resume stage fail the first real conversation. The ones who passed the first conversation don't survive the CEO interview. The ones who made it to offer stage decline or counter at a number that doesn't work. The search that should have closed in six weeks has run for sixteen, and the company is considering whether to restart or settle.

The problem is almost never the candidates. It is the brief.

What sales briefs get wrong

Sales leadership briefs conflate three different jobs that require materially different profiles.

The first is the builder. This is the hire for a company that has some revenue — maybe $2M to $8M ARR — mostly founder-led, and needs someone who can build the function from scratch. Team, process, CRM hygiene, forecasting cadence, hiring playbook. This person needs to be willing to carry a bag while building the system around them. Most experienced VPs of Sales with a track record at scale are not this person. They want to lead, not build.

The second is the scaler. This is the hire for a company that has a functioning sales motion and needs to grow it — from 20 reps to 60, from one market to three, from one product to a full platform. This person needs operational depth, manager-of-managers experience, and the ability to maintain culture and performance standards through rapid team growth.

The third is the fixer. This is the hire for a company whose sales org is broken in a specific way — wrong team composition, wrong incentive structure, wrong positioning in market — and needs someone who can diagnose the problem and rebuild without losing the existing revenue base. This is the rarest profile and the hardest to hire for.

A brief that doesn't specify which of these three jobs the company actually needs will attract candidates for all three and close none of them.

Account management as a distinct search

Account management leadership is often bundled into VP of Sales searches and almost always suffers for it. The VP who built a high-velocity new-logo engine is rarely the right person to lead a complex enterprise account management function. The skills that drive new logo performance — urgency, competitive instinct, short-cycle thinking — are actively counterproductive in an account management context that requires patience, relationship depth, and multi-stakeholder navigation over eighteen-month cycles.

When account management leadership is the actual need, the search should be built for that profile specifically — not appended to a sales VP search and assumed to be covered.

What closes a sales or AM search in 30 days

Specify the job precisely. Builder, scaler, or fixer. New logo, expansion, or both. Team size inherited, team size needed. Quota structure. CRM state. The two or three things this hire must get right in the first 90 days.

Outreach built on this brief reaches the right candidates with language specific to their background. It differentiates the role from the twelve other VP of Sales opportunities in their inbox. Response rates are higher. Qualification conversations are faster. The shortlist is smaller and better.

Majhi Group runs retained sales and account management leadership searches. The search assessment focuses on brief precision before outreach begins.

If a sales leadership search is producing volume but not closing, request an assessment.