Currently available for select engagements

Hire Sales Director — own the number for your segment

As businesses grow, one sales leader can no longer cover everything: enterprise needs a different motion from mid-market, regions need local leadership, and verticals need specialists who speak the buyer’s language. A sales director owns a defined segment — a region, a vertical, an enterprise tier — with its own pipeline, playbook, and number that rolls up cleanly into the company target.

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15+

Years Experience

100+

Projects Delivered

Countries Served

$25M+

Revenue Enabled

I'm Omer Muneer Qazi, a Dubai-based Fractional CTO & Solutions Architect with 15+ years of experience and 100+ projects delivered across 6 countries. I place directors who have owned segment P&Ls — not just carried a bag — and I align the CRM structure and reporting so segments stay comparable. If you need the architect for the entire sales org, start with a VP of sales.

What You Get

Segment ownership, done properly

Segment strategy and plan

A clear-eyed plan for the region, vertical, or tier: market sizing, target accounts, and the motion that fits — instead of running the corporate playbook where it does not apply.

Dedicated pipeline engine

Prospecting, qualification, and pipeline built specifically for the segment — with messaging and proof points that resonate with those buyers, not generic decks.

Segment playbook

Documented winning patterns for the segment: discovery questions, objection handling, competitive positioning, and deal structures that work here.

Team build or turnaround

Hiring segment specialists or professionalizing the existing pod — with ramp plans matched to the segment’s actual cycle length.

Cross-segment coordination

Clean handoffs and rules of engagement with other segments — so enterprise and mid-market stop stepping on each other’s deals.

Segment reporting that rolls up

Pipeline, forecast, and win-rate reporting structured so the segment number aggregates honestly into the company number.

How It Works

From segment audit to owned number

A structured engagement with no surprises — you’ll always know what’s happening and what’s next.

Segment diagnostic

We assess the segment’s real potential: pipeline history, win patterns, competitive position, and whether the current team and motion fit.

Plan and playbook

The director builds the segment plan and codifies what works — turning individual heroics into a repeatable motion.

Execute and hire

Pipeline building starts immediately while the team is shaped for the segment — specialists hired, generalists redeployed.

Scale the winners

Proven plays get scaled across the segment; the director’s number becomes one of the most predictable lines in the forecast.

Why Omer

Why hire a sales director through a Fractional CTO

Segment sales dies in bad CRM structure: one pipeline for every motion, no segment reporting, and forecasts that cannot be split. I configure the systems so each segment is measurable on its own — which is the entire point of having a director own it.

You get segment ownership with the infrastructure to prove it works. Get in touch to define the segment.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

When do we need sales directors instead of just more reps?

When different parts of the market need different motions — enterprise vs SMB, regions, or verticals with distinct buying processes. One manager cannot credibly lead three different sales motions.

Should the director be a player-coach?

At smaller segment scale, yes — carrying some strategic deals while building the team. As the segment grows, the role should evolve toward pure leadership.

How do you split credit between segments?

Rules of engagement agreed upfront: account ownership, handoff criteria, and split-credit policy. Ambiguity here causes more internal conflict than any competitor does.

What is a realistic timeline for a new segment?

One quarter to build pipeline properly, two to three quarters for it to become a predictable contributor — faster if there is an existing customer base to expand within.

Do they need to come from the vertical?

For vertical directors, yes — buyer credibility matters enormously in regulated or specialized industries. For regional directors, sales leadership craft matters more than local rolodex.

The hiring itself

How I scope, search and onboard when you hire a sales director

When you hire a sales director, the costly error is running it as a CV hunt. I start by writing the role to a number and a motion, not a job spec. I pull your closed-won deals, lost reasons and ramp curves out of the CRM, listen to a sample of calls in Gong or Chorus, and build a success profile from what actually wins in your market. That profile becomes a scorecard: the three or four outcomes this person owns in year one, the behaviours that predict them, and the deal sizes and cycles they must be fluent in. Hiring a sales director against a clear scorecard, rather than a vibe, is the single biggest determinant of whether the hire survives month nine.

I run the search as a structured loop, not a series of chats. Sourcing through LinkedIn Recruiter, warm referrals and targeted outreach; a chronological, Topgrading-style interview that walks every prior role's number, team and reason for leaving; then a working session where the candidate reviews a redacted deal of yours and runs a live pipeline inspection. I want to see them diagnose, coach and forecast in real time, not recite methodology. I back-channel references off-sheet, not just the names given. The red flags I weed out: leaders who only ever carried inherited pipeline, who conflate activity with progress, and who have never actually hired, performance-managed or exited a rep.

Comp and territory decide whether a good hire stays motivated or quietly checks out, so I design both before the offer. For a director I usually land near a 50/50 base-to-variable OTE, with accelerators above plan and a clawback on early churn, modelled in QuotaPath or CaptivateIQ so it is transparent. Quotas come from a bottom-up capacity model, segment TAM, ramped-rep productivity, coverage, not a number reverse-engineered from the board deck. I carve territories to be roughly equal in winnable pipeline so the plan is credible on day one. Good looks like a leader who can defend their forecast, name their top ten accounts cold, and tell you which reps to double down on.

The last mile is instrumentation, and it is where I spend most of my systems background. Before the director starts I tidy the engine they inherit: hard stage-exit criteria in HubSpot or Salesforce, MEDDICC or SPICED fields that are actually enforced, forecast categories wired into Clari, and Gong scorecards so coaching is evidence-based. I set a thirty-sixty-ninety plan with explicit milestones and a 3x pipeline-coverage target, so you know by week six whether the hire is tracking. The mistakes I repeatedly fix: promoting your best closer and assuming they can lead, hiring with no ramp budget, and measuring dials and demos instead of stage conversion and cohort win rate.

Who it's for

When clients hire me for this

Founder stepping out of the deals

The founder has sold every account personally and the pipeline lives in their head and their inbox. I help you hire a sales director who can take the relationships, codify the founder's instinct into a repeatable motion, and give you back the forty hours a week you are spending in demos.

First real sales leader post-funding

You have four or five reps hired fast after a raise and no one actually leading them. I define the role, run the search, and install the forecasting and coaching rhythm so the new director inherits a measurable team instead of a spreadsheet of guesses on day one.

Replacing a mis-hire

The last sales director looked impressive and never moved the number. Before you re-hire, I run a cold diagnostic of what went wrong, whether it was the person, the territory, the comp or the CRM, then rebuild the scorecard so you do not pattern-match your way into the same mistake twice.

Adding a second segment or region

Enterprise and mid-market, or EMEA and North America, now need different owners. I help you hire a sales director for the new segment, carve clean territories and rules of engagement, and wire the reporting so both lines roll up to one honest company forecast.

Questions buyers ask

What does it cost to hire a sales director through you?

I am not a contingency recruiter taking a percentage of first-year salary. I work on a fixed project or monthly retainer for the scoping, search support, assessment and onboarding design. For most clients that lands well below a traditional 25 to 30 percent placement fee, and you keep the scorecard, comp model and RevOps setup afterwards. I will quote a flat figure once I understand your segment, seniority and timeline on a first call.

Do you place the candidate or just advise?

Both, depending on what you need. Some clients want me to run the full process end to end, sourcing, interviewing, references and offer. Others have candidates in hand and hire me only for the scorecard, the working-session assessment and the onboarding plan. When you hire a sales director this way, you are buying judgement and a system, not a CV database, so I am equally useful as the lead or as the second opinion that stops a bad offer.

How long does the search usually take?

For a mid-market or regional sales director, plan on six to ten weeks from scorecard to signed offer, assuming we are aligned on comp and the role is genuinely fundable. Enterprise or vertical-specialist searches run longer because the pool is thinner and references matter more. I would rather lose two weeks getting the assessment right than fill fast and manage out a mis-hire two quarters later, which costs far more.

Can you set up the comp plan and CRM, or only hire the person?

That is the part most search firms skip and the part I am strongest on. I design the OTE split, accelerators and quota from a capacity model, build it in QuotaPath or CaptivateIQ, and clean up stage definitions, forecast categories and Gong or Clari reporting in your CRM. A sales director hired into a broken pipeline engine fails regardless of talent, so I treat the instrumentation as part of the hire, not an afterthought.

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

A VP of Sales owns the whole go-to-market number, strategy, headcount plan and often marketing alignment. A sales director owns execution for a segment or region, the team, the pipeline and the forecast within a defined lane. If you are below roughly fifteen quota-carrying reps, you usually want to hire a sales director first and add a VP later, and I will tell you honestly which role your stage actually needs.

Can you provide an interim or fractional sales director while we search?

Yes, for the diagnostic and stabilisation phase. I can run the forecast calls, inspect the pipeline and keep the team pointed in the right direction for a few weeks while we find the permanent hire, so momentum does not collapse during the gap. I am clear about the handover, though: the goal is to hire a sales director who owns it for the long term, not to make the interim arrangement permanent.

Currently available for select engagements

Give your best segment an owner

Tell me how your market splits and how it is covered today — I will scope a director role around the segment with the most untapped value.

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