How to recruit a commercial leader who truly delivers results

Hiring a commercial leader is one of the highest-impact decisions a company can make — and one of the most frequently poorly executed. The profile seems obvious: someone who sells well, has "charisma," has already led teams. But the candidate who fits that description is not always the one who will deliver.

Many companies hire based on past results — and are frustrated when those results don't repeat. What changes? The context. The market. The product. The team. And above all, the culture.

The difference between a good salesperson and a good commercial leader

This is the first and most common mistake: promoting or hiring a great salesperson to lead a sales team. These are completely different skills.

A good salesperson excels at persuasion, managing their own pipeline, customer relationships, and resilience to rejections. A good commercial leader needs something more: the ability to replicate performance. They must know how to turn their own methodology into something the team executes, diagnose where each salesperson is failing, and create the conditions for the entire group to deliver more.

"The best salesperson is rarely the best manager. Forcing that transition without preparation costs both the leader and the salesperson."

The 6 criteria MyT evaluates in commercial leadership candidates

1. Documented — and contextualized — track record: numbers matter, but context matters more. Did the market grow, the product improve, the marketing team evolve? Or did they create results from scratch? Numbers must be investigated, not just admired.
2. Sales methodology: which process do they follow? Can they articulate clearly why it works? A leader who sells "by instinct" rarely manages to teach the team to do the same.
3. History of people development: who have they trained? Are there former subordinates who grew after working with them? This is concrete evidence of leadership ability — not just declarations of intent.
4. Tolerance for ambiguity: a growing company doesn't have all processes defined. The commercial leader must build while operating. If they need total structure to perform, they may not be the right fit for this stage.
5. Alignment with the business model: consultative B2B sales are completely different from transactional B2C sales. A profile that thrives in one context can fail in another — even with an excellent track record.
6. Fit with leadership: the commercial leader needs support, visibility, and strategic alignment with the CEO or director. If there is a divergence of vision or management style between them, the result is rarely sustainable.

How to conduct interviews for commercial leadership

The conventional interview — "tell me about yourself," "what's your biggest challenge?" — is not suitable for evaluating commercial leadership. You need to go further.

MyT uses competency-based interviews focused on behavioral evidence. Instead of asking "can you develop a team?", we ask: "Describe a moment when a salesperson on your team was performing below expectations. What did you do? What changed?"

The answer reveals the method. The absence of a precise answer reveals the absence of the method.

The executive search process for senior commercial profiles

The best commercial leaders are rarely looking for a job. They are employed, performing well, and only consider a change if the opportunity is truly relevant — both in terms of challenge and compensation.

Therefore, recruitment for these positions requires active headhunting: market mapping, consultative outreach, and a clear value proposition about what makes that opportunity different from the others the candidate already turns down every week.

That is the work MyT does. We don't post jobs and wait. We map, approach, and qualify — with the care and discretion that a leadership position demands.

The onboarding that defines whether the leader will stay

The hiring doesn't end with the contract signing. The first 90 days of a commercial leader are critical — and rarely receive the attention they deserve.

A structured onboarding for commercial leadership should include: cultural immersion, expectation alignment with surgical clarity, access to the team's historical metrics, one-on-ones with each member, and a realistic 30/60/90-day delivery window.

Companies that skip this process and expect immediate results frequently lose the leader before 6 months — and begin a new selection process that is more expensive and more time-consuming than the first.

The right hire starts before the position opens

The ideal time to define the commercial leadership profile a company needs is not when the position is open — it's before. When the company clearly understands what stage it's at, where it wants to go, and which competencies will be needed in the next phase, the selection process becomes more precise and faster.

This strategic people planning is what differentiates consultative recruitment from a transactional operation. And it's exactly what MyT delivers.