Head of Sales vs VP of Sales: which should a SaaS startup hire first?

If your team is under around eight people and the founder still closes the biggest deals, you need a Head of Sales who will sell alongside them. A VP of Sales is the right hire for when you are hiring managers rather than reps. The titles get used interchangeably in job ads, but the roles are not the same job at a different pay grade, and hiring the wrong one for your stage is the most expensive mistake in this category.

What each role actually does

A Head of Sales runs a team of closers, owns the number, and still sells personally. This is the right hire when founder-led sales is capping out and the team is under roughly eight people. A VP of Sales builds the organisation: hiring managers, designing comp plans and territory structure, and operating at a level where the job is managing the people who manage reps, not managing reps directly. This is the hire for when you have multiple teams, or you've scaled past the point one person can coach everyone.

A CRO sits a level above both, owning all revenue including marketing, customer success, and partnerships, not just the sales function. That search runs differently again, because the candidate pool is small enough to map exhaustively and the decision usually involves the board.

Why the mismatch happens

A VP of Sales who has built teams at a Series C company arrives at a Series A company expecting managers to hire, a budget to deploy, and a playbook to scale. What they actually find is eight people and a founder who still closes the biggest deals personally. In our experience, most VPs hired into a Head of Sales job don't last a year, not because they weren't good VPs, but because the job they were hired for and the job that actually needed doing were two different roles wearing the same title.

The reverse mismatch is less common but just as damaging: hiring a Head of Sales when the business has already outgrown founder-led selling and genuinely needs someone who can build sales infrastructure from scratch, rather than sell alongside an existing team.

The decision rule

Ask two questions before you write the job spec. First: is the founder still closing the biggest deals? If yes, you need someone who will sell alongside them, which points to Head of Sales. Second: are you hiring one rep at a time, or building a function with multiple teams and managers underneath it? If the latter, that's a VP-shaped job regardless of what the previous person in the seat was called.

Job titles in SaaS sales leadership are not standardised across companies, so the title on a candidate's last role tells you less than what they actually did in it. A candidate with a "VP of Sales" title at a 15-person company may have been doing Head of Sales work the whole time. Screen for what they actually built and ran, not the title on their LinkedIn.

What we screen for, beyond the title

Whether a candidate has built a team or inherited one is the first thing we check, since running a team someone else hired is a genuinely different job from building one from two people. We also check whether they still sell personally where the seat requires it: at Head of Sales level in a company under 50 people, a leader who hasn't personally closed a deal in three years is a real risk, however strong their management track record looks on paper.

What this costs

UK sales leadership compensation varies meaningfully by level and stage, and the two roles are priced differently because they are different jobs. For the current UK ranges by role, see our sales leadership recruitment page, which covers SDR Manager through CRO.