Director of Sales

Career Area: Sales

Occupation Group: Sales Managers

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Director of Sales earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $102,651

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $107,552

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Directs and is responsible for performance of sales for an entire organization. May manage sales managers. Plans and directs sale of products or services to customers. Coordinates sales distribution. Establishes sales territories, quotas and/or goals for staff, and provides training for sales representatives.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Director of Sales is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Building Effective Relationships: Building relationships is about your ability to identify and initiate working relationships and to develop and maintain them in a way that is of mutual benefit to both yourself and the other party. Good relationships are the key to getting things done and are essential when your success is dependent on others.
• Planning: Working experience with the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve desired goals.
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Sales: Experience selling products or services to consumers.
• Sales Goals: Working experience of Sales Goals. Sales goals or targets are a specified amount of sales that a management sets for achieving or exceeding within a specified timeframe. Sales goals are apportioned among different sales units such as salespersons, franchisees, distributors, agents, etc.
• Budgeting: Experience planning how the financial resources of a business or department are to be allocated during the next business period.
• Business Development: Business development entails tasks and processes to develop and implement growth opportunities within and between organizations.
• Sales Strategy: A sales strategy is a plan by a business or individual on how to go about selling products and services and increasing profits.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Director of Sales that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Articulating Value Propositions: Working experience of Articulating Value Propositions. Value proposition refers to a business or marketing statement that a company uses to summarize why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement convinces a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings will. Companies use this statement to target customers who will benefit most from using the company's products, and this helps maintain an economic moat.
• Sales Calls: A sales call is a phone call made by a sales representative of a company to a person's home with the purpose of selling goods, services, etc.
• Enterprise Sales: Working experience of Enterprise Sales. Complex sales, also known as Enterprise sales, can refer to a method of trading sometimes used by organizations when procuring large contracts for goods and/or services where the customer takes control of the selling process by issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) and requiring a proposal response
• Market Planning: Working experience of Market Planning. A marketing plan is a comprehensive document or blueprint that outlines a business advertising and marketing efforts for the coming year. It describes business activities involved in accomplishing specific marketing objectives within a set time frame.
• Sales Training: Sales Traininginvolves the personal development of skills and techniques related to creating and exploring new sales opportunities, as well as closing sales for an organization.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Director Of Sales
• Sales Director
• Vice President Of Sales
• Head Of Sales
• Vice President Sales

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Director of Business Development
• Business Development Manager