Leadership Search
VP Sales recruitment
Retained and exclusive search for the leader who turns founder-led selling into a repeatable sales organisation.
300+
GTM placements over five years
40 / 60
Split of placements across the US and EMEA
25%
Of placements at executive-search level
10 days
Average to identify the ideal candidate after intake
The first sales leader is the appointment most likely to change a company's trajectory and the one most often got wrong. The usual failure is hiring for the stage the company wants to be at rather than the stage it is at.
Tipped runs VP Sales search for venture-backed SaaS and AI companies, as a mapped and confidential process rather than a shortlist of available candidates.
First sales leader, or the next one
A first VP Sales inherits no team, no forecast discipline and often no defined ICP. They have to sell personally, hire the first sellers, write the playbook and build reporting — usually at the same time. Candidates who have only ever managed an existing team through an existing process struggle badly.
A second-generation VP Sales joins an organisation that already sells and needs segmentation, management layers, forecast accuracy and productivity per head. That is a different person, and the search brief has to state which one it is.
What we assess
- Stage fit
- Where their success actually happened: ARR, team size, and what already existed when they arrived.
- Playbook building
- Evidence of writing a qualification and sales process, not inheriting one.
- Hiring record
- Who they recruited, how those people performed, and how many would join them again.
- Forecast discipline
- Whether they can defend a number and explain misses precisely rather than narratively.
- Personal selling
- Willingness to carry deals themselves for the first two or three quarters.
- Board readiness
- Can present pipeline and coverage to a board and withstand pressure on it.
How a leadership search runs
Leadership appointments run retained or exclusive: a defined intake with the founder and board where relevant, a mapped market rather than a database search, a longlist reviewed with you, then a shortlist with a written rationale and reference themes for each candidate.
Across our searches the ideal candidate is identified within an average of ten working days of intake, and we work to a shortlist of three to five genuinely appointable people rather than volume.
US and EMEA
A recurring version of this search is the first senior commercial leader in a second geography — a US company appointing its first EMEA sales leader, or a European company appointing in North America. That leader has to be autonomous, comfortable being remote from the founder, and credible enough to attract sellers to an unknown brand in their market.
Proof
Cursor
Tipped helped Cursor make its first EMEA sales hire, with the successful candidate introduced within seven days of the search beginning.
Read the case study- 7 days
- From search start to introducing the successful candidate
- First
- EMEA sales hire for the business
Selected clients
- Cursor
- Planhat
- Branch
- Unitary AI
- Sweep
- Anima Health
- FullStory
- Acoustic
- Optimizely
- VertoFX
Common questions
- When should a founder hire a VP Sales?
- Generally once there is repeatable evidence of product-market fit — several closed deals the founder can explain a pattern behind — and the founder's own selling capacity has become the constraint. Hiring before there is a pattern usually results in the leader searching for the message rather than scaling it.
- Is VP Sales search retained?
- Usually. Retained or exclusive terms are used where confidentiality, market mapping and committed capacity matter, which is nearly always the case for a first sales leader.
- Do you handle CRO searches too?
- Yes. Where the mandate spans sales, customer success, marketing and revenue operations rather than sales alone, the search is scoped as a CRO appointment.
Ready to talk about the hire?
Tell us the roles, the markets and the stage. You will get a straight answer on whether we are the right partner, and a market view either way.