How to hire a Sales Director in the UK, fractional or full time

Hiring a fractional Sales Director in the UK takes seven steps: write the gap down, set the budget from the published day-rate band, check fractional is the right shape, shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage, interview with the six questions below, agree the day-ninety markers in writing, and contract the days and the IR35 position. Most companies go from brief to signed contract in about two weeks. To skip the reading and meet people, hire a fractional Sales Director from the seat page.

UK day rates for the seat run £700 to £1,300. All eleven seats compared →

Fractional or full time: which Sales Director hire you need

A fractional Sales Director costs £700 to £1,300 a day, usually two days a week, which is £5,367 to £9,967 a month with no employer costs. A full-time Sales Director is a salary plus employer National Insurance and pension, and a retained search adds 25 to 33 per cent of first-year earnings. Fractional fits two or three days of judgement; full time fits five days of leadership.

Three ways to hire a Sales Director, compared
Route	Cost basis	Time to start	Commitment	Best for
Fractional	£700 to £1,300 a day; £5,367 to £9,967 a month at two days	Met within days, starting in one to three weeks	One to three days a week, usually a month's notice	Owning the Sales Director decisions two or three days a week
Interim	£13,417 to £24,917 a month at 5 days	Weeks rather than months	Full time for a fixed term, typically 3 to 9 months	Cover for a departure, a transaction or a turnaround with an end date
Full-time search	A salary plus employer costs, and 25 to 33 per cent of year one as the search fee	eight to twelve weeks of search, then three to six months of notice	Permanent and employed, five days a week	A five-day seat that is certain to be permanent

How a permanent search for the seat runs is on Sales Director executive search. The difference between the three routes is set out in full on fractional versus interim versus full-time, and hiring a full-time executive covers the permanent route.

Hiring a fractional Sales Director in seven steps

Write the gap down. Name the two or three things a fractional Sales Director must own in the first quarter, and how many days a week that is. Put the numbers in: average deal size, cycle length, rough win rate, and how many deals the founder personally closed last quarter. Good candidates qualify you the way they qualify deals, and a brief without numbers reads as a company without them. Below ↓
Set the budget from the published band. UK fractional Sales Director day rates run £700 to £1,300 in 2026. Two days a week is £5,367 to £9,967 a month, with no employer costs on top. Fractional Sales Director cost →
Check fractional is the right shape. A fractional Sales Director is two or three days a week for a year or more. If the need is five days for six months, or the seat is a full-time job already, interim or permanent fits better. Below ↓
Shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage. Read track records, not titles. The right operator has been the Sales Director at a company of your size and stage before, and says what happened there in numbers. Browse the bench →
Interview with the six questions. Every question asks for something that happened. An operator who has held the seat answers from memory; one who has advised from the sidelines answers in the abstract. Below ↓
Agree the day-ninety markers in writing. Put the day-ninety outcomes in the brief before they start. A documented sales process with stages and exit criteria, live in the CRM, with the founder's own deals running through it. If the founder's deals sit outside the process, there is no process. Below ↓
Contract the days, the notice period and the IR35 position. Fix the days a week, a notice period of a month, who owns the output, and the IR35 determination. Then set the start date and the first ninety-day review. IR35 for fractional executives →

What the seat covers is on the fractional Sales Director page. The rest of this page is the part that usually goes unwritten: the interview, day ninety, and when this hire is the wrong answer entirely.

Where to find a fractional Sales Director in the UK

Four routes work, and most companies use two of them at once. Whichever finds the person, the shortlist test is the same: they have held the seat at a company of your size and stage before.

A platform or bench with the rate on the profile. The day rate is visible before the first call, which settles the budget conversation early. The UK fractional platforms, compared.
A search against a written brief. Somebody else runs the longlist and the first interviews and puts a shortlist in front of you. How Operator Search works.
Your investors, accountant or lawyer. They have seen fractional sales directors work at other companies and know which ones they would have back.
Other founders. A Sales Director who has done it at a company like yours is usually two introductions away. Ask what they would hire them for again, not whether they were good.

Six questions to ask, and what a strong answer sounds like

Every question here asks for something that happened, not something they believe. An operator who has genuinely held the seat answers from memory; one who has advised from the sidelines answers in the abstract, and the difference is audible within a minute.

1. Walk me through the last time you took a company off founder-led sales. What did you keep from what the founder was doing?

Listen for: Strong candidates treat the founder's instinct as data: they watched calls, worked out why the founder wins, and wrote that into the process. Weak ones arrive with the playbook from their last company and install it regardless of what was already working.

2. Tell me about the last deal you killed. Why, and how far in?

Listen for: You want named qualification criteria and a real deal, killed early, with a straight face. Someone who cannot remember killing anything is running a pipeline padded with hope, and their forecast will be fiction.

3. Tell me about a sales hire of yours that failed. What did you get wrong?

Listen for: The strong answer owns the mis-hire: what the scorecard missed, how long they took to act, what changed in the next hire. If the story is entirely about the rep's flaws, they have not learned anything, and their next mis-hire will be on your payroll.

4. What makes a deal a commit in your forecast, and how accurate were you last quarter?

Listen for: Good answers name evidence: signed order form in legal, verbal from the economic buyer, a date. And they know their own accuracy as a number. Weak answers involve rep confidence percentages, which is astrology with a CRM.

5. Our average deal is this size and takes this long to close. What does that change about how you would run it?

Listen for: Fill in your own numbers. A strong candidate adjusts everything: hiring profile, activity volume, how much process is worth it. A weak one gives the same answer they would give an enterprise vendor and a self-serve product, which means they have only ever run one motion.

6. If part of your fee were performance-linked, what would you tie it to?

Listen for: Sensible candidates pick something they control on this timeline: pipeline coverage, stage conversion, a hire made and ramped. Be wary of anyone who ties themselves to closed revenue inside a sales cycle they have just told you is six months, because they are either not listening or telling you what you want to hear.

Red flags

Promises revenue movement inside their first month when your own sales cycle is longer than that. They have just failed the most basic test of the seat.
Wants to hire reps before listening to a single recorded call or watching the founder sell. Hiring into a process that does not exist yet is the exact failure they are supposed to prevent.
Talks sequences, dialers and tooling before asking your deal size, cycle length and win rate. The stack is the last decision, not the first.
Has only ever run teams with SDRs, RevOps and marketing air cover already in place. Your first sales hire will not have any of that, and neither will they.

What day ninety should look like

Agree these before they start, in writing, in the brief. A fractional engagement without a ninety-day marker drifts into a retainer nobody remembers the point of.

A documented sales process with stages and exit criteria, live in the CRM, with the founder's own deals running through it. If the founder's deals sit outside the process, there is no process.
A forecast they put their name to, split into commit and best case, with at least one month you can check against what actually landed.
Either a hiring scorecard and shortlist for the first rep, or a written case for why hiring now would fail. Both are good outcomes. Silence on the question is not.

When a fractional Sales Director is the wrong answer

You have fewer than ten paying customers. There is no pattern to systematise yet, and the founder selling badly teaches you more right now than a director organising it would. This is founder work.
You need someone carrying a quota and closing deals themselves every day. That is a salesperson, full-time, and probably costs less. A fractional director builds the machine; they are not the engine.
Deals die at the same point because nobody can say why your product beats the alternative. That is a positioning problem, and it belongs to marketing or product. More sales process just documents the losses more neatly.

If one of those is you, say so in a brief anyway and we will tell you straight. Sometimes the honest answer is interim or full-time.

What to put in a fractional Sales Director brief

Put the numbers in: average deal size, cycle length, rough win rate, and how many deals the founder personally closed last quarter. Good candidates qualify you the way they qualify deals, and a brief without numbers reads as a company without them.
Say whether they own the revenue number or the machine that produces it. They are different jobs with different day counts, and the honest candidates will price them differently.
The thing founders always forget: budget the founder's own time for the handover. The process gets extracted from your head, on calls the candidate needs to hear. Two hours a week for the first month, in the brief, in writing.

What the contract should cover

General guidance rather than legal advice: have the engagement letter read by somebody who acts for you. These are the clauses that cause the arguments when they are missing.

The days. How many a week or a month, whether they roll over, and the day rate or monthly figure that pays for them.
Notice. A month either way is the usual term, long enough to hand over and short enough that neither side is trapped.
Intellectual property. Who owns the models, documents and code the Sales Director produces. It should be the company, said in writing, because without a clause it may not be.
IR35. Whether the engagement is inside or outside, who made the determination, and the reasons. IR35 for fractional executives explains who carries the decision.

The rest, from confidentiality to conversion terms, is in what a fractional executive contract should say.

Common questions about hiring a fractional Sales Director

How quickly can a company hire a fractional Sales Director?

Faster than any other way of filling the seat. A request to a fractional Sales Director on the bench is accepted or declined within three days, and a brief to Operator Search returns a shortlist in five business days. A permanent Sales Director search runs eight to twelve weeks to an accepted offer and then a notice period of three to six months, which is why fractional cover is the normal bridge.

How many days a week should a fractional Sales Director be hired for?

Two is the most common arrangement and one to three is the working range. Below a day a week nobody can own a function; above three the seat has usually become a full-time one and the honest conversation is about converting. Start at the lower end and add a day when decisions begin queueing for the Sales Director's days.

What is the monthly cost of a fractional Sales Director two days a week?

At the 2026 UK band of £700 to £1,300 a day, two days a week over 46 working weeks comes to £5,367 to £9,967 a month, invoiced by the operator's own company with no employer National Insurance, pension or recruitment fee on top. Often part fixed fee, part performance-linked. Agree the structure in writing before starting.

Can a fractional Sales Director later become the full-time Sales Director?

Yes, and it is one of the better routes to a permanent hire because both sides have had months of working interview. Raise the possibility early so the operator can plan their other clients, agree a start date around their notice to those clients, and check the engagement letter for any conversion terms before the conversation.

What should a brief for a fractional Sales Director say?

The three outcomes the seat owns in the first ninety days, the days a week and whether on site matters, who the Sales Director reports to and who reports to them, the systems and data they will inherit, and the budget as a day rate or a monthly figure. A brief that lists tasks rather than outcomes attracts people who want a to-do list, and the fractional sales directors worth hiring decline it.

When should a company hire a full-time Sales Director?

When the work fills five days and stays there: decisions queue for the Sales Director's days every week, there is a team of leaders to manage, and the role is certain to be permanent. A retained search for the seat runs 25 to 33 per cent of first-year earnings. Until all three are true, a fractional Sales Director at two days a week is the cheaper way to find out.

How long does it take to hire a Sales Director, fractional or full time?

A fractional Sales Director is usually met within days and starts in one to three weeks: Operator Search returns a shortlist in 5 business days, and a request on the bench is answered within three. A permanent Sales Director takes eight to twelve weeks of search to an accepted offer, then a notice period of three to six months, so a first day is usually six months or more away.

How do I find a part-time Sales Director?

Four routes work in the UK: a fractional platform or bench where the day rate is published before you speak to anybody, a search run against a written brief, a referral from an investor, accountant or another founder, and the Sales Director's own network of former colleagues. Whichever route, shortlist people who have held the seat at your stage, and agree the days, the notice period and the IR35 position in writing.

Ready to meet operators

How to get to a shortlist

This seat is opening on the bench, so there is nobody listed to book direct yet. Brief Operator Search and the search runs across the wider market rather than only the people already listed.