Last updated: August 2026
Most businesses reach for another layer of management when a different shape would fix the problem more cheaply. Two questions settle it. Does national performance depend on coordination the owner should stop providing? And can your route to market be led by one person at all?
This page works through them, along with the four that follow: whether the answer is no new layer, whether specification and trade can report to one leader, how wide a field leader can go, and who state managers report to.
If you have not settled what the role decides, start with what sales leadership role your business actually needs. For pricing it, what a sales leader costs.
When should the managing director stop personally coordinating state sales activity?
When national performance starts depending on coordination between states rather than activity within them. Selling nationally is a much earlier milestone and a poor trigger on its own.
An owner can run reps in four states for a long time, and plenty do it well. What eventually breaks is the point where the questions stop being about individual territories and start being about the relationship between them. A national customer wanting one price across four states. A specification won in Melbourne that has to convert on a site in Perth.
Four signals that the coordination has outgrown the owner, in rough order of how early they appear.
Pricing decisions are made inconsistently across states, because the person making them is doing it between other things. Interstate opportunities are lost in the handover rather than at the point of sale. The owner's diary is the bottleneck on things that are not strategic, which is the clearest signal. And nobody is coaching, because the person who could has the least time.
That last one matters more than businesses credit. A management layer earns its cost through development. Where the person you hire will not have time to coach either, the problem has moved rather than been solved.
When is the answer neither?
When the coordination problem has a cheaper fix than a management layer. Three are worth testing before you write a brief. Two of them cost time rather than money. The third is a hire, so it carries a salary of its own, and it is still usually cheaper than a leadership package with a vehicle and an incentive on top.
Operating cadence. A weekly national call with a fixed agenda, a shared pipeline view and one person chasing actions closes a surprising amount of what looks like a management gap. Where nobody knows what the other states are doing, that is an information problem before a leadership problem.
Account ownership rules. Written rules on who owns a national customer, who prices it and how credit splits remove most cross-state friction. Where interstate losses happen in the handover, this is the fix, and it is a morning's work.
A coordination role rather than a leadership one. A sales operations or commercial analyst who owns the pipeline, forecast, pricing register and reporting takes the administrative half of a national leader's job off the owner without the package or the transfer of authority. It works where the states are performing.
The test that separates these from a genuine management hire: does the team need developing, or does the information need organising? Cadence and reporting organise information. Neither builds capability in a rep who is not getting better, and that is where the layer earns its cost.
One to be careful with. Promoting a strong rep to a part-time coordination role while they keep their territory tends to produce a worse territory and worse coordination.
Why is route to market the primary structural variable, not headcount?
Route to market decides what managing involves. Headcount tells you how many people are doing it. Four routes, each shaping the structure differently.
Specification led. The win happens at the design layer on cycles running twelve to twenty-four months. The leader has to be credible with architects, engineers and specification writers, manage a pipeline nobody can invoice yet, and hold their nerve when a quarter looks empty.
Merchant and distributor channel. The leader manages coverage, range, promotional programmes and buying group relationships on a fast repeating cycle. The motion is rhythm and consistency.
Direct project sales. Lumpy and tender driven. The leader reads a project pipeline, resources against unevenly timed opportunities, and is comfortable with a quarter that turns on two decisions.
Trade. Fast, territory driven and service heavy. Coverage and responsiveness win. The leader manages activity levels and territory discipline more than long cycle influence.
A leader who is excellent at one of these is not automatically capable in another, and this is the most common structural mistake at the layer above rep level. A business that has always sold through merchants promotes its best channel manager to lead a growing specification team, then cannot understand why the specification numbers do not move. The person is running a merchant motion on a specification pipeline.
Sector differences are real too, which is why I write about building envelope, interiors and lighting as distinct markets.
Can specification sales and trade sales report to the same leader?
Sometimes, and it depends on whether the two are one commercial motion or two. The test is whether the specification the team wins converts through the trade channel the same team services.
When it works. The product is specified and then installed by contractors your trade team already deals with, so the specification and the conversion are two ends of one job. One leader can hold both, because the handover is the thing that most needs managing and splitting it creates the gap. Waterproofing, construction chemicals and some facade categories often sit here.
When it does not. The specification audience and the trade audience are different markets with different products, cycles and definitions of a good week. Architectural lighting specified into a design practice and commercial lighting sold through electrical wholesale is the clearest example. One leader means one motion wins, and in the cases I have seen it is the specification side that loses, because trade produces visible results this month and specification produces nothing visible for a year.
What breaks when you get it wrong. The forecast, usually first, because a leader running both under one set of metrics reports the pipeline they understand and estimates the one they do not. Specification people then start leaving, and they are the harder half to replace. The mechanics are in specification leakage.
The honest test: ask what happened last time a specification was lost. Where nobody in the trade team knew it had been won, you have two businesses reporting to one person. The same question one level down is in Spec Manager vs BDM.
Is a player coach structure a compromise?
No, and it is worth saying plainly, because most writing on this treats it as a stage a business grows out of. It is a legitimate structure with trade-offs, and a lot of good leaders in this market actively want it.
The candidates who ask for it give the same reasons. They still enjoy selling. They want influence over the outcome rather than a reporting line to it. They want to stay close to customers and live projects, because that is where the market intelligence is. And they hold relationships worth years of pipeline that would be wasted in a pure management seat. A business that insists on people-leadership only will lose those candidates to one that does not.
The trade-off is real. The account load and the coaching compete for the same hours, and accounts have deadlines where coaching does not, so coaching is what quietly gets dropped. Four inputs tell you whether the trade-off is worth making.
Account load. A few genuinely strategic relationships a handover would damage is workable. A full territory is a rep with a management title.
Team size. A small team can be coached around an account load. As it grows the same person cannot hold both, and the failure is quiet.
Travel and geography. A state leader with a compact metropolitan territory has hours a national leader does not, which is why the structure is harder to hold on a national remit.
Whether it has been revisited. Early on it is efficient and often the only affordable option, and it gets left in place, so the structure that was right at four people is still there at nine.
The honest test is what you want from the seat. Where you need the leader's relationships in the market, a player coach is right, and you should resource the coaching separately rather than pretend one person does both. Where you need the team to get better, the personal number has to come down. Decide which you are buying before the ad goes out.
How many people should a field sales leader manage?
There is no correct number, and any benchmark you are quoted describes somebody else's route to market. The ceiling is set by how much of the leader's time each report needs, which varies by selling motion. A specification team needs more per person, because being useful in a meeting with a tier one practice means being in the meeting.
Three constraints beat a number. How often each report needs meaningful contact rather than a status update. How much of the week goes to travel between them. And how much is already committed to work that is not people, such as national accounts, forecasting and pricing. Add those up honestly and the ceiling names itself, usually lower than the business hoped.
Should state managers report to the National Sales Manager or to the managing director?
To the National Sales Manager, where you employ one and want the role to be real. Reporting state managers directly to the managing director while also employing a national leader is the structure that produces the most confusion in the briefs I take.
Each option does something specific to accountability and speed.
To the managing director, no national layer. Fast, direct, and workable while the owner has the time and the states operate independently. It stops working the moment national coordination matters, and it puts every cross state decision in one diary.
To a National Sales Manager. Slower on individual decisions, faster on national ones, and it is the structure that lets the national role be held accountable for a national number. Do it properly. A direct line to the owner is not automatically a problem, and in a small business it is often unavoidable and healthy. It becomes a problem where it is the route people take to get a decision reversed. If the owner will overturn the national leader on price or on people, say so before you hire, because that is a different job from the one the ad describes.
A dotted line to both. It functions as a compromise. It works where the two lines cover genuinely different things, for example the national leader owning performance and the managing director owning a specific national account, and where that split is written down. Left informal, it becomes an appeal route and the national role erodes.
The question to test any of these against: when a state leader and the national leader disagree on price, who decides, and does everyone in the business already know the answer without asking? Where the answer depends on who is in the office that day, the structure is not real yet.
Do state markets differ enough to structure around?
Construction activity and mix vary between states, which the ABS tracks in Building Activity, Australia. What follows is my interpretation rather than something the ABS says: a national business can be running four quite different markets under one brand.
Two examples. A Victorian business with real civil and infrastructure exposure needs a structure that can work tender cycles and head contractors, a different motion from a commercial fit-out patch of the same revenue. A Queensland business with mining exposure often needs coverage across several product categories and across distances that change what one person can hold.
Both are examples to test against your own mix rather than rules about those states.
Where do these observations come from?
The leadership briefs I take across building products, lighting and architecture and design, weighted to the eastern seaboard. First hand observation rather than survey data, which is why there are no percentages here. Hiring into the shape is covered in how to hire a State Sales Manager, and the state and national remit page goes deeper.
Get the shape right before you hire into it
If you are working through the structure of your sales team, I am happy to spend twenty minutes on the phone thinking it through. Confidential, no obligation, no pitch.
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James Bowesman recruits sales leadership for building products, lighting and A&D suppliers across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.