The best salesperson in the company is the boss: and that's the problem

In thousands of Belgian SMEs, revenue rests on two or three people: the leader, and one or two long-standing salespeople who carry the client book in their heads. As long as it sells, nobody worries. Yet it is one of the heaviest risks a company can carry, and it is not settled by recruiting a sales director on 100,000 euros. It is settled by structuring.

This is a strength that has become a vulnerability. In the SME that has grown, selling was built around people, not processes. The founder knows every major client by their first name, a senior salesperson holds the relationships of an entire sector, another single-handedly carries exports. The system works, and works well, until the day one of those pillars retires, falls ill, or moves to a competitor with the client book. That day, the company discovers that its most precious asset was never its own: it was in a few heads.

Concentration, the risk that never makes it onto the balance sheet

Bankers and buyers have a word for this: concentration risk. When a significant share of revenue depends on a handful of people, or on a handful of clients only those people control, the value of the company is mechanically reduced. The reasoning is the same as for dependence on the leader: what holds only through individuals cannot be handed over, cannot easily be financed, and negotiates badly. An unstructured sales force is a time bomb under the owner's wealth, silent for as long as everyone is still in post.

The Belgian context makes matters worse. Recruiting a good salesperson has never been simple, and the market remains tight: among the 146 critical functions and shortage occupations listed by the Forem (Wallonia's public employment and training service) in 2025, qualified profiles are fought over, and 37 % of the vacancies published concerned an occupation under pressure. Betting all your growth on your ability to poach, tomorrow, an exceptional salesperson to replace the one who leaves, is betting against the labour market.

The false remedy: hiring a sales director

Faced with the diagnosis, the classic reflex is to open a sales director position as a permanent hire. It is often premature, and expensive. A profile at that level, fully loaded, represents 10,000 to 12,000 euros a month, with a recruitment lead time of several months and a risk of a casting error which, in a management role, can exceed 150,000 euros according to sector studies. Above all, the leader who recruits a sales director because the function is beyond them is the worst placed to assess that profile in an interview: they are buying a competence they do not master, blind. The remedy can cost more than the disease.

Structuring is not replacing

The effective route is not to find a super-salesperson, it is to turn individual talent into a repeatable system. In practice, that comes down to a few building blocks any SME can lay. A pipeline visible in a CRM, where every deal has a stage, an amount and a dated next action, rather than a spreadsheet only its author understands. A written sales approach: how you qualify a prospect, how you handle the recurring objections, what you promise and what you don't. Clear targets and short review rituals that replace improvised sales meetings. And documented know-how, so that a salesperson's departure no longer takes half the client book with it.

This is exactly the role of fractional sales leadership: someone who has already structured and run a sales force comes in to install those blocks, one to three days a week, coaches the team in place, and passes on what they know. The cost is a fraction of a permanent hire, the start is counted in days, and once the machine is running, the practitioner scales back or hands over. The talent of the long-standing salespeople is not replaced: it is finally capitalised on.

Selling must stop being a talent and become an asset