If your company has been trying to hire a VP of Sales for more than six months, I have some news that might sting: the problem probably isn’t the candidates.
I’ve spent 18+ years in commercial leadership in the CPG industry — restructured a 1,500-person sales organization, designed go-to-market strategies across wildly different regional markets, and led a 480-person commercial team with full P&L responsibility. I now work with consumer brands in the $20M–$500M range — founder-led, family-owned, PE-backed — on the exact challenge that’s probably keeping leadership up at night: how to build the commercial infrastructure that lets the company scale beyond one person doing everything.
And after dozens of conversations with companies, recruiters, and executive search professionals, I keep hearing the same story.
The Pattern
A brand gets built. Great product, strong early traction, real consumer demand. Through grit, relationships, and timing, it gets to $20M, $30M, $50M in revenue. But the person who built it is still the best salesperson, the best marketer, and the best operator in the company.
Those were superpowers at $5M. At $50M, they’re constraints.
At some point, leadership hits a ceiling. Growth slows. The team is stretched. A board member, an investor, or a trusted advisor says: “You need a VP of Sales.”
So they engage a recruiter. Good candidates come through. But something goes wrong. Leadership rejects candidate after candidate. “She doesn’t understand our business.” “He’s too corporate.” “Nobody gets it like we do.” The search drags on for months. Or worse — they make a hire, and the new VP is gone within a year.
The company blames the candidates. The recruiter suspects something deeper is off. And the real problem sits there in plain sight, undiagnosed:
There’s nothing built for a strong hire to walk into.
It’s Not a Hiring Problem. It’s an Infrastructure Problem.
When I say “commercial infrastructure,” I mean the systems, strategies, and architecture that allow a commercial organization to function without one person at the center of every decision:
- Sales org design — Who sells what, to whom, in which channels? What does the team structure look like? What are the roles, territories, and account assignments?
- Trade strategy — How are you investing in the trade? What’s your promotional architecture? How are you allocating spend across accounts and channels to maximize return?
- Pricing architecture — Is pricing consistent across channels? Are you protecting margins or eroding them with every new account? Does the pricing tell a coherent story from wholesale to shelf?
- Revenue growth management — Are commercial resources deployed against the right brands, in the right markets, for the right consumers? Or is every geography getting the same approach regardless of what the data says?
- KPIs and operating rhythm — What gets measured? How often does the team review performance? What’s the cadence of accountability?
In most consumer brands at the $20M–$500M stage, none of this exists. The commercial knowledge lives in one person’s head. They’ve been making these decisions intuitively — based on relationships and instinct — since day one. It works. Until it doesn’t.
And when you drop a talented VP of Sales into that environment, here’s what happens: they spend their first three months trying to figure out what the job actually is. There’s no org to inherit, no trade strategy to execute, no pricing framework to follow. They’re not leading a commercial function — they’re trying to build one from scratch while the person who’s always done it second-guesses every decision.
Even the right hire won’t fix it — especially a Fortune 500 executive who ran the machine but never built one.
Velocity Is a Symptom, Not a Lever
When commercial performance stalls, most companies respond the same way: more distribution, more spend, more pressure on the sales team. Chase velocity with brute force.
None of that fixes the real issue. It just pushes product.
If the trade strategy doesn’t align with the channel, the pricing architecture is inconsistent, and there’s no defined commercial plan by account segment — you can force product onto shelves all day and it still won’t move. You can manufacture short-term velocity with discounts, displays, and promotions. But that’s not growth. That’s intervention.
Sustained velocity is a byproduct of the machine working: who is the product for, where does it win, and why the commercial model supports it. Everything else is a band-aid.
Proving You Can Scale and Being Built to Scale Are Two Different Things
A lot of brands get to $30M, $50M, $100M on hustle, great product, and opportunistic timing. They’ve proven they can scale. But they are not built to scale.
That distinction matters — especially in today’s M&A environment. We’re in one of the most active acquisition cycles the FMCG industry has seen in years. Big players need growth and they’re buying it faster than they can build it. Challenger brands are attractive targets.
But the bar is higher than “growing fast.” Acquirers want commercial traction, strong unit economics, operational discipline, and a leadership team that can scale. Most brands at the $20M–$100M stage have the first half but not the last. The commercial infrastructure doesn’t exist in a way that would survive due diligence, let alone a post-acquisition integration.
Acquirers pay premiums for infrastructure, not just growth. That’s the piece most companies haven’t built yet.
What Recruiters Already Know
The best executive recruiters in the CPG space see this pattern constantly. They place a strong candidate into a role that isn’t defined, at a company that doesn’t have the infrastructure for that person to succeed, and then watch the placement unravel.
I’ve talked to recruiters who describe the same frustration: leadership keeps rejecting candidates because “nobody gets the business like we do.” That’s not an insight about the candidates. That’s a signal that the commercial knowledge hasn’t been externalized into systems and processes. Of course nobody gets it — the playbook only exists in one person’s head.
The recruiters who are most effective in this space have started recognizing the infrastructure gap for what it is: a pre-hire problem, not a hiring problem. A well-defined role at a company with real infrastructure doesn’t just attract better candidates — it retains them.
Build the Machine Before You Hire the Driver
The solution isn’t to keep searching for a unicorn who can walk into chaos and build everything from scratch. Those people exist, but they’re rare, expensive, and they have options. They’re not going to choose the company with no infrastructure when the company down the road has a defined role, a clear strategy, and a team to lead.
The better path is to build the commercial infrastructure first. Define the sales org. Develop the trade strategy. Create the pricing architecture. Establish the RGM framework. Build the KPIs and operating rhythm. Then — and only then — hire the leader to run it.
When you do this, three things change:
- The role becomes real. You can describe it in concrete terms: here’s the team, here’s the strategy, here’s what success looks like in the first year. That clarity attracts better candidates.
- Leadership can let go. When there’s a system in place, the person who’s always done everything doesn’t need to be involved in every commercial decision. There’s a framework to run it within.
- The hire sticks. The new VP of Sales isn’t starting from zero. They’re stepping into a functioning commercial operation and making it better. That’s a job people stay in.
The Question Worth Asking
If your VP Sales search has stalled, or if your last commercial hire didn’t work out, ask this: did the person fail, or did the infrastructure fail them?
If you’re honest about it, the answer is usually the latter. And the good news is that the infrastructure problem is solvable. It’s the same work that every major CPG company has done at some stage of its growth. The difference is that at the $20M–$500M stage, most companies haven’t done it yet because the people running them have been too busy building the product and growing the brand.
The brands that break through — the ones that attract great talent, retain them, scale operations, and command premium valuations — are the ones that build the machine before they hire the driver.
About the Author
Dan Sullivan is the founder of Sullivan Commercial Group LLC, a commercial advisory practice that partners with FMCG/CPG brands — founder-led, family-owned, PE-backed — to architect the commercial infrastructure so leadership can move from operating to scaling.
He has spent 18+ years in commercial leadership in the CPG industry. At Reynolds American, he restructured a 1,500-person sales organization to 1,200 and redesigned the route-to-market model — the infrastructure that overtook Juul and made Alto the #1 tracked electronic nicotine device in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Texas as a whole. He then designed the RGM strategy to maximize profitability across the full portfolio by geography — Texas first, then the Southeast, then nationally.
Most engagements start with a commercial diagnostic. Some evolve into fractional leadership. All of them start with a conversation.