Notes for owners · Sales management
How to advertise to sales heads, who see the playbook coming
A sales head runs the same sequences you are about to send them. They buy on a missed number, a hiring problem or a handover, and only what they can defend upward.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Sales heads are the most advertised-to job in Indian business. Every customer relationship management product, every lead generation agency, every training firm and every dialler company writes to the same few thousand people. Same tools, same words. So the useful question is not how to reach a sales head. They are easy to reach. It is what to say in the ten seconds before they recognise the pattern and delete it.
What actually triggers a purchase
Nothing on this list is an advertisement, which is the point. Advertising's job is to be present and credible when one of these happens.
| Trigger | What they go looking for | How long the window stays open |
|---|---|---|
| Missed the number two quarters running | A diagnosis they can show the board | Weeks. It is urgent and political |
| Five of twelve people left in one quarter | Hiring, onboarding, a playbook that survives attrition | A quarter |
| Founder handing sales over | Process, a pipeline review, structure | Months, and it is the best window there is |
| New product or territory | Training, scripts, a list, a launch plan | Fixed to the launch date |
| Forecast the MD does not believe | CRM discipline, pipeline hygiene, reporting | Immediately after the review that went badly |
| A competitor hired their best person | Anything that looks like an answer | Days, and it often passes |
The handover row is worth reading twice. When a founder stops carrying sales personally and a first sales head is appointed, everything gets bought at once, and the new head is judged on the first two quarters. That person will take a call.
Where they are, and when they are not
On the road from Tuesday to Thursday. Customer meetings, a distributor visit, a factory, another city. They take phone calls in the car and reply to messages between meetings.
Monday morning belongs to the review. Nobody buys anything on a Monday morning.
Friday evening is when the pipeline is looked at honestly and the week's shortfall is obvious. That is the hour your message gets read.
LinkedIn genuinely, unlike most Indian B2B audiences. They post, they argue in comments, and they follow the people who train them. Peer group WhatsApp circles matter even more, and they cannot be bought into, only referred into.
The last month of the financial year, they are gone. March is for closing. Anything sold to a sales head in March is either a purchase they had already decided or a mistake.
They sell for a living, so they see it coming
A connection request followed by a pitch four minutes later. They do this for a living and they know exactly which tool sent it.
Fake personalisation. "I saw you are hiring business development executives" is machine-generated in one click and reads that way.
"Book a demo" with no idea of their number. A sales head will not spend forty minutes being shown features by someone who has not asked what their target is.
Discount pressure and false deadlines. The whole audience has run that campaign themselves.
Case studies with no names. A sales head reads an unnamed case study as an invented one, and they are usually right.
What they are really buying
Something they can defend upward. This is the insight most vendors miss. A sales head is not the final signature on anything meaningful. What they need from you is the argument they will make to their MD and their finance head. Give them the one-page version of that argument, with the cost per person and the comparison against hiring two more salespeople, and you have done half their work.
And something the team will use. The most common way a sales purchase fails in India is not that it was wrong. It is that eleven field salespeople quietly kept using their own diaries and WhatsApp. The data went stale within a month, and by the renewal nobody could show a single report. A sales head who has been through that once buys adoption, not features, and will ask you what happens in week three.
The channel nobody plans for
Your best source of enquiries from sales heads is the sales head who already bought from you and then changed jobs. In this market they move every two or three years, and they carry their vendor list with them. A new role means proving something quickly, with tools they already trust. Most firms never notice this happening and never ask for it. A simple quarterly check of where your past buyers now work is worth more than a month of paid media.
For example, a Bengaluru firm selling sales training to manufacturers might build a list of eighty companies with field sales teams of ten or more. Twenty of those have appointed a new sales head in the past year. That list of twenty is the campaign, and the other sixty are a mailing list until something changes in them.
How to measure it
Enquiries are the wrong first number here, because a good campaign aimed at eighty accounts might produce three conversations in a quarter and be working perfectly. Record the baseline we record in every audit. How many of your target accounts have a live conversation. How fast each enquiry was answered, how many reach a proposal, and how many of those are still alive ninety days later. Read it monthly against what it was before you started.
What to do next
Take the last five deals you won from a sales head and find the trigger behind each one. Write the trigger, not the industry. Then look at your current campaign and ask whether a person in that exact situation would recognise themselves in the first line of your creative. If they would not, rewrite the line before you raise the budget. Book a free audit if you want a second pair of eyes on it.