Given a description for the Director of Sales position at ACME Tools, we were able to use our AI model to analyze the leadership requirements for the position. The full position description included:
- Position Overview
- Position Responsibilities
- Position Requirements, including knowledge, skills, personal attributes, physical demands and company values.
The director would be responsible for leading a team of regional sales managers, key account and manufacturer rep agencies to develop sales in an assigned geographic area, corporate accounts, and specific channels of distribution. The Director of Sales will train, develop, and motivate the team to forge relationships with our distribution network, direct independent sales representatives, and establish strategic partnerships with major accounts.
Based on the position description, a leadership position profile was created using the dimensions and leadership behavior definitions utilized in our Leadership IMPACT Assessment™ framework. Each dimension was rated on a 7-point Likert scale with justifications for each rating provided.
Executive Summary
This Director of Sales role is highly vision-driven, with clear expectations to create and execute channel strategies, business plans, and promotional plans that drive profitable growth in Industrial and Trade Distribution. The position strongly emphasizes day-to-day execution of leadership through communication, motivation, and hands-on team development, making living and coaching & mentoring central to success.
The role calls for substantial risk-taking in owning aggressive financial objectives, competitive market penetration, and visible external representation at trade shows and with major accounts. Empathy and interpersonal skill are important for managing internal and external relationships, though humility and structured reflection are less explicit, suggesting a culture oriented more toward urgency, performance, and initiative than deliberate introspection. Overall, the position aligns best with high leadership potential in vision and risk-taking, and strong practice in visioning, living, and coaching, making it well suited to a decisive, strategic, people-developing sales leader who can learn to embed more explicit reflective habits over time.
Director of Sales Position Description Summary:
- Top Priorities (7/7): Vision, Visioning, Living
- High Priorities (6/7): Empathy, Risk-Taking, Coaching & Mentoring
- Moderate Priorities (5/7): Assessing
- Low Priorities (4/7): Humility
- No Priority (<4): Reflecting
Individual Ratings of Leadership Requirements
Potential for leadership is the innate leadership qualities a person possesses which provides them with a higher leadership ceiling.
Humility – 4/7
- Emphasizes collaborative teamwork and valuing each other’s contributions without strong language about self-effacement or learning from subordinates.
- Highlights reliability, responsibility, and ownership, which support grounded behavior but do not directly stress leader modesty.
- Frames the role as a key strategic contact with buying and marketing groups, which can reinforce positional authority more than explicit humility.
Empathy – 6/7
- Stresses strong interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate at all levels with kindness, openness, honesty, and valuing contributions.
- Requires maintaining positive key customer relationships and providing timely, responsive, and accurate account support, which demands understanding others’ perspectives.
- Calls for the ability to work collaboratively with internal and external teams and lead effective field sales teams, implying attention to people’s needs and motivations.
Vision – 7/7
- Requires establishing plans and strategies to meet and exceed financial objectives across channels, demonstrating forward-looking commercial vision.
- Calls for developing business plans to identify and acquire new account growth opportunities and new product suggestions, showing market and product foresight.
- Places responsibility on the Director to direct field sales strategy, channel development, and overall high-performance results in Industrial and Trade Distribution.
Risk-taking – 6/7
- Holds accountability for meeting and exceeding sales budgets and gross margin goals, which involves business, career, and reputation risks.
- Requires originating sales techniques to penetrate markets and combat competitive initiatives, implying a willingness to challenge the status quo.
- Involves extensive travel, high exposure to major accounts, and visible trade show presence, all of which increase interpersonal and performance-related risk.
Practice of leadership is determined by how the leader manifest their potential for leadership into a daily execution of the leadership process.
Assessing – 5/7
- Requires strong understanding of customer and market dynamics and sales processes, indicating regular assessment of external conditions.
- Involves ability to assess sales and business results and identify operational issues to resolve with internal teams.
- Relies on strong business acumen and basic finance knowledge, suggesting the role must continually evaluate performance and context.
Visioning – 7/7
- Demands establishing plans and strategies for Industrial and Trade channels that align with total company interests, consistent with crafting a clear, actionable leadership vision.
- Involves developing annual promotional plans and business plans focused on key product categories, new products, and new accounts, requiring a coherent strategic direction.
- Requires partnering with VP of Sales/Customer Service on sales process improvement, indicating alignment of personal leadership approach with broader organizational vision.
Living – 7/7
- Expects excellent communication skills, time management, organization, and follow-up, all of which reflect daily execution of the leadership approach.
- Requires leading, training, motivating, and developing a high-performance field sales team, using tools like coaching, motivation, and observation in day-to-day work.
- Emphasizes “sense of urgency,” “let’s get it done” attitude, and results orientation, showing consistent, visible enactment of leadership philosophy.
Reflecting – 3/7
- Mentions learning from mistakes and continuous improvement in the company values, which hints at reflection but not in a structured, personal way.
- Focuses heavily on action, urgency, and results without explicit reference to deliberate review, journaling, or structured after-action learning.
- Emphasizes deadline pressure and extensive travel, which can crowd out regular reflective practices unless intentionally built in.
Coaching & Mentoring – 6/7
- Requires hiring, training, motivating, and developing a high-performance field sales team, which is core coaching and mentoring work.
- Stresses superior product demonstration skills with the proven ability to train others, clearly linking expertise with developing people.
- Calls for partnering with leadership on sales process improvement, which often involves providing feedback and guidance to managers and reps.
NEXT STEPS
Requirements Modifications
- Dimensions with leadership ratings of 5 or less, should be reviewed to determine if the score is appropriate for the given position or if the position requirements should be modified. Humility and Reflecting are important leadership behaviors and modifying the language in the position requirements be updated to reflect their importance.
- The position profile should also be compared to the general Population Average and Only Directors in the Academy’s database. The Population Average is the average of all who have taken the assessment over the last 9 years. The Only Directors is the average of all who have self-identified as Director in the database.
Alignment Review
- Determine how well the incumbent leader aligns with the current or revised position description. This is accomplished by comparing the leader’s assessment results to the position description’s ratings. The leader on the left (Pat Smith), is misaligned to the position’s leadership requirements, versus the leader on the right (Chris Jones), who is more aligned with the position’s leadership requirements. The organization should determine if the leader’s alignment can be improved through coaching of if they would be better aligned elsewhere in the organization.
Environmental / Situational Analysis
ACME Tools should evaluate the environment the new Director of Sales will be leading in to ensure the position description reflects any known leadership challenges the Director may be facing. Some important considerations include:
- Is the team they will be leading well established or fairly new?
- Is the team comprised of high performers, average performers or low performers?
- Were there any leadership capabilities missing in the previous Director?
After a comprehensive situational assessment has been performed, then the position description should be reviewed to ensure that it addresses any special situational needs. These steps are critical to help select the right person with the right leadership abilities for the right opportunity at the right time.
By following this framework, an organization can reduce misalignment resulting in higher team engagement, better performance, and lower turnover.
