Vice President of Sales Job Description

The vice president of sales is the senior executive who owns a fashion company's selling function: the revenue number for the whole business or a major division, the strategy that produces it, and the organisation of managers and salespeople who deliver it. The role sits on the executive team alongside the heads of product, marketing, finance and operations, and it is accountable in both directions — upward to the president or chief executive for results and forecasts, and downward through national and regional sales managers to every territory and account. It is the top of the sales ladder described across this directory, and its work is leadership, not personal selling.

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Revenue Strategy and the Sales Plan

Strategy is the role's first product. Each year the vice president builds the sales plan: which channels will grow — wholesale accounts, key national accounts, e-commerce wholesale, international distributors, the company's own stores where they exist — which product categories carry the growth, what price and margin architecture the selling will defend, and what the plan assumes about the market. The plan becomes budgets, territory structures and hiring decisions, and it is the document the rest of the executive team plans against: production books capacity, finance books cash flow, and marketing books support, all from the sales forecast the vice president signs.

Within the year, the vice president manages the number actively. Monthly and seasonal reviews compare order intake and sell-through against plan by channel and region; shortfalls are diagnosed — a weak category, a lost account, a region underperforming its market — and answered with reallocated effort, account action or revised forecasts given early and honestly to the executive team. Fashion's calendar makes this unforgiving: a selling season missed cannot be re-sold, so the vice president's forecasting credibility, built season over season, is a large part of what the role is paid for.

Designing and Leading the Sales Organisation

The vice president designs the machine that sells: how territories and account groups are drawn, where sales managers sit and what spans they carry, which accounts are handled nationally, how showrooms and market weeks are staffed, and what the sales roles at each level are expected to do. Compensation design belongs here too — salary and commission structures, bonus triggers and expense policy — because how salespeople are paid decides what they actually do all day, whatever the strategy says. Hiring and developing the management layer is the continuous version of the same work: the vice president recruits and coaches national and regional managers, reviews their pipelines and people, and builds succession so a departure does not take a region's revenue with it.

Leadership at this level is exercised through systems more than presence: the reporting rhythm, the forecast process, account review discipline, pricing and discount authority limits, and the standards for how accounts are opened, grown and closed. The vice president also carries the function's culture — whether bad news travels up quickly, whether orders are written honestly, whether distribution discipline survives a tough quarter. Those norms are felt in every showroom the company runs.

Key Accounts, Channels and the Executive Table

Personally, the vice president sponsors the relationships too large for any single territory: the department store groups, national chains and major online accounts whose orders can be a significant share of company revenue. Sponsorship means executive-level presence — annual business reviews, joint planning, escalation when terms, deliveries or exclusivity are disputed — while the account's own manager runs the season beneath that umbrella. The same seniority represents sales in channel decisions: entering a new retail channel, approving a major distributor, or withdrawing the brand from an account whose discounting damages every other stockist.

At the executive table the vice president is the market's voice. Product leadership hears which categories accounts are asking for and which are stalling; marketing hears what sell-through support actually moves stock; operations hears delivery promises the selling side has made and must keep. That translation — turning buyer behaviour into company decisions — is why the role is an executive post rather than a senior sales post, and why its holders are expected to understand margins, inventory and production constraints as well as they understand selling.

Skills, Qualifications and Career Path

Appointment is by record: a career built through territory selling, sales management and national management, with demonstrated revenue growth, forecast accuracy and team building at each level. The specific skills are strategic and financial as much as commercial — building a sales plan, reading a P&L, designing compensation, negotiating at executive level, and presenting a forecast to a board or ownership group without flinching. Fashion product credibility remains essential: a vice president who cannot judge a range in front of a major buyer loses the room, however strong the spreadsheet. Formal business education is common at this level but the promotion history is the qualification employers read first.

The vice president of sales is the sales function's summit in most companies; from it, careers move to general management — divisional president, chief commercial officer, or company president roles — or across to larger companies carrying the same title at greater scale. The distinctions inside the ladder matter: the sales executive owns accounts, the sales manager owns a team, the national sales manager owns a country's selling, and the vice president owns the strategy, the organisation and the number itself.