A finance director at one of my client businesses shut her laptop in a board meeting this week and said the Budget had run out of excuses. Nobody around the table argued, which tells you how long they had all been waiting.
The Budget was delivered on the 28th October, and most of what I read afterwards dwelt on borrowing, tax thresholds and who pays what. And very little of it asked what an owner or managing director should do with a commercial vacancy they had put on hold. Almost nobody has said the obvious part out loud, which is that the reason to wait has quietly gone, so I will.
The wait was never really about the money.
Did the Budget add any new cost to hiring senior sales people?
No, and that is the short version. Make UK points out that the employer National Insurance threshold is unchanged, so taking someone on costs what it cost before the Chancellor stood up. That keeps the sums for a head of sales or a key account manager where they were. For most firms I speak to, the budget line was settled long before the Chancellor stood up.
But employing people is still getting more expensive and riskier, according to Make UK, which cites the Employment Rights Act and the earlier rise in employer National Insurance as the main reasons, though a cost you can already model is not a reason to wait.
Does the higher National Living Wage touch a sales director salary?
Barely, and mostly through the back door. Personnel Today reports that the National Living Wage rises 3.9% to £13.21 an hour from 1st April next year, affecting about 2.3 million people. Nobody hiring a sales director is paying anywhere near that, so the direct effect on a senior salary is close to nil.
But the indirect effect deserves a few lines. Martin Jones of UHY Hacker Young told Personnel Today that the rate has climbed 61% from £8.21 and that wage pressure is spreading to more experienced staff. If your sales support team moves up, the gaps between grades tighten, and a good senior hire can help you sort the structure out rather than just add to the bill.
I would treat that as a pay bands conversation, not a hiring freeze.
What does a weaker growth forecast mean for a sales hire?
It means the market you sell into gets harder, which is an argument for better people rather than fewer. City AM reports that the OBR has cut next year's growth forecast from 1.6% to 1%, raised its average inflation projection to 3.4% and expects unemployment to peak at 5.1%. The same figures put family budgets only 2% higher by the end of the decade than before the pandemic.
Read that as a buyer would. Customers with tighter budgets ask more questions, take longer to sign and compare you with suppliers they would not have bothered with in a boom. A strong sales director earns their salary in exactly that kind of market, and a thin pipeline in a slow one is painfully hard to rebuild. Ask any sales manager who has inherited one.
And there is a reading from the candidate side too. A higher jobless peak does not make senior commercial people easy to find.
The ones with a record of closing in a tough year are still choosy, and they have read the same forecast you have, so expect them to ask hard questions about stability before they say yes.
What did the Budget change about notice periods and non-competes?
Nothing yet, but a change is coming. The Manufacturer reports that the Chancellor plans to reform non-compete clauses as well as skilled worker visas, and for sales that matters more than any tax line. Few functions lean on restrictive covenants as heavily as commercial teams do.
Many senior sales contracts carry long notice periods, gardening leave and limits on joining a competitor or taking clients with you. If those clauses loosen, hiring from a rival should get easier and keeping your own best people will get harder, and I would not build a plan around rules nobody has published, but I would read your own contracts this month.
What should an employer weigh up before restarting the search?
Start with the cost of the empty chair, because it is the number nobody puts in a spreadsheet. Every month without a senior commercial lead means unreviewed pipeline, forecasts nobody quite believes and a team looking around for direction. Ask any finance director how that feels at quarter end. I will not put a figure on it, but you will know yours.
Then look at the wider picture. According to HR Review, the CIPD said employers would be pleased there were no big unwelcome surprises, but argued that skills, AI and jobs policy sits apart from the employment tax and regulation decisions pulling the other way. The full piece is in HR Review's Budget coverage.
On skills, the CIPD welcomed the pause on the youth minimum wage and a £100m expansion of mayoral apprenticeship brokerage.
Useful if you are building a pipeline of junior sales development reps who might become your managers in a few years. But a junior pipeline will not fill the director seat this quarter.
How should you run the search this time?
Write down the three things the person must change in their first year, and judge every conversation against them. It sounds basic. But most of the stalled searches I see started with a title and a salary range and nothing about the problem.
Then check the pay against what the market is doing, using our salary guides. Decide who signs off an offer before you meet anyone. The best sales leaders are rarely on the market for long, and a slow second interview loses more of them than a modest salary does. And expect a counter-offer.
Be honest with yourself about the real choice.
Waiting was easy to defend while something was pending. But now it is simply a decision. It should be made on purpose, with the pipeline and the team in view, rather than drifting into another quarter.
By the end of that board meeting her colleagues had run out of reasons too, and no forecast for next year is going to hand them a fresh one.
Should your own board be close to deciding to hire a sales director, you can see how the sales recruitment specialists at Coburg Banks approach a senior search before you commit to anything.
