The Head of Sales, typically the first sales leader to join your organization, plays a crucial role in scaling your founder’s vision across key markets. By leveraging extensive sales experience and exceptional leadership skills, these professionals build both a repeatable sales process and a revenue-generating team, making mis-hires costly, demoralizing, and detrimental to long-term growth.
Most early-stage organizations hire a Head of Sales as they transition from founder-led sales to a scalable sales motion. Sometimes referred to as a Vice President of Sales, this role involves close collaboration with founders and CEOs to develop effective GTM strategies, making cultural alignment a key predictor of success.
As the primary owner of the sales function, the Head of Sales needs a deep understanding of the company’s long-term revenue goals, target markets, competitive differentiation, and stakeholder involvement. This enables them to manage the sales budget, establish performance metrics, define the ideal candidate profile, build relationships with current and prospective customers, hire and develop the sales team, and continuously refine the sales motion.
Employers are increasingly prioritizing candidates with experience selling to their target buyer, whether that’s technical stakeholders or leaders from compliance-heavy industries such as healthcare or government. While deals with the former require complex sales experience and credible product knowledge, those with the latter demand vertical expertise, a hands-on approach, and strong storytelling abilities.
Below is our curated list of the top ten recruiting agencies for Heads of Sales in tech. These firms combine wide-reaching talent networks, industry fluency, and a consultative approach to match organizations with executives who drive measurable results.
1. Betts Recruiting
Founded in 2009, Betts Recruiting is the national leader in placing exceptional go-to-market (GTM) talent for high-growth tech and SaaS companies. The firm leverages deep functional and industry expertise to secure visionary leaders with a proven track record of designing sales strategies that align with specific markets and target buyer profiles. Many innovative organizations have partnered with Betts to hire top executives, including Apptimize and UXPin.
Betts Recruiting’s executive search team implements a relationship-driven approach to place senior-level candidates within 45 days, 50% of whom are diverse hires. With expertise across domains such as enterprise Saas, AI, cybersecurity, HealthTech, GovTech, and others, Betts is well positioned to evaluate each candidate’s market fluency, cross-functional leadership capabilities, tech stack experience, strategic approach, and data-driven playbooks.
The firm’s proprietary candidate marketplace, Betts Connect, features one of the largest GTM talent networks in North America and enables rapid sourcing by filtering through numerous KPIs. This tool can be used by recruiters and hiring managers, helping partners achieve ROI within just three months of a Connect subscription.
2. Captivate Talent
Since 2017, Captivate Talent has provided human-centric services exclusively for early- to growth-stage SaaS startups in need of top GTM and RevOps candidates. The firm draws on its niche focus and startup fluency to identify talent that aligns with your business strategy and current stage of growth.
Recruiters take a results-driven approach when evaluating each candidate’s previous performance, culture fit, versatility, analytical skills, long-term vision, and more. The firm continuously refines its search based on market insights and feedback from your hiring team, fostering a collaborative and focused partnership.
Captivate Talent leverages its hyper-specialization to provide consultative guidance on when to hire specific roles and how their responsibilities should be scoped. By gaining a deep understanding of your needs, the firm delivers personalized solutions that promote long-term success.
3. HireDNA
Founded in 2018, HireDNA implements a data-driven approach to exclusively recruit sales talent for SaaS and tech companies. The firm achieves objective results by conducting a three-tiered screening process that delivers the most qualified candidates for your role.
HireDNA learns about your role requirements and success metrics before implementing its proprietary FitScore ranking system and a sales-specific assessment. These methods collect data measuring each candidate’s selling competencies as well as their role, culture, and experience alignment. Leadership candidates are evaluated on their ability to train and coach teams, manage pipelines, scale revenue, and implement strategy.
By partnering with HireDNA, your firm also receives weekly pipeline reports and sourcing performance insights, ensuring you consistently receive a new group of passive and active candidates to consider.
4. Optimal Sales Search
Founded in 2004, Optimal Sales Search recruits mid- to senior-level sales and marketing talent for high-growth SaaS companies. The founder-led firm pairs its boutique approach with deep market fluency to help organizations make confident hiring decisions.
The firm gains an understanding of your sales motion, buyer profile, and growth goals before headhunting passive candidates from its confidential talent pool. Recruiters also provide valuable market intelligence into your competitors’ recent hires, team quotas, and target markets to help you attract high-quality candidates.
Optimal Sales Search prioritizes speed without compromising quality, delivering the first round of candidates within five to ten business days with an offer-to-acceptance rate above 90%.
5. Formative Search Partners
Formative Search Partners has recruited C-level, VP, and Head of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success talent for startups and scaleups at key growth transitions since 2014. Founded by former software engineers, the firm leverages deep expertise in the modern tech stack as well as a strong network of technical founders to place candidates across sectors such as enterprise SaaS, AI/ML, cybersecurity, and FinTech.
Recruiters provide bespoke services throughout the partnership, including rigorous vetting processes, role design guidance, and founder coaching. Having completed over 1,900 searches for more than 900 startups, the firm has built an extensive talent network of 4.7 million candidates and established a strong reputation among leading venture and private equity firms.
6. VibeScaling
Founded in 2018, VibeScaling is a GTM advisory and recruiting firm that partners with AI-native seed to Series D companies. The recruiting team includes several current and former Heads of Sales who focus on placing founding sales talent for scaling organizations.
VibeScaling’s team of partners and talent advisors draws on its deep startup fluency to provide consultative, hands-on solutions. They begin by understanding your company’s culture, product, market, financial position, and ideal candidate profile before targeting qualified candidates.
The firm hosts private events in San Francisco and New York City with top professionals across the SaaS and AI industries each month, contributing to a strong and growing talent network.
7. salestalent.com
Founded in 2021, salestalent.com is a team of former sales leaders who place permanent sales talent across the tech, SaaS, industrial, and medical industries. The team includes the founder, a six-time sales executive who specializes in recruiting for Head of Sales roles, ensuring you receive trusted insights throughout your partnership.
The firm draws on your role requirements to target 100 to 300 passive sales professionals through seven-point, multi-channel outreach campaigns. Recruiters evaluate candidates through interviews and assessments, delivering a short list of three to five prospects within two weeks.
8. TheLIONS
Founded by a former Head of Sales at a $100+ million startup, TheLIONS has recruited sales talent across diverse tech sectors including SaaS, SalesTech, MarTech, security, and DevOps since 2010.
The firm applies a principles-driven approach, aiming to uphold truth, honor, and ethos in partnerships built on open-mindedness and trust. It holds the “lions” in its talent network to similarly high standards, ensuring you receive candidates who demonstrate loyalty, leadership, and self-sufficiency.
9. RevPilots
RevPilots has hired a wide range of fractional and permanent sales talent, including Heads of Sales, for high-growth companies since 2022. Recruiters draw on more than ten years of sales leadership experience to quickly identify qualified candidates.
The firm conducts rapid hiring processes by assigning two to three recruiters to each search and working from 8 AM to 12 AM, seven days a week. Recruiters deliver the first round of candidates within five business days, presenting only those who meet your experience, industry, and budget requirements.
10. MSH
Founded in 2011, MSH is a global recruiting and technology consulting firm that places a wide range of talent, including sales roles. The firm combines a software sales specialization with proprietary recruitment technology to deliver leadership candidates who align with your needs at any stage of growth.
Recruiters learn about your revenue goals and team structure to build custom search strategies. With a presence spanning 35 markets and three continents, the firm has a wide-reaching network of SaaS candidates, enabling it to quickly identify professionals with relevant experience across tech stacks, domains, and growth stages.
MSH also leverages Aeon Hire, its proprietary, AI-powered recruitment platform available exclusively to clients. This tool streamlines the hiring process by transcribing interviews, scoring candidates, generating live interview questions, and building ideal candidate profiles.
Compensation Trends for Head of Sales in Tech
The average base earnings for Heads of Sales vary depending on the organization’s stage of growth, with most early-stage compensation structures prioritizing equity over salary. Below are the typical ranges between the 25th and 75th percentiles:
Seed
Base: $175K—$200K
Series A
Base: $185K—$225K
Series B
Base: $200K—$250K
Series C
Base: $200K—$275K
Series D
Base: $200K—$275K
Check out our Comp Engine for real-time salary benchmarks across all GTM roles, based on data from our placements over the past six months. Meanwhile, our Compensation, Executive Compensation, and Enterprise Compensation guides discuss evolving market trends to consider when making your next hiring decision.
Ready to build an exceptional sales team? Contact Betts here to get started today.