You already know how to write a job ad. Open the last one you posted. Copy the bullet points. Change the company name. Post it before lunch.
That's not a brief. That's a hostage note for whoever reads it next — usually a recruiter, sometimes a candidate, occasionally the manager who inherits the person you eventually hire.
Here's what nobody in hiring wants to say out loud: most sales role briefs are written for the person writing them, not the person doing the job. They exist to get a task off a to-do list, not to define what winning looks like. A brief built to relieve your anxiety instead of clarify the job produces exactly what you'd expect — a hire who technically matches the words on the page and still fails within six months.
Ask yourself something before you write the next one. Could you tell a stranger, in two sentences, what this person needs to have accomplished by day 90 for you to call the hire a success? If you can't answer that right now, you don't have a role. You have a headcount request with a job title stapled to it.
The document that fails before the ad goes live
Gallup has asked employees the same question for decades: do you know what is expected of you at work? Only about half strongly agree that they do. Half. Read that against your own sales floor. If half your existing team can't confidently say they know what's expected of them, what chance does a brand-new hire have of guessing it from a bullet-pointed ad you wrote in twenty minutes?
The brief is where this gets decided, long before the interview, the offer, or the disappointing first quarter review. A brief that lists duties — "manage the full sales cycle," "build and maintain a pipeline," "achieve monthly targets" — tells a candidate what they'll be doing. It tells them nothing about what doing it well actually looks like. The candidate reading it can't tell the difference between a role built on real thinking and one copied from a template site at 11pm, because both documents use the same language.
Geoff Smart and Randy Street, who spent years studying why senior hires fail, draw a hard line between the two in their book Who. A job description, they write, is a list of duties. A scorecard is "a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well." One tells someone what to do. The other tells them what winning looks like. Most businesses only ever write the first one, then wonder why the person they hired is busy without being effective.
Smart and Street go further, citing Peter Drucker's estimate that the hiring success rate for managers sits around 50%. A coin flip. Half the time, businesses that write detailed job descriptions, run interviews, check references and make a considered offer still get it wrong — and the brief, not the interview, is usually where the wrongness started.
Outcomes, not tasks — and why this is harder than it sounds
"Manage the sales pipeline" is a task. "Build and close $600,000 in new business within 12 months, with at least 40% self-sourced" is an outcome. The first sentence could describe almost any BDM role in the country. The second one can only describe yours.
That sounds obvious once it's written down. It isn't obvious when you're the one writing the brief, because outcomes require you to already know things most founders and sales leaders haven't actually worked out: what a realistic ramp looks like for this role, where pipeline should come from, what good looks like at 90 days versus 12 months. Tasks are easy to write because they don't require that thinking. Outcomes are hard to write because they force you to do it before the ad goes live, instead of discovering the gaps in real time with a live human being's income attached to the discovery.
This is the part hiring managers quietly skip. Writing "achieve sales targets" instead of naming the number, the timeframe and the source of the pipeline isn't laziness exactly. It's avoidance. Naming the real number means someone can hold you to it later — including the candidate, who can point back at the brief and say, "this isn't the job I was told about."
That avoidance has a cost you can actually measure. ZipRecruiter's new-hire research found 15% of new employees say their actual role barely matched, or didn't match at all, the job description they were hired against. More than a quarter — 26% — said they'd restart their job search over that gap between promise and reality. Among new hires who end up dissatisfied, 78% plan to leave before their first year is out. Compare that with highly satisfied new hires, of whom nearly half expect to stay five years or more. The difference between those two outcomes is rarely the person. It's usually the document that set the expectation in the first place.
The territory and motion question nobody answers until month three
A brief that skips outcomes almost always skips this too: what is this person actually selling into, and how? New logo or expansion revenue? Inbound-qualified leads or genuinely cold outbound? A named list of 200 accounts, or "the Australian market" — which isn't a territory, it's a continent.
Every one of those distinctions changes who you should hire. A brief that doesn't specify them isn't neutral. It's an invitation for the hiring manager to picture one kind of role and the candidate to picture another, and for both of them to discover the mismatch only once someone's already resigned from their last job to take this one.
Write the motion down the way you'd write it in a board deck, not the way you'd describe it to a mate at a barbecue. "Outbound to a named list of 150 mid-market manufacturing accounts across New South Wales and Victoria" tells a candidate exactly what they're walking into. "New business development" tells them nothing, and the ambiguity doesn't disappear just because nobody said it out loud. It moves downstream, to week three, when the new hire realises the pipeline they were promised doesn't exist yet.
The comp plan hiding at the bottom, if it's there at all
Most briefs mention salary as a range, buried under three paragraphs of "who we are." Almost none explain how commission actually pays out against the outcomes described two sections earlier, because most people writing the brief haven't checked whether the comp plan and the target are even mathematically compatible.
If the outcome section promises $600,000 in new business and the comp section doesn't show what that number pays a rep who hits it, you haven't written one brief. You've written two documents that don't know about each other — and the candidate reading both is the first person who'll notice they don't add up.
What "success in the first 90 days" actually means
Here's the test that separates a real brief from a template: can you write, in advance, what a hiring manager will say in the week-13 review if this hire is working? Not "settling in well." Something specific — call volume against target, a named number of self-sourced opportunities, a percentage of ramp-quota achieved. If you can't write that sentence before the person starts, you're not managing performance for the first 90 days. You're deciding after the fact whether you like them, and calling it a review.
Write that sentence into the brief itself. It does something most hiring managers don't expect: it filters out weaker candidates before you've spent a single hour interviewing them. A vague brief attracts people comfortable with vague expectations. A specific one attracts people who actually want to be measured against something real.
The uncomfortable finish
Every hiring manager who's made a bad sales hire can point to the interview, the reference check, the onboarding. Almost none of them go back to the brief, because the brief is the part they wrote themselves, alone, usually in a hurry, usually copying the last one. It's the easiest place to find the mistake and the hardest place to admit it.
So before you write the next one, ask yourself the honest question. Are you writing a brief that defines the job, or a document that lets you stop thinking about it and get back to your actual work? Those two documents look almost identical on the page. Only one of them hires the right person.
If you'd rather build the outcomes-based brief properly before the ad goes live than fix the hire after it's gone wrong, that's exactly where SalesHQ starts every search.
If you want help diagnosing the real issue — or hiring the right profile for the motion you actually run — talk to SalesHQ, or download the FY2027 Sales Salary Guide.
Ready to hire or take the next step in your sales career?