Sales and Marketing Director Job Description

A Sales and Marketing Director runs both halves of a company's revenue function: the marketing team that creates demand and the sales team that converts it into signed orders. At a mid-sized manufacturer, distributor, software firm or services business, this one leader writes the annual plan for pipeline and bookings, decides where the marketing budget goes, and answers to the CEO or a general manager when the quarter comes in short.

The combined title puts the handoff between the two teams under one leader. Marketing generates inquiries, scores them and passes them along; sales qualifies, works and closes them. When two separate leaders own those steps, arguments about lead quality and who gets credit can eat the weekly meeting. A single director owns the definitions (what counts as a marketing-qualified lead, when an opportunity enters the forecast, which stage triggers a handoff) and ends the argument by writing the rules.

Two jobs under one title

On the marketing side, the work tracks the duties BLS lists for marketing managers: planning campaigns and media, initiating market research, developing pricing and customer acquisition strategy, and negotiating contracts with agencies and partners. On the sales side, it tracks the sales manager profile: preparing budgets, assigning territories, setting goals for representatives, analyzing sales data and running training programs.

A typical week mixes the two. Monday opens with a pipeline review in Salesforce or HubSpot, checking coverage against the quarter's target and pressing account executives on deals that have gone quiet. Midweek brings a campaign readout: cost per lead by channel, conversion from inquiry to first meeting, and which webinar or trade show actually produced opportunities. Friday might hold a forecast call with finance and a one-on-one with the regional sales manager who is behind plan.

Where the role sits in 2026

The CMO Survey 2026, run by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, shows how marketing leaders split responsibility with sales. Among responding marketing leaders, 42.5% said marketing was primarily responsible for revenue growth at their company, up 10.3 points from 2025, while 19.4% said marketing was primarily responsible for sales. Lead generation sat with marketing at 67.1% of companies. Respondents rated marketing's work with sales and distribution at 5.8 on a 7-point scale, the closest tie marketing reported with any function.

The director also owns the systems that connect the two teams: the CRM, a marketing automation platform such as Marketo or HubSpot, attribution reporting, and the sales engagement software reps use for outbound sequences. Choosing, budgeting and cleaning up that stack is part of the job, and so is making sure every rep logs activity so the forecast means something when it reaches the CEO.

Education

BLS lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for both sales managers and advertising, promotions, and marketing managers. For the marketing side, BLS points to a business field such as marketing, or a related field such as communications, and notes that some employers prefer a master's degree. For the sales side, BLS names business as a common field of study. An MBA can help a sales leader make the case for owning brand and budget, or help a marketer show the financial fluency to carry a bookings target, but no degree replaces a record of hitting a number.

Experience

This is a leadership job, not an entry point. BLS says employers usually prefer sales managers with several years of sales experience, and that marketing managers typically come up through advertising, marketing, promotions or sales roles. As a rough guide, plan on 8 to 12 years across sales, marketing or both, including a few years managing people, before a combined director title is realistic.

The candidates who stand out can show both sides. A sales leader who has also run a demand generation budget, or a marketer who has carried a quota or managed account executives, can speak to the handoff problem from experience. Be ready to name the size of the team you led, the revenue or pipeline target you owned, and what happened to win rate, sales cycle length and customer acquisition cost on your watch.

Skills and tools

BLS notes that sales managers use customer relationship management and spreadsheet software to track sales and build forecasting models. In a combined role, that means real working knowledge of:

• CRM: Salesforce or HubSpot, including stage definitions, forecast categories and dashboard design
• Marketing automation: Marketo or HubSpot Marketing Hub for scoring, nurture and routing
• Analytics: Google Analytics 4 plus a BI tool such as Tableau or Looker for funnel and cohort reporting
• Sales methodology: MEDDICC, Challenger or SPIN, applied in deal reviews rather than slide decks
• Unit economics: CAC, lifetime value, payback period and pipeline coverage

The people side matters as much as the tools. Designing a commission plan, coaching a struggling rep, and briefing an agency on a campaign call on different muscles, and the director does all three.

Certifications

No license is required. Optional credentials that fit the role include the American Marketing Association's Professional Certified Marketer (PCM) in Marketing Management or Digital Marketing, Google Ads certifications earned through Google Skillshop, and HubSpot Academy certifications for teams running on HubSpot.

BLS does not project the Sales and Marketing Director title on its own, so the outlook comes from the two occupations it straddles. In its 2025 to 2035 projections, BLS expects employment of marketing managers to grow 7%, and the wider group of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers to grow 6%, which BLS calls faster than the average for all occupations, with about 36,300 openings a year on average for that group. Sales managers are projected to grow 4%, about as fast as the average, with about 47,300 openings a year on average. BLS expects many of those openings to come from replacing workers who change occupations or leave the labor force.

Who hires

The employer mix differs by side. Marketing managers held about 421,600 jobs in 2025; professional, scientific, and technical services employed 23% of them, management of companies and enterprises 12%, and finance and insurance, information, and wholesale trade 10% each. Sales managers held about 650,100 jobs, with wholesale trade at 21%, retail trade at 16%, professional, scientific, and technical services at 13%, and finance and insurance and manufacturing at 10% each.

Budget pressure and short-term thinking

The CMO Survey 2026 describes the climate a revenue leader now works in. Pressure from CEOs, boards and CFOs to prove marketing's value eased slightly from 2025 levels but remained the experience of most marketing leaders, and the leading response was a shift toward short-term impact over long-run gains, reported by 70.6% of marketers. The same report found acquisition spending 26% larger than retention spending, even as retention was outperforming acquisition in the performance data. A director who controls both the sales team and the marketing budget is in a position to rebalance that mix, and is the person who will be asked to defend it.

AI and the revenue stack

The CMO Survey points to AI on both sides of the funnel. It reported that Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of getting content to appear in AI-generated search results, was already in use at 41.5% of companies, and that AI contributions to sales productivity rose meaningfully year over year. The report also warned that adoption is outrunning execution: no marketing technology activity scored above 5 on its 7-point performance scale. For this role, the practical effect is more time spent deciding which tools earn a place in the stack, integrating them with the CRM, and training reps and marketers to use them well.

Where the path leads

The job can lead to vice president of sales or marketing, chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, or a general manager post with profit-and-loss ownership. A record that shows both a pipeline number and a bookings number the director personally owned is the evidence those promotions turn on.

Dear Ms. Alvarez,

Please consider me for the Sales and Marketing Director opening at Northfield Controls. For the past four years I have led both the inside sales team and the marketing group at a regional distributor of industrial sensors, and the job you posted reads like a description of the work I already do, at a larger scale.

When I took over, sales and marketing reported to different managers and agreed on almost nothing. Marketing counted form fills; sales counted meetings; neither trusted the other's numbers. My first project was to write one set of stage definitions in Salesforce, agree on what a qualified lead looked like with the account executives in the room, and route every inquiry through a single scoring model in HubSpot. Within two quarters the weekly pipeline meeting stopped being an argument about whose leads were real and became a conversation about which deals to push.

From there I rebuilt our trade show plan around the accounts our reps actually wanted to meet, cut two paid channels that produced traffic but no opportunities, and moved that budget into a partner program with three system integrators. I also redesigned our commission plan so that reps earned more for multi-year service contracts, which matched what our finance team wanted to grow.

I manage a team of eleven, including two sales managers, a demand generation lead and a content writer, and I report monthly to our president on bookings, forecast accuracy and marketing spend.

Northfield's move into building automation is exactly the kind of launch I want to lead next. I would welcome the chance to talk about how I would set up the first year.

Sincerely, Jordan Reyes