Commercial leadership is the hire where importing assumptions from headquarters does the most damage. Brazil is a large, regionally fragmented market where B2B buying leans heavily on established relationships, and a go-to-market model that works elsewhere often needs more than translation.
Distribution and channel are the hard part
In many sectors here, reaching customers means working through distributors, representatives or regional partners rather than selling direct. Those relationships are held by individuals and take years to build — which makes channel strategy, and the person who owns it, disproportionately important.
It also means a strong candidate's network is a real asset rather than a line on a CV. That is worth probing specifically: which relationships are theirs, which belonged to the employer, and what actually transfers.
Commission interacts with employment law
Commercial staff in Brazil are typically employed under CLT, and variable pay is not a free-standing bonus the way it often is elsewhere. Commissions paid habitually are generally treated as part of remuneration, which means they affect the calculation base for entitlements such as vacation pay, the thirteenth salary and severance deposits.
The practical consequence is that a compensation plan designed abroad can cost meaningfully more than modelled, and can be difficult to reduce later. Design it with Brazilian counsel before the first offer — changing commission structures after the fact is legally and culturally harder here than in most markets.
What to assess
Separate what the candidate inherited from what they built. Someone who ran a mature operation in a growing market and someone who rebuilt coverage in a difficult one show similar numbers and are not comparable. The honest answer to that question predicts more than any target attainment figure.
For a subsidiary there is a second dimension: whether the person can operate with a reporting line abroad — escalating early, and translating local channel realities into terms headquarters can act on rather than simply absorbing pressure and going quiet.
Promoting the strongest individual seller is the recurring error, here as anywhere. The skills that close deals personally are not the skills that design territory coverage and discount policy, and the failure shows up as a leader who keeps selling while the team never develops.
Follow-up continues for 90 days. Revenue cycles rarely resolve in that window, so the signal to watch is whether the person changed something structural — coverage, process, pricing discipline. Someone who only inherits the existing plan tends to keep inheriting it.
