Fractional CRO or a full-time sales head: how to choose

Owners often draft a job description for a "sales head" and discover it describes a person who does not exist: a planner, a coach, a closer and a traveller on one salary. The way to choose between a fractional chief revenue officer and a full-time sales head is to sort the lines of that description by what they need. Plan and rules lines suit a part-time senior person. People lines that need someone present every day suit a full-time head. Count the lines and the answer often becomes clear.

Sort every line of the draft

Start with your draft and write each duty on its own line. Beside it, mark one of three letters. P means plan: a forecast, a pricing rule, a pay scheme, dealer margins. M means managing people: coaching, reviewing calls, travelling with sellers, hiring. S means the person must be on the floor on a given day, for a customer or a seller who needs you there.

Set targets and quotas by territory                      P
Fix dealer margins and the discount ladder               P
Build the quarterly forecast                             P
Decide the response to a competitor's price cut          P
Design the sellers' pay scheme                           P
Report to the owner on pipeline health                   P
Review quotes before they go out                         P/M
Coach the three sellers on negotiation                   M
Join the biggest dealer meetings                         S
Handle angry customers                                   S

Here, six lines are plan, one is mixed, one is coaching and two need presence. That is a part-time job with a small coaching element, and it does not justify a full-time senior salary. If the list had been mostly M and S, with eight or ten sellers needing weekly coaching, the answer would flip.

What each role is, once you have sorted

A fractional CRO is a part-time senior leader who owns the revenue plan across sales, marketing and customer success for an agreed number of days. The role sets the forecast, pricing logic, pay design and reporting, and helps hire. It does not sit in your office all week. Agree in writing which decisions the leader can take alone, such as pricing rules or territory changes, and which come to you. Without that, the role turns into advice nobody is obliged to follow.

A full-time sales head runs the team every day: coaching, reviewing calls, travelling with sellers, taking the angry customer and the promotion decision. The value is presence. If you picture that person at the whiteboard every morning, you want this role. If you picture someone sitting with you for a few days to rewrite how you price and plan, you want the other.

A case: a packaged-water plant maker in Latur

Here is an invented case. A firm in Latur builds small packaged-water plants and sells them through four dealers, with two seasoned sellers. The owner wrote a job description for a sales head with a large salary. On sorting it, nine of eleven lines were plan lines. Nobody needed managing daily.

The first plan was to hire anyway, on the feeling that "a real company has a sales head". The mistake was visible in one line of the draft: "reports on dealer performance". There was no dealer data to report on. Hiring a senior full-timer would have meant paying for months before there was anything to lead.

The firm took a fractional leader for the plan: dealer margins, targets, a one-page forecast. It named its office manager as the person inside who carried out each decision. The saved money went on a third seller, which the order book needed more. The dealer data took a full quarter to build before the fractional leader had anything to plan from, and one dealer left in that time.

Four checks that overrule the sort

Even when the sort points one way, test it against these.

Ask first how many people you need coached. With eight or ten sellers needing regular coaching, a part-time leader cannot cover it. Next, is there a trusted person inside who could grow into the job? If so, a fractional leader as mentor, with a review later, may be the better path. Third, look at your cash. A senior full-time hire needs time before producing results, and a thin balance sheet feels that. Last, ask whether you can say in one sentence what the leader must deliver first. If you cannot, start with the plan before hiring anybody.

If you start fractional, plan the exit on day one. The fractional leader should help you hire and brief the successor, so that when the team grows past what a few days of senior time can cover, the move to a full-time head is a handover and not a restart.

Where the fractional route can fail

Divided attention is the first risk. A person with several clients is not always reachable, so agree response expectations in writing and check them against what happens. The second is advice without follow-through. If nobody inside owns the actions, nothing moves between visits, so name one person on your side to carry each decision out. The third is fit. Capital goods with long sales cycles can be hard for an outsider, so ask for experience in similar sales and not only the title.

The full-time route has its own risks: an expensive error that is hard to reverse, and a hire who arrives with habits from a bigger firm. Note too that a fractional leader can join key meetings and coach, but cannot carry a number personally. If you want that, hire a seller.

When neither is the answer

With fewer than two sellers and no steady enquiries, the problem is probably the offer or the lead flow and not leadership. Fix that first, and see how a fractional CMO answers the same question on the marketing side. The earlier stage, when the founder is still the bottleneck, is in when a fractional head of sales makes sense.

Sort your own draft today

Write the duties on separate lines and mark each P, M or S. If the page is mostly plans and rules, a part-time leader is likely to be enough. If it is mostly people, hire. When the page is ready and you want a second view, tell us what you need; the wider question of how a sales team runs sits under sales.