A fractional CRO (chief revenue officer) is a seasoned sales professional that leverages their expertise in multiple ways to enhance team performance and drive business success.
By working only part-time, this sales leader can help optimize the investment being made by your tech company. Fractional CROs are usually employed for one or two days per week and offer experience and a network of help, without over-burdening a startup with the high financial outlay that accompanies any C-level hire.
Just as with a full-time head of sales, a fractional CRO:
A fractional CRO can also play a key role in recruiting and mentoring full-time sales hires, setting sales performance goals, sales coaching and designing effective compensation plans. Often this foundational onboarding and coaching is managed by a cadre of resources – HR, CFO, CEO. None of these people typically have the time or energy to do this effectively, or put another way, they are better suited to managing other tasks. Sales team management is also not the value delivered by most tech companies. For these multi-taskers, having to context switch to cover sales recruitment and training becomes a burden – and a distraction from their day jobs.
Ultimately, a fractional CRO is there to help a company achieve sustainable growth with greater efficiency than if the task is shared among other managers.
There are also not-so-obvious, time-consuming tasks that include CRM and email automation setup and optimization, which, once implemented, drive down customer acquisition costs. At the outset, and perhaps for as long as a quarter or more, they require care and attention. A badly designed email outreach campaign will sink efficiency and might even do more harm than good – too many haphazard emails or posts can turn off a prospect and put you in the SPAM bin forever. A poorly implemented CRM might mean a ton of important data is lost or never properly captured. Or, especially if you live in or are targeting California or anywhere in Europe, you might be ruining your reputation by breaking CCPA or GDPR!
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Another area of sales growth that can become cumbersome includes expansion into new markets or geographies. A fractional CRO who excels in rapid recruitment, training and management of regional account executives, inside sales and sales operations is critical for a startup or scale-up that is looking to expand internationally or that wants to enhance an international presence. Using contractors in-region can also be a benefit for any company that does not have operations set up to hire and maintain benefits abroad. A good CRO will have a network of contacts to draw upon. Remember, they are habitually more efficient at these tasks than someone trying it for the first time.
A common misperception is that some companies are “too specialized” or niche to draw from a generalist’s toolkit – and in some industries, like energy or healthcare, this may be true. By and large, however, the sales playbook will vary but draw upon some standard truths about sales…and a fractional CRO, deployed before a full-time leader is warranted or affordable, can make the difference between stasis and multiple percentage points of growth.
The rise of the fractional CRO is a part of the overall RevOps movement, applying a very data-oriented revenue operations framework to align sales, marketing, customer success and finance teams to work toward the same goals. The fractional CRO sets up and starts to oversee these RevOps efforts.
A fractional CRO is especially interesting when you are expanding to new markets or verticals because you gain their expertise but don't have to commit to the cost of a full-time CRO before you've proven the new customer base.
Don't let sales slow you down. Hire a fractional CRO and watch your business soar! Let's rev those ops together!
