Service
Fractional sales and commercial leadership
Fractional commercial leadership gives a founder-led business a senior sales leader for a day or two a week. I find what's broken in your sales system, or build it from scratch, and make the people already selling more successful. You get a working system you can see and run, and you own all of it.
Who is it for?
Founders and owners who have outgrown selling everything themselves but can't yet justify a full-time sales director. Two situations come up most.
- You've never had a sales leader. You sell, maybe with a junior or two, and growth has hit the ceiling of your own hours.
- You have a sales lead and results are flat. You want senior capability added without it threatening anyone's role. I'm there to make the person already doing the job more successful.
It suits founders who see sales as a system that improves step by step. If you need a revenue figure guaranteed by a date, I'm the wrong person.
What problems does it solve?
- The pipeline lives in the founder's head and nothing can be forecast
- Deals only close when the founder is in the room, and every discount waits for sign-off
- Leads come in and nobody follows them up or tracks what converts
- The CRM holds a company name and not much else
- A top salesperson was promoted into management and the team has stalled since
- New hires take months to reach target, or never get there
How does an engagement run?
Understand the business.
Meetings with you and the team, some in person, to see how sales works day to day.
Diagnose.
A written research paper on the current state of play, so we agree what the situation is before anything changes.
Map the process.
Ideal customer profile and ideal customer situation, stages, qualification and handovers, written down and agreed with you.
Build.
Weekly pipeline reviews, enrichment built on your ideal customer situation (I build these in Clay), cold email variants in a sequencing tool (I use Lemlist) and a playbook draft covering the full sales cycle.
Launch and improve.
The system goes live, the first numbers come in, and each month we fix the next thing that isn't working yet.
Everything is built fresh for your business and set up in your own accounts. Nothing made for a previous client is reused.
Why work with me?
I've run sales functions rather than advised on them. At an award-winning UK performance marketing agency I led a 25-person sales organisation across the UK and US, carrying £4.5M in annual recurring revenue. At Docan, an engineering software business, I built the sales function from zero. I wrote the business case for a £40k CRM transformation, sold it to the board and ran the 15-seat pilot.
I also know your side of the table. I founded Tandem Recruit and grew it to 20 active clients, then stopped because I couldn't sell and grow the business at the same time. I'm building Nodus now. See the full track record
Everything in fractional sales leadership
5 of 5 shown
- 01Fractional sales directorA senior sales leader in your business one day a week, running the system, coaching the team and working live deals.
- 02Go-to-market strategyWho to sell to, what to say, which channels and in what order, tested with real prospects within weeks.
- 03Sales process and playbookThe stages, qualification and handovers written down, so every lead gets handled the same way.
- 04CRM setup and pipeline managementHubSpot rebuilt around how you sell, with fit scoring and a weekly pipeline review.
- 05Moving beyond founder-led salesA repeatable way to win business outside your network, and approval rules that let deals move without you.
From experience
Seehab AhmedFounder, Stratus Growth
At the agency, the UK sales team was failing because a top seller had been promoted into management and it hadn't worked. It needed new people, lead data run by a system rather than instinct, live coaching for the SDRs and tracking for lead-to-deal rates and missed upsells. Within four months it went from missing every H1 target to 109% of quota.
The sales process is as important as the lead generation. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if you don't nurture them or get them to buy, what was the point?
In the same organisation, average contract value rose 20%, from £4,400 to £5,300, and the time for a new hire to reach first target fell from 12 weeks to 6.
Industries I know from the inside
- IndustryMarketing agenciesI ran a 25-person sales organisation at an award-winning UK performance marketing agency. I help agencies build sales systems that don't depend on two or three top sellers.
- IndustryRecruitment businessesI founded Tandem Recruit, built an AI recruitment platform and billed at PageGroup. I help recruitment firms build business development that doesn't hang on a few billers.
Questions people ask
How many days a week is a fractional sales director?
Will you manage my sales team?
What will I have after 90 days?
What are the terms?
Two ways to start
Free
You're weighing up ongoing help
A 60-minute call to work out what's going on and whether I'm the right person to fix it. If I'm not, I'll say so on the call and tell you what would help instead.
£150 · One hour · No VAT is charged
You have one question that needs a straight answer
Bring the question. You leave the hour with my answer and the reasoning behind it, with no retainer and no obligation afterwards.
Not sure which? Answer three questions and I'll point you to the right one.