The question I get most often from founders at £1M–£3M ARR is some version of: “Should I hire a CRO or use a fractional one?” The answer depends on your specific situation, but most people ask it without having done an honest comparison of the numbers. So let’s do that.
What a full-time CRO actually costs in the UK
The salary ranges for Chief Revenue Officers in the UK — particularly in London and the South East — are genuinely significant. A credible CRO with relevant experience and a track record of scaling B2B revenue will expect a base salary of £130k–£180k. Total OTE (on-target earnings, including bonus) typically runs £160k–£220k for the calibre of person who can actually do the job.
That’s the number candidates quote. It is not the number the role costs you.
Total employment cost adds roughly 20–25% on top of salary once you factor in:
- Employer National Insurance (13.8% on earnings above the secondary threshold — at £130k base salary, that’s approximately £17k per year)
- Employer pension contributions (minimum 3%, more commonly 5% — call it £6k–£9k at this salary level)
- Benefits: private health insurance, life assurance, income protection — typically £3k–£6k per year for a senior hire
- Recruitment fees: typically 15–20% of first-year salary for a retained or contingency search at this level — that’s £20k–£36k as a one-off cost
- Equity: most CROs at this stage will expect options. This is dilutive and has a real value, even if it doesn’t show up as a cash cost today.
Adding it together: a credible full-time CRO in the UK costs you somewhere between £180k and £260k per year in total employment cost, excluding equity. In year one, add the recruitment fee and onboarding costs on top.
Time-to-value: the hidden cost of hiring
The recruitment process for a senior commercial hire typically takes three to six months. That’s time to brief the search, run a process, interview, reference check, agree terms, work a notice period, and actually have someone in the building. For a CRO coming from a larger business, notice periods of three months are standard.
Then there’s the ramp period. A new CRO needs to understand your customers, your pipeline, your team, your positioning, and your current go-to-market motion before they can start making meaningful decisions. For a fair shot at success, that realistically takes another two to three months.
You could easily be nine months into the process before your CRO is operating at full effectiveness. During that time, you’ve been paying full salary and on-costs, the commercial function has been without experienced leadership, and deals may have been lost or mismanaged as a result.
That’s not an argument against hiring — it’s an argument for being honest about the full cost of the decision.
What fractional CRO engagement costs
I’ve covered the specifics in more detail in my post on fractional CRO cost in the UK, but as a general frame: a fractional CRO typically engages at a day rate or a monthly retainer, working between one and three days per week depending on the scope.
At typical market rates for experienced fractional CROs in the UK, you’re looking at £8k–£20k per month depending on time commitment and scope. At two days a week, that’s roughly £10k–£14k per month.
The maths against a full-time hire are stark. At £12k per month for a fractional engagement, you’re spending £144k per year — likely less than the total employment cost of the full-time version, without the recruitment fee, without the equity dilution, and without the three-to-six-month time-to-hire.
More importantly, a fractional CRO is typically operational within two to three weeks. They’ve done this before in similar businesses, they have a framework for rapid assessment, and they’re not on a ramp period — they’re expected to add value immediately.
The risk profile is different too
Hiring a full-time CRO is a two-to-three year commitment, at minimum. Getting it wrong — a bad hire, a mismatch on culture, someone who’s great at operating but can’t build, or who’s a builder but struggles to manage an inherited team — is expensive to unwind. You’re looking at a six-to-twelve-month performance management process or a costly redundancy, on top of the wasted time while the problem was developing.
The downside risk of a full-time CRO hire going wrong at £2M ARR is significant enough that it can set a business back by twelve to eighteen months.
Fractional is structurally lower risk. Engagements are typically scoped in three to six month blocks. If it’s not working — because of fit, because the problem turned out to be different, because you needed something different from what you thought — you can exit cleanly without the legal, financial, and morale cost of a senior departure.
When full-time eventually makes more sense
I’m not arguing that fractional is always the right answer. It isn’t.
A full-time CRO makes sense when:
- You have a sales team of eight or more people who need day-to-day leadership and management, not just strategic direction
- You’re operating at £5M+ ARR with the revenue and operational complexity to justify the cost and the need for someone embedded full-time
- You have a board or investors who require a named CRO on the leadership team for governance or fundraising purposes
- The nature of the role is heavily relationship-dependent — some commercial leadership roles, particularly in enterprise sales, require deep internal presence that fractional can’t provide
- You’ve already established your sales infrastructure and the role is primarily about managing and executing, not building
The transition from fractional to full-time is a natural progression. Some of my engagements are explicitly structured to assess whether a full-time hire is needed, help define what good looks like, and sometimes run the hiring process once the business is ready — so there’s a proper brief and a clear handover.
When fractional is genuinely not the right answer
I’ll be direct about this too.
If your business needs someone to be the public-facing sales leader in customer relationships — attending large enterprise accounts, representing the business in key deals — fractional has limits. Three days a week means missed calls and delayed responses, and that matters in relationship-intensive sales motions.
If your investors expect a full C-suite and will raise concerns about the commercial function being “fractional”, that’s a real constraint, even if it’s partly optics.
And if the root problem in your business is not the strategy or the infrastructure but the sheer volume of hands-on work — you just need more capacity — then fractional leadership doesn’t solve a headcount problem.
The honest question to ask is: what does this role actually need to do, day to day? If the answer is primarily “build the infrastructure, set the strategy, run the pipeline process, and develop the team’s capability”, fractional works well. If the answer is “manage a large team and be present full-time”, it doesn’t.
For most B2B businesses at £500k–£3M ARR, the fractional model covers what’s actually needed — and covers it at a fraction of the total cost. To understand what a fractional CRO engagement looks like in practice, or to explore the cost breakdown in more detail, you can read more at /fractional-cro. If you’d like to talk through what your business specifically needs, get in touch.