When a founder decides the sales function needs senior leadership, there are two obvious options: hire a Head of Sales, or bring in a Fractional CRO. They’re not the same thing, and choosing the wrong one is an expensive mistake that a lot of businesses make.
This isn’t an argument for one over the other. Both have their place. But the conditions under which each works are specific, and confusing them tends to produce bad outcomes.
If you want the full picture of what a Fractional CRO actually does before comparing, What Is a Fractional CRO? covers the role in detail. And if you’re thinking about costs, What a Fractional CRO Costs in the UK has the numbers.
What you’re actually buying in each case
A Head of Sales is an employee. You’re buying their time, their presence, their commitment, and their career. They own one thing: your revenue function. They’re building their own track record in your business, and they need enough infrastructure and support to succeed at it.
A Fractional CRO is a senior commercial operator working across a small number of businesses simultaneously. You’re buying their experience, their pattern recognition, and their ability to build (not just manage) the function. They’ve seen this before. They know what good looks like at your stage. They’re not learning on the job.
The distinction sounds subtle. It isn’t. It changes almost every aspect of how the engagement works and what you should expect from it.
When to hire a Head of Sales
You’re ready to hire a Head of Sales when you have a working process for them to run.
That’s the most common mistake in this decision: businesses hire a Head of Sales before the revenue function is properly built, and then wonder why the hire doesn’t perform. The Head of Sales shows up expecting a process, a CRM that works, qualified pipeline, and a team they can manage. They find founder-dependent selling, a CRM that nobody updates, and reps who don’t know how to close without the founder on the call.
That’s not a hiring problem. It’s a sequencing problem.
A Head of Sales is the right hire when:
- You have a documented sales process that runs without you
- The CRM reflects reality and produces useful data
- You have reps who are performing, and the leadership layer is the gap
- Revenue is at a scale where a full-time salary is justified, typically £3M ARR and above in most B2B businesses
- You’re ready to build a team, not build the process
If any of those conditions aren’t met, the Head of Sales hire is premature. You’re not ready for a manager; you need a builder.
When to bring in a Fractional CRO
Fractional is the right answer when the process doesn’t exist yet, or when it exists in the founder’s head and needs extracting.
The typical situation: a business at £500k–£3M ARR, growing, founder still closing most of the significant deals, a small sales team that’s useful but not independent, a CRM that’s either empty or full of noise. The business needs someone who can come in, diagnose what’s actually happening, build the infrastructure from scratch, and create the conditions under which a Head of Sales can eventually succeed.
That’s not something a Head of Sales is generally set up to do. Building a revenue function from scratch requires a different kind of seniority: one that’s seen multiple versions of this problem at multiple businesses, knows which approaches work and which don’t, and can execute quickly because they’re not also managing their own career trajectory in your organisation.
Fractional works well when:
- The founder is the revenue function and needs to be extracted from day-to-day deals
- There’s no documented process, or the documented process isn’t used
- The CRM doesn’t produce reliable forecasts
- Revenue is below the threshold where a full-time salary makes sense
- The business needs infrastructure built, not managed
If you recognise these conditions, Discovery Week is the right starting point: a structured diagnostic that makes clear exactly what needs building and in what order.
The sequencing argument
There’s a version of this that isn’t about choosing one or the other, but about doing them in the right order.
A Fractional CRO builds the function. They design the process, configure the CRM, define the metrics that matter, establish the rhythm of pipeline reviews and forecasting, and create the conditions under which the next hire can succeed. When the process is working (when deals close without the founder, when the forecast is accurate, when the team is executing reliably) that’s when you hire a Head of Sales to run it.
The Fractional CRO hands them a working operation rather than a blank sheet. That’s a very different proposition for a Head of Sales hire, and it dramatically improves the odds that the hire works.
Done well, the fractional engagement should end with a clear brief for the permanent hire: here’s the process, here’s the CRM, here are the metrics, here’s what you’re taking over. That’s a good starting point for someone senior.
The mistake worth avoiding
The most expensive version of this mistake is hiring a senior commercial leader (whether Fractional CRO or Head of Sales) before you’re willing to let them change things.
Senior commercial people change things. That’s the job. If the founder wants someone to validate their existing approach, neither a Head of Sales nor a Fractional CRO is the right answer. What they want is an advisor, and advisors are significantly cheaper.
The value in bringing in senior commercial leadership is the willingness to hear that your pipeline stages are wrong, your qualification is inconsistent, and the reason deals aren’t closing is the process, not the market. If that conversation isn’t welcome, the investment won’t produce much.
If you want to understand what the fractional engagement itself looks like in practice, the Fractional CRO service page has the details on scope, structure, and how engagements are typically run.