Working with a Fractional Sales Lead in your B2B startup

You’ve identified a problem, built an MVP or a beta product, raised some money and now you’re looking to iterate as fast as possible.

Read on to learn about how having a fractional sales lead in your corner can help you move things along faster, avoid many common founder mistakes and help you reach product market fit more confidently.

When? 

A fractional sales lead can support you as early as in stealth, with a beta product but without any processes or customers in place yet. Or you may be slightly further along, having generated some early revenue, identified your ICP and reached some repeatability in sales. You may even have made your first one or two first sales hires.

For VC backed businesses, this may be post pre-seed or at seed. 

Why?

In the early days of building a tech company, sales is, as it should be, founder-led. You will be focusing on speaking to as many potential users of your product as possible, so you can iterate and build based on feedback.  Being theoretical for too long, by researching the market and the competition while trying to build a perfect product, is a common mistake.

There is no reason to wait, speaking to people from day one is key. Even if you’re building in stealth.

You are working towards finding product market fit and feeling that pull from the market (you’ll know when it’s there). You want to generate enough traction for the next stage in the journey so you can start scaling things up, and go in to a next fundraise with confidence.

The world of business development and sales may however be new to you, especially if you're a team of founders with technical backgrounds.

This can sometimes lead to slow progress on the sales efforts, or in the worst case, make you think there isn’t a market for your product when there is. 

Once your own networks are exhausted you may struggle with getting in front of relevant people. You may not be capturing the full value from conversations, falling into the trap of too much demo and too little exploration, or not feeling confident in leading companies down the funnel in the right way post meetings. You may feel unsure about how to handle negotiation and pricing conversations. Or you may not be building out a relevant sales playbook, meaning that the knowledge gap will be big once it is actually time to start hiring a sales team.

Or you may not struggle with any of these things, but simply find that it’s inefficient trying to handle the go-to-market efforts yourself, while also managing the product development side of things.

Before you’ve identified product market fit and some repeatability it’s generally too early for a permanent sales hire. Plus, as a founder, you are best suited to be in all those early conversations. This is where an experienced fractional sales lead can come in and support the founders. Working together to ensure things move along smoothly, but not instead of you.

How? 

Fractional typically means that they work with you on a part time basis (for example 1-2 days per week). They’ll be a contractor rather than an employee, so the relationship is flexible. But unlike a consultant or an advisor, they are completely invested in, and hands on with your business.  

As they are fractional, they are likely working with other companies simultaneously - so can bring across learnings from one company to another. 

What will they do?

It depends on your stage and goals and what you jointly agree as the focus.

If you have a MVP, you’re likely looking for feedback and the opportunity to co-build the solution with early adopters. The fractional lead can help you with the right approach to get in front of potential customers and then help manage those conversations.

They may actively outreach or use their network to book meetings, support on customer calls, handle negotiations and help ensure that beta pilots convert to paying customers.

They can help establish and narrow down your ICP, as another common mistake is to go too wide.

They can help you understand customer needs and pains, and how your product can best be positioned to suit them. From their years of experience, they may be able to ask questions that get to the root of issues faster, and pick up on subtle things in conversations that can help drive your product forward.

Most definitely they will can also help document, improve processes and draw from the knowledge they have to avoid making any costly mistakes.

If you're already some way towards achieving product market fit and generating revenue, they tend to help with making the sales process more repeatable, building out your playbook, scaling the team and building the right winning sales culture. They can review your current approach to sales and optimise it based on their experience.

They’ll be able to provide advice on when you hit the point of needing to hire for sales and can help you bring those hires up to speed.

What do they need to get started? 

This may differ, but at Studio 1% we have the experience to be able to get to work quickly.

A couple hours of understanding your product and reviewing existing conversations, messaging etc is generally enough. Understanding the vision and background of the company is key and we may also want to do some research on the market and customer options.

Setting up a shared space to collaborate that also has basic CRM possibilities is important (such as Notion) and a way to communicate with you easily (like Slack, WhatsApp). Access to shared calendars with the founders is needed and an an email on your domain is beneficial.

Could I just hire a permanent sales person instead? 

It rarely makes sense to bring onboard a full time sales hire until you as a founder have closed a good amount of customers and there's some repeatability established. And when you do, you may want to focus on hiring a “founding account executive”, that is someone who can run a full sales cycle but may not have more than a few years of experience in sales.

So even at that point, a fractional sales lead will still be helpful, to ensure you have the experience onboard to bring your first hires up to speed and to success.

A permanent senior sales leader (like a VP or a Head of) should in most cases wait until you have a couple reps onboard who are consistently hitting targets. At that point you’ll need to have both the budget for the senior person, and budget for them to hire and scale a team.

If you try to do this too early you’ll run the risk of causing a lot of frustration and friction. Another big tip once you get here is to hire for your stage, you need someone who has done 0-1 or 1-5 before, not someone who has been a leader in a much larger organisation.

What does a fractional sales lead cost?

This may of course differ but here at Studio 1% we charge a rate per working day. Depending on your stage and current goals, we recommend working together roughly 1-2 days per week which can be adjusted depending on workload and how things are going. There may be a commission based element on new business revenue or if you're at a very early stage, kickers for meetings booked or closed customers / design partners may be a better option.

Overall, working with a fractional sales lead is cost efficient, and you get the experience of a senior sales person, at a fraction of the cost to a permanent, full-time hire. The flexibility of the contractor relationship also make it very low-risk compared to your other first “real” hires in say engineering or design that you might also be working with at this stage.

If you’re an early stage B2B SaaS founder looking to get to PMF faster and interested in the support of an experienced fractional sales lead - register your interest for a free 30 min intro call here.