Free Resource - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
A 10-point checklist to assess the strength of your commercial foundations before you scale. Takes five minutes. Saves you months.
Most startups that stall commercially haven’t failed to build a good product. They’ve failed to build the commercial architecture that sells it. Work through this checklist honestly. Tick the statements that are genuinely true - not aspirationally true.
Tick each statement that is genuinely and currently true for your business
Not just a general target market - a specific description of the exact buyer, their role, their organisation type, the problem they have, and why they would pay to solve it now.
In language our buyer actually uses - not internal language or technical jargon. If you can’t say it clearly in two sentences, your buyer can’t explain it to their board either.
If all pipeline generation requires the CEO to make the call, you don’t have a commercial process. You have a personality-dependent sales effort that won’t scale.
Every stage is defined, every team member follows the same process, and there are clear criteria for moving a prospect from one stage to the next.
Not approximately - specifically. If you can’t tell an investor what percentage of qualified leads become paying customers, you can’t forecast revenue or make rational decisions about where to invest in the funnel.
Every piece of marketing has a defined purpose in the pipeline and a measurable OKR. Marketing and sales are aligned around the same goals, not operating in separate silos.
Validated means tested. Not assumed. A segment you have outreached into, received signals from, and made deliberate commercial decisions based on what you learned.
The story you tell a customer is aligned with the story you tell an investor. The problem, the solution, the evidence, and the opportunity are described the same way by every member of the team.
Not a spreadsheet. A system that everyone uses, that reflects reality, and that produces pipeline reports you’d be comfortable showing to your investors.
Including you. If the pipeline would stall because one person was unavailable for two weeks, you don’t yet have a commercial system. You have a commercial dependency.
Your commercial architecture needs building from the ground up. Scaling now means scaling the gaps. A fractional CCO can build the foundations systematically in 90 days - before you burn through more of your runway on outreach that won’t convert.
You have some of the infrastructure in place, but the gaps are real and likely costing you. A fractional CCO would focus on identifying which gaps are causing the most commercial drag and closing them in order of impact.
You have strong commercial foundations. The question is whether you have the senior commercial capacity to accelerate from here. If the answer is no, a fractional CCO adds speed rather than structure.
A one-hour session to work through your commercial challenge directly. No commitment, no proposal. If I can’t help, I’ll tell you.
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