Comparison - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
All three will help with your commercial problem. Only one of them is accountable for whether the revenue arrives. The difference is not seniority or price - it is who holds the outcome when the engagement ends.
The short answer
A consultant analyses your commercial problem and recommends what to do. The deliverable is the recommendation. Whether it works is your risk.
An agency delivers activity within a defined channel - paid, content, outbound, PR - against a scope you set. The deliverable is the activity. Whether that channel was the right choice is your risk.
A fractional CCO owns the commercial function and does the work personally: builds the Ideal Customer Profile, the positioning, the pricing and the pipeline, then runs the outreach to prove it converts. The deliverable is a working commercial model and the evidence that it works.
The distinction is accountability. Consultants and agencies are accountable for a deliverable. A fractional CCO is accountable for an outcome - which is why the good ones will tell you when you do not need them.
Part 01
| Consultant | Agency | Fractional CCO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Analysis and recommendations | Delivery within one channel | Ownership of the whole commercial function |
| Who does the selling | You, afterwards | Leads passed to you to convert | They do, personally, to prove the model |
| Scope | Fixed project with a defined question | The channel you have contracted for | ICP, positioning, pricing, GTM, pipeline, outreach |
| Accountable for | The quality of the recommendation | The agreed activity and channel metrics | Commercial outcomes agreed in the plan |
| Ends with | A document | A rolling retainer | A documented process and a handover |
| Typical failure mode | Good strategy nobody implements | Efficient delivery of the wrong message | You paid for foundations that were already sound |
| Right when | You need one decision properly informed | The strategy is proven and you need capacity | The commercial foundations are missing or broken |
Part 02
Good consultancy is genuinely valuable, and I am not about to pretend otherwise - the free working session I offer instead of a proposal is consultancy.
Where it earns its money is a bounded question with a real decision attached. Should we enter this market. Is this acquisition commercially sound. Why has margin moved. Somebody rigorous spends a defined period on it and comes back with an answer you can act on.
Where it fails is the unbounded commercial overhaul. A strategy document is a hypothesis. Until somebody takes it to real buyers, you do not know whether the ICP is right, whether the message lands, or whether the price holds.
The most common outcome of a commercial strategy engagement is a well-argued document that never gets implemented - because the people who have to implement it were not involved in building it, already have full-time jobs, and were not in the room when the trade-offs were made. That is not a failure of the analysis. It is a failure of the model.
The test I would apply: ask who is running the first ten outreach conversations after the recommendations land. If the answer is your already-stretched team, discount the value of the document accordingly.
Part 03
Agencies are specialists in delivery, and at delivery they are usually better than you or I would be. A strong outbound agency will out-execute an in-house attempt; a strong paid team will out-perform a founder learning the platform at weekends.
The limitation is structural rather than a criticism. An agency operates inside the channel you have contracted for, against the brief you have given, using the proposition you have supplied. It is not their job to tell you the proposition is wrong - and commercially, it is not in their interest.
So agency spend works when the commercial model is validated and the constraint is capacity or specialist skill. It goes badly when it is asked to compensate for a structural problem:
Each of those is a commercial architecture problem wearing a marketing costume. No amount of channel optimisation resolves it, and the reporting will look reasonable throughout.
Part 04
Ownership, and the execution that proves it.
The framework is not handed over as a deck. I build the Ideal Customer Profile, the proposition, the pricing and the pipeline architecture, and then I run the outreach myself - lead generation, pitching, presenting, negotiating - to find out what actually converts.
That is the part that cannot be outsourced to either of the other two models. A consultant will not run your outreach; an agency will run it against a brief nobody has validated. Doing both jobs in one person is the only way the feedback loop closes fast enough to matter.
Two consequences worth being explicit about:
The breadth is also different in kind. Because fractional CCOs work across several businesses at once, the pattern recognition is wider than any single-company hire can offer - you have seen the same problem in five contexts, and you know which solutions take six months to prove they do not work.
Part 05
The titles overlap far more than the models do. These questions separate them quickly.
If the answer is your team, you are buying advice. If it is a junior on their side, you are buying an agency. If it is the person in front of you, you are buying a fractional executive.
A document is consultancy. A monthly activity report is an agency. A working commercial model with conversion data attached is fractional ownership.
Anyone with genuine commercial accountability can answer this immediately and specifically. A blank look means the model is a retainer, whatever it is called.
A consultant ends at the deliverable. An agency, honestly, would rather it did not end. A fractional CCO should be describing the handover and the permanent hire before you have signed anything.
A commercial adviser with a financial interest in one channel is no longer giving you commercial advice. Third-party costs should be yours, visible, and unmarked.
Part 06
Worth separating, because the words get used interchangeably and mean quite different commitments.
The practical difference shows up in the contract and the tax treatment as much as the calendar - which is covered in the IR35 guide. It also shows up in intent: interim holds a seat until it is filled, fractional builds something that changes what the seat needs to be.
Questions
No, and the difference is testable: ask who runs the outreach. A consultant analyses and recommends, and implementation is your risk. A fractional CCO builds the commercial model and then personally does the lead generation, pitching and negotiating to prove it converts. One produces a document; the other produces a working process with conversion data attached.
If your commercial model is validated - you know who buys, why, and at what price - then yes, an agency is often the efficient answer, because the constraint is delivery capacity. If any of those things are still assumptions, agency spend delivers the wrong message efficiently, which is more expensive than it looks because the reporting stays healthy while revenue does not.
Yes, and that is frequently part of the value. Someone accountable for total commercial outcomes rather than channel metrics will brief agencies properly, hold them to the right measures, and stop paying for activity that is not converting. It also gives your agencies a single decision-maker instead of a committee.
Interim is full-time temporary cover for a vacant role, and the brief is continuity. Fractional is an ongoing part-time arrangement with genuine ownership of a defined commercial scope, and the brief is to build something that works and hand it over. Different commitment, different contract, different intent.
Possibly not - it depends whether it has been tested. A strategy document is a hypothesis until someone has taken it to real buyers and found out whether the ICP is right, the message lands and the price holds. If that has happened and the numbers support it, you need execution capacity. If it has not, the document is a starting point rather than an answer.
No. You get me. That is the whole point of the model - the person who designs the commercial architecture is the person who takes it to market, because otherwise the feedback loop between strategy and reality never closes. Third-party delivery resource is your choice and your cost, quoted separately and never marked up.
Book a free 30-minute call. If the honest answer is that an agency or a one-off piece of consultancy serves you better, I will say so - it is a faster conversation than a proposal and considerably more useful.
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