Comparison - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
Four commercial leadership titles, routinely used interchangeably, that own completely different things. Pick the wrong one and you spend twelve months and a six-figure salary discovering the problem was never the one you hired for.
The short answer
Hire a VP of Sales or Sales Director when you have a proven, repeatable sales process and need someone to scale it with a team.
Hire a CRO when the commercial model demonstrably works and revenue delivery needs professionalising and scaling across the whole funnel.
Hire a fractional CCO when the commercial foundations - Ideal Customer Profile, positioning, pricing, go-to-market - either do not exist yet or have stopped working, and you need them built and proven before you commit to a permanent hire.
The test is one question: is the problem the execution of a known process, or the absence of one? Execution problems are solved by sales leadership. Architecture problems are not, and hiring sales leadership to solve them is the single most expensive mistake I see.
Part 01
| Role | What they own | What must already exist | What breaks if you hire wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales Director / VP Sales | The sales team, quota attainment, sales process discipline | A repeatable process that converts, and enough pipeline to work | They inherit no playbook, invent one under quota pressure, miss, and leave inside a year |
| CRO | All revenue delivery - sales, customer success, often marketing - against agreed targets | A validated commercial model and a team large enough to warrant an executive over it | You pay executive money to optimise a model that is fundamentally mispriced or aimed at the wrong buyer |
| CMO | Brand, positioning, demand generation, the marketing function | A clear commercial strategy for marketing to serve | Demand arrives that sales cannot convert, and both functions blame each other with some justification |
| Fractional CCO | The whole commercial architecture: ICP, positioning, pricing, GTM, pipeline, plus the outreach to prove it | A product or service someone can buy, and appetite for honest change | If the foundations were already sound, you have bought strategy you did not need |
Note the third column. It is the one that gets skipped in board discussions, and it is the one that determines whether the hire can possibly succeed.
Part 02
A good Sales Director takes a process that works and makes it work more times. They hire, coach, forecast, enforce CRM discipline, and hold a team to quota. That is a real and valuable skill set.
It is not the same skill set as working out who to sell to, what to say, and what to charge. Those are strategic questions, and most sales leaders have never had to answer them from scratch - because in every previous role, somebody else already had.
This is the classic first sales hire mistake. A founder is stretched, revenue is lumpy, so they hire a Sales Director and expect them to build the commercial function from nothing. The Sales Director expects an existing pipeline and a proven pitch. Neither expectation is unreasonable; they are just incompatible. Twelve months later the role is vacant again and the underlying problem is unchanged.
There is a fuller version of that argument in why your B2B startup doesn’t need a Sales Director yet, and a practical readiness test in the guide on when to hire one.
Part 03
Chief Revenue Officer is a scaling title. The role exists to take accountability for all revenue delivery - typically sales, customer success and renewals, sometimes marketing too - and to hit a number the board has already agreed is achievable.
The implicit assumption is enormous: that the commercial model is sound. A CRO optimises conversion, coverage, forecasting accuracy, and team performance against an existing motion. They are generally not hired to decide the motion was wrong.
So a CRO is the right appointment when you can already say, with data: we know who buys, we know why, we know what they pay, and we convert at a predictable rate. If you cannot say those four things, a CRO will spend their first two quarters discovering it - at executive cost.
CCO and CRO are frequently treated as synonyms. The useful distinction: a CCO owns the commercial model - what we sell, to whom, at what price, through which channels. A CRO owns the delivery of revenue against that model. One designs the machine; the other runs it hard.
Part 04
A CMO is the right answer when your genuine constraint is awareness and demand: the proposition converts when it reaches the right buyer, and not enough of the right buyers know you exist.
Where it goes wrong is when marketing is asked to compensate for a commercial structure problem. More leads into a funnel that leaks at qualification produces more cost, more noise, and an argument between two departments.
That argument is structural rather than personal, and I have written about it at length in silos are stealing your margin. The short version: when sales and marketing report to different people with different metrics, nobody owns the handover, and the handover is where the money goes.
Part 05
A fractional CCO owns the whole commercial function part-time, usually one to three days a week, and - this is the part that distinguishes the role - does the work personally rather than advising on it.
The scope is the architecture the other three roles all depend on:
And then the outreach itself: lead generation, pitching, presenting, negotiating. Not delegated. That is the only way to find out whether the architecture survives contact with a real buyer - which a strategy document, however good, cannot tell you.
Because the role is fractional, the cost is proportionate: retainers from £1,800 per month, outside IR35, with no employer National Insurance, pension or benefits attached. That is the arithmetic set out on what a fractional CCO costs in the UK.
Part 06
Deals close, but not predictably, and the reasons differ every time. That is an architecture problem. A fractional CCO first; sales leadership once the pattern is documented.
Look at where it leaks before you hire anyone. Leaks at qualification are usually an ICP or positioning problem. Leaks at close are usually process or pricing.
This is the clearest case for a Sales Director or VP of Sales. Hire the scaler, give them the playbook, hold them to the number.
Nobody owns the join. A single revenue owner fixes this - and it is worth proving that fractionally before you create a permanent executive seat around it.
Classic misalignment. The fix is a shared definition of a qualified lead, owned by one person with authority over both functions.
If the pipeline data does not yet support the story, the answer is commercial architecture and evidence - not a more senior person to tell the story.
You are past the fractional stage. Hire the permanent CRO or CCO. Anyone advising otherwise is selling you something.
Part 07
These roles are not really competing options. They are stages.
Commercial architecture gets built and validated. Then sales leadership scales it. Then a revenue executive professionalises delivery across the whole funnel. Taken in that order, each hire inherits something that works.
Taken out of order, each hire spends their first two quarters doing the previous stage’s job badly, under pressure, on a salary priced for a different problem. That is the expensive version.
The fractional model exists to make the first stage affordable and reversible - and to make the second hire obviously right when you make it. When a fractional engagement ends with “you are ready for a full-time Sales Director, here is the brief and here is how to assess them,” that is the whole sequence working as intended.
Questions
A Chief Commercial Officer owns the commercial model: what you sell, who you sell it to, at what price, and through which channels. A Chief Revenue Officer owns the delivery of revenue against that model - forecasting, conversion, coverage and team performance. In practice a CCO is the right title when the model itself is in question, and a CRO is the right title when it is not.
For a period, yes - a fractional CCO will typically run outreach, pitch and negotiate personally while the commercial process is being proven. What they will not do is permanently line-manage a growing sales team. Once there is a validated process and a team to run it, a full-time sales leader is the correct and cheaper answer.
Ask whether your constraint is demand or structure. If the proposition converts well when it reaches the right buyer and you simply need more of those buyers to know you exist, that is a CMO. If leads arrive and fail to convert, or sales and marketing disagree about what a good lead looks like, that is a commercial structure problem and a CMO will not fix it.
Usually, yes - substantially. A UK Sales Director costs roughly £80,000 to £150,000 a year plus OTE, employer National Insurance, pension and benefits. Fractional retainers start at £1,800 a month and carry none of those employment costs. But cost is the second question. The first is which role solves your actual problem, because the cheap wrong hire is the expensive one.
The engagement is designed to end. In my case that usually means writing the role brief, helping assess candidates, and handing over a documented commercial process with evidence of what works - then stepping back, sometimes to an advisory or non-executive role, sometimes entirely.
Most businesses never need all four. A company at £50M with a large commercial organisation may well have a CRO and a CMO reporting to a CCO. A £10M business with one revenue owner and a small team almost certainly should not. Add executive seats when the organisation genuinely requires the span of control, not because the org chart looks incomplete.
Book a free 30-minute call. Tell me where revenue is stuck and I’ll tell you honestly which of these roles fixes it - including when the answer is a full-time hire rather than me.
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