The Chief Sales Officer role has exploded in both importance and complexity in recent years. Today’s CSO is more than just the Leader of the Sale Team.  The modern CSO must have intense business acumen, a full grasp of how bookings relate to other business functions, and deep expertise in the latest sales technology and processes.

In addition, they must quickly and accurately assess talent in order to identify new team members who can reach maximum effectiveness as rapidly as possible.  Sales is no longer a monolithic silo within an organization.  It is core to the growth and survival of any business, and a CSO’s ability to interact and integrate their function with other functions within the company (marketing, product, finance, etc.) is just as important as the accuracy of their sales forecast.

A fractional CSO is an experienced sales executive who serves on a part-time or interim basis. This professional has served as a CSO or CRO for other companies and comes into the organization with the experience and knowledge to hit the ground running with minimal onboarding time and at a far lower cost than a fully-loaded FTE. While Fractional CSOs are a viable option whenever assistance is needed to improve bookings performance, the three most common situations in which fractional CSOs are engaged are:

1. When companies enter a growth stage and need to scale or re-engineer their selling function
2. When a mature organization loses a key sales leader and wants to maintain sales momentum while searching for the perfect long-term candidate as permanent CSO
3. When any company – regardless of size or maturity – seeks an immediate injection of new sales thinking without the lengthy process and high cost of hiring and training new senior leadership.

• Daily management of the selling organization
• Ownership of and accountability to a monthly and quarterly sales forecast
• Coaching of all sales associates and managers
• Senior advisor to the CEO and other members of the leadership team
• Oversight of all sales operations functions, including sales engineering, sales process and sales reporting
• Leads all sales hiring and oversees onboarding of new sellers
• Creates/Revises sales playbooks
• Identifies, implements and enforces the appropriate selling methodology
• Justifies and rationalizes the optimal sales technology stack and ensures proper usage of those tools by the sales team
• Provides senior deal support on all key opportunities.