Let’s start with the truth most businesses don’t want to admit: a lot of agencies and B2B businesses don’t actually know what kind of support they need when it comes to commercial teams.
They know they want better results.
More leads. More revenue.
A stronger order book. Maybe an exit.
Maybe just a bit of predictability so the whole thing stops hinging on whether you’ve had a good week on LinkedIn.
But the format of support? Leadership coaching, growth consulting, NED, fractional director… most people don’t really care what it’s called. They just want somebody to help them fix what’s going wrong.
And I get it, because the nature of the beast is: you don’t know what you don’t know!
So what happens? People go shopping for “marketing help” or “business strategy help” or “growth specialists” in the same way they go shopping for a new CRM: pick a thing, plug it in, hope it fixes the problem.
It doesn’t though, does it?
Not because the people you hire are useless, and not because your business is “different” and marketing doesn’t work for you – but because if you don’t understand what good looks like, you can’t choose the right support, you can’t hold anyone accountable, and you can’t build a pipeline that functions like a proper machine.
This article is here to help you get a straight answer.
Not a “well, it depends” with no conclusion. A straight answer about when a Fractional Sales & Marketing Director is genuinely the right move, and when it’s a complete waste of money.
And, importantly: what to do instead if it’s not right.
The real reason this is so confusing
Businesses come to me and say things like:
- “We just need more leads”
- “Marketing isn’t working for us”
- “We’ve hired people and it didn’t work”
- “We’ve got a marketing person but nothing’s happening”
- “We’ve got someone doing sales but it’s all a bit… random”
But underneath all of that is usually one thing: they know the problem, but because they’ve never experienced the solution, they don’t know the mechanism for it.
And I see a distinctive split between two types of business owners:
- The ones that want to crack on themselves
- The ones that desperately want to offload it
This split is the defining characteristic in whether you should be looking at coaching and consultancy support, or whether you should go down the fractional director route.
Because the fractional route isn’t “support”, it’s additional leadership capacity.
It’s somebody stepping into the business, getting their hands dirty, leading the commercial team, translating outcomes into action, holding people accountable, leading personal development and making the whole thing work as a system.
Whereas – coaching is much more about helping you think clearer, so you can take the action yourself.
And yes, the confusing bit is: these things often overlap.
I act as a coach, a consultant, a NED, and a fractional director – but the ratio changes depending on what the business actually needs.
If I’m doing more of an impact coaching piece, there’s naturally going to be consultancy in there because people don’t always have the answers.
But here’s the part that matters: I can coach someone until I’m blue in the face, but if the knowledge isn’t in their head, coaching isn’t going to help them.
Sometimes they don’t need mindset support. They need someone who actually knows what they’re doing to show them what good looks like and help them execute it.
So let’s get practical…
First: what a Fractional Sales & Marketing Director actually is
A Fractional Sales & Marketing Director is not a “do some content and see what happens” hire.
It’s not “bring us ideas”.
It’s not “help us with LinkedIn”.
It’s leadership.
It’s somebody who steps in and:
- creates the strategy
- leads its execution and deployment
- holds the team accountable to taking the action over the longer term
- and tracks the right things, challenging people in the right areas (this is a big one)
They embed into the team and understand how to take commercial outcomes and turn them into an actionable plan.
Because a lot of marketing managers don’t know how to do that. They’re just experienced executors – not strategists, that’s a whole other skillset and level of seniority.
And if they’ve never been taught, and you don’t know how to turn them into one, then who will?
Plus, you also, by default, end up not getting the best out of people because you don’t know what it takes to do their role or what a progression plan for them looks like.
That’s what fractional leadership is solving; it’s not about “more marketing”.
It’s leadership, accountability, capability, and commercial direction – it’s a subject matter expert that’s in the trenches with the team each day.
When you SHOULD hire a Fractional Sales & Marketing Director
I’m going to be blunt: you hire fractional when you need a heavier hand. When you need someone to get their hands dirty in a leadership capacity.
Because you should be out there running the business, making the most of your network, speaking at events, building up the brand and its reputation… and you don’t have the time, the skill set, or the headspace to lead the commercial team as well.
And this shows up in a few very specific ways…
1) You have a team that needs to be led… and nobody to lead it
This is the most common scenario.
Larger companies are often the ones who have the best business case for a fractional, because they tend to have an actual team to lead and nobody to do it.
You end up with a C-suite that’s got, say, a marketing manager and a salesperson as line reports — and there’s a huge disconnect in knowledge between those roles and leadership.
You have nobody to sit in the middle who can talk to both of them on their level, and yet who can also take business outcomes from the board and translate that into things a younger team would understand.
So the marketing manager is doing the marketing tasks.
The salesperson is doing sales tasks.
Leadership is saying “we need more leads”.
But nobody can actually connect the dots.
There’s no person between the SLT or c-suite and the execs to convert business objectives into actions for the people who are the “doers”.
2) You’re running the “crack on” model and it’s failing everyone
This one is so painful, because it looks good on paper.
This is where you hand off director-level responsibilities like strategy to a manager or an exec in the name of “personal development”.
It looks cost-effective. It sounds like: “we’re giving them a growth opportunity.”
But if there’s nobody there to help them grow, no one who understands what good looks like, then it’s pointless.
All you’re doing is putting that person in a position where they’re massively out of their depth and feeling intense imposter syndrome or fear because they don’t know if what they’re doing is right…
They have absolutely no benchmark for success, while at the same time, you’re not getting the results you want from them.
And guess what? If you were being really honest, you don’t know if what they’re doing is right either.
This is the real killer, because neither you nor the manager know how to improve it, and all the while you’re losing time and money.
What you’re missing is the fractional part in the middle – the experienced director who you don’t need ALL the time, but when you DO need them, wow do you feel it.
You’re missing the one in the middle who knows how to achieve the targets you’ve set, knows how to fix things, understands why things you tried didn’t work and what would instead, not to mention how to develop that manager into someone who could take on a more senior role in future when it’s needed full time… but you have to get there first.
Fractional fills that gap.
3) You don’t know what to track (and your team are hiding behind nonsense)
Often, businesses don’t know what to track. So what happens?
The wrong kind of sales and marketing people hide behind incredibly vague vanity metrics things like engagement rates.
They don’t generate results, and they have no indication attached to them as to whether things are truly working or not.
Because if you’re in it for lead generation rather than brand awareness, and you’re talking about engagement, it’s pointless.
A fractional director will build the right tracking and accountability system, because you can’t lead what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t understand.
4) You don’t know what good looks like in terms of team structure
This is one of the biggest hidden reasons fractional becomes necessary.
If you don’t know what good looks like, you don’t know what tactics will get you the results.
If you don’t know what tactics will get you the results, you don’t know who to hire to do them.
So you hire “a marketer”.
Or you hire “someone to do outbound”.
Or you hire “a content person”.
Something nice and generic
… but the problem with generic is that they inevitably ask for a specialist in XYZ when they get their feet under the table.
And then you get stuck in the same loop:
- spend money
- feel busy
- don’t get results
- blame marketing
- panic and chase leads harder
- repeat
A fractional director isn’t just there to “do the work”.
They inform you what to hire, and what not to hire, because they can see the strategy and the capability gaps at the same time.
When you should NOT hire a Fractional Sales & Marketing Director
If it’s just you, or a small team, you don’t need to hire a fractional – it would be a huge investment for something that simply isn’t needed.
You can be a lot leaner when it comes to sales and marketing, with so much to gain from a handful of well-chosen, organic tactics.
You don’t need to be doing loads of stuff that takes a full salary of a person to get results at that size – unless you’re a scale-up who’s planning rapid expansion and huge market penetration after a funding round… that would be the only exception.
If you’re a small team where most of the business is delivery (projects, client work, etc), a permanent fractional person would be a waste of money.
You’d be paying for leadership capacity you can’t actually utilise properly because there isn’t a team to lead.
You don’t need that complexity. You’re best off going for:
- a strategy sprint project to set you off on the right path – you work out the actions, and then have a clear plan you can execute yourself or hold your small team accountable to
- and then a business or performance coach to hold you accountable over that period of time and delegate accordingly, adjusting the resource to meet you where you’re at
This is the difference:
- Fractional is for when you need to offload leadership capacity entirely and admit it’s not your skill set
- Coaching/NED-type support is for when you need to think clearer and delegate effectively so that you can take the actions yourself
That’s it. Job’s a good ‘un.
The simplest way to decide (and a straight question to ask yourself)
If you’ve read this and you’re still thinking, “Okay… but what do I need?”, good. That’s normal – because you don’t know what you don’t know.
So here’s a straight A/B question… do you:
a) want to crack on yourself, but you need help thinking clearer, getting the strategy right, and being held accountable to execute it?
Or:
b) need to off-load commercial leadership capacity entirely because you don’t have the time, skill set, or internal structure to lead the team and build the system?
If it’s the first, you’re looking at an initial strategy piece with coaching support.
If it’s the second, you’re looking at fractional leadership.
And if you’re somewhere in the middle, that’s exactly what a discovery conversation is for — because the worst thing you can do when you’re facing leadership challenges is hire the wrong kind of support and then decide “marketing doesn’t work”.
Marketing and sales isn’t vague or random or fluffy – it’s a formula.
It’s driven by metrics and your ability to hold people accountable to meeting them and hitting them.
Show up and take the right action, and the result takes care of itself – and the first part of defining the right action, is choosing the right support for where your business actually is.
If you want a straight answer about what kind of support you need, book a discovery session with me. I’ll tell you plainly whether you need thinking support, execution support, leadership capacity, or a complete rebuild of the commercial system – and what to do next.
