Hands-On Fractional Sales Leadership for Startups
Expertise at a fraction
Paul Albert
Fractional CRO/VP Sales
I provide hands-on fractional sales/GTM leadership to your startup, delivering a responsive, integrity-driven approach to building, managing and motivating your customer facing organisation. My goal is to help you build the foundations and embed the sales motions for sustainable and profitable growth with the outcome of needing a fulltime VP Sales or a CRO.
Experience
Start Up Sales Expert
After 20 years in software sales, with 10 in leadership, I've decided to follow my passion, helping founders realise their commercial vision.
I've had the privilege of leading sales in a number of high-growth, innovative companies and have achieved the 0-£10M+ ARR journey multiple times.
- 2008-2014: I brought Alida (then Vision Critical) into the European market where it became the market leader in the UK for Insight Communities 0-£8MM (total company £100M)in ARR
- 2015-2018: Employee 8 at Zappi where we built it out from the ground up, 0-£8M (Total company £25M) in ARR
- 2019-2022: Re-focusing Kaisa (Freespee), to move upmarket with a defined ICP, £8-£12M ARR
- 2023: Scaled Payhawk from 30 people in sales, success, partnerships and pre-sales to 110 and £3.5M to £12M ARR
- 2023-2024: Helped Rest Less find both product and go-to-market fit. £1M - £2.25M Run Rate
- Currently Fractional CRO with Element Human
I love getting my hands dirty being in field with reps talking directly to customers. I love seeing Slack channels light up with wins and my biggest motivation is seeing people grow into the best versions of themselves.
I am passionate about creating a culture of winning by instilling consistency, accountability, coaching, discipline, enablement and importantly, fun.
Startups are hard
Building a repeatable, scaleable sales motion is crucial.
Transitioning from founder-led sales to a scalable sales motion is a significant challenge. Founders often rely on their passion, vision, and personal networks to secure early customers. These bespoke efforts, though effective initially, are difficult to standardize and scale.
Founder-led sales are inherently adaptable and personalized, tailored to each customer interaction. This flexibility, while valuable early on, lacks the structure needed for consistent growth. Sales teams require clear, repeatable processes, metrics, defined value propositions, and reliable, qualified pipelines.
Navigating to a scalable sales motion demands codifying the founder's instincts into replicable strategies. This involves detailed documentation, training, and data-driven refinement. It’s a demanding shift but critical for turning a startup into a scaleup.
What is Fractional?
Cost effective and low risk
Fractional CROs/VP Sales offer startups cost-effective, expert leadership without the expense of a full-time hire. They are professionals with proven success in scaling businesses, who can implement growth strategies quickly and know what good looks like. Fractional CROs/VP Sales come in on a part-time basis to fit the needs specific to your stage of growth and help navigate roadblocks preventing you from succeeding to the next level of growth. The goal of any fractional CRO/VP Sales should be to get the company to a point where they need that role full time.
From a fractional CRO/VP Sales, you should expect a focus on:
- Accelerated Revenue Growth Pipeline management, forecasting and ownership of key deals that can move the needle.
- Stronger Sales Team Performance You can't build a high-performing sales organization without having the basics done consistently right. Discovery and qualification, demo paths, proposal walk throughs and expansion plans almost always need work.
- Scaleable Sales Infrastructure Optimize existing sales stack with prudent advice on new tools (if any) needed to drive a more efficent sales motion(s).
- Data Driven Decision Making Establishing clear sales metrics providing clear visibility into performance across the customer journey and providing accurate forecasting
- Expert Sales and Go-To-Market Strategy Identification and refinement of your Ideal Customer Profile, Total Addressable Market and key persona's who have the problem your start up addresses. Aligning pricing, packaging, team structure and roles and responsibilities to reduce friction in your customers buying process.
How I Help Founders
Sales Management and Mentoring
Incremental improvements done consistently overtime have an exponential outcome. Operating cadence, accountability, discipline and enablement help foster a winning culture.
- 1:1's, pipeline reviews, coaching sessions
- Co-selling with reps and leadership
- Owning, progressing and closing critical opportunities
- Deal strategy reviews
- Hiring guides
- Career pathways
Evidence Based Frameworks
Highly experienced in implementing sales qualification frameworks, methodologies and measurement models. We take the guess work out and replace with processes, systems and data.
- CRM/sales tools review and recommendations (Salesforce, Hubspot)
- Sales methodology and qualification frameworks (eg. Challenger, MEDDPIC)
- Data model mapped to customer journey and lifecycle (from lead to expansion)
- Sales metrics and leading indicators
- Forecasting
Go-To-Market Strategy
Each startup is unique in the variables of people, product and position in the market. We will first identify quick wins and agree on the overall sales strategy, including:
- Total Addressable Market to Ideal Customer Profile to Persona development
- Pricing, packaging and channels
- GTM organisation structure, roles and responsibilities
- Unit Economics: CLV:CAC
- Sales targets and commission plans
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