Why some fractional sales leaders keep getting hired
Share
If you're working as a fractional CRO or VP of Sales, you probably know the loop. You're delivering for two or three clients at once, your contracts are usually rolling three or six months, and most of the time you're not delivering you spend on making sure the next contract turns up before the current one ends. The pipeline depends almost entirely on your network, on referrals, and on whoever happens to remember you exist when their company hits the right inflection point. Revenue has good months and quiet months. And every time you sit down to think seriously about how to make this less precarious, you arrive at roughly the same conclusion: that you should probably have a book, or a framework, or some kind of body of work that explains what you do to founders and CEOs before you're in the room with them. Then you don't, because you have no time and no idea where to start, and you go back to delivering.
I keep hearing some version of that from the fractional sales leaders I talk to.
The strange part is that the underlying need for what you do is, if anything, higher than it was. The companies looking at fractional sales leadership are wrestling with founder-led sales that won't scale, sales teams the founder doesn't know how to coach, pipeline forecasts they can't trust, and growth plans that fall apart the moment the first SDR leaves. None of that gets solved by a chatbot, or for that matter by faster software. But every prospect now turns up with at least one stakeholder who has already tried to fix the problem with ChatGPT, every LinkedIn feed is filling up with sales advice that all looks roughly the same, and founders are slower to commit serious money to fractional engagements even though there is more average sales advice in the world than there has ever been.
Which is what makes it worth looking at the sales leaders who have kept getting hired for the last fifteen years, and are still getting hired now. They didn't build their reputation through LinkedIn posts. Most of them did most of the work before LinkedIn was anything more than a digital CV. They built something else, and whatever they built is still doing the work for them.
A few of them are worth being specific about.
Aaron Ross wrote Predictable Revenue in 2011, off the back of the cold-outbound model he had built at Salesforce. The book defined what became the default playbook for B2B SaaS pipeline generation for the next decade. Aaron has been working off that book ever since. He doesn't have to pitch fractional engagements. Founders read the book and call him.
Mark Roberge was CRO at HubSpot during their growth years, then wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. The book turned him from "former HubSpot CRO" into a recognised authority on scaling sales teams in his own right, opened a teaching post at Harvard Business School, and now feeds into his investment firm. Most of his current credibility runs through that book, not through anything he posted last week.
Trish Bertuzzi wrote The Sales Development Playbook in 2016. It's a tight, opinionated book about how to actually build inside-sales and SDR teams. The book made her the recognised thought leader on what was, at the time, a fairly narrow corner of the sales world. She has been speaking and advising off it for nearly a decade.
Keenan, more recently, self-published Gap Selling in 2018. The book is unapologetically opinionated and the voice is polarising, which is part of why it worked. He built A Sales Growth Company on the back of it, and the book turned him into someone founders specifically request when they need a particular kind of sales rebuild.
Bill Campbell is the slightly grim one. He coached Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg and a long list of others, and refused most public attention. He never wrote anything himself. After he died in 2016, three of his closest collaborators wrote Trillion Dollar Coach about what he had actually done. That book is now the closest thing the tech industry has to a coaching manual for the executive team. The slightly grim lesson is that nobody else is likely to do this work for you while you're still around to do it.
What unites those examples isn't really the channel. Mainstream books worked for most of them, a self-published title worked for Keenan, Trish built her authority on a niche-specific book in a corner of sales most people weren't yet taking seriously. The thing that links them is that each of them took the time to turn what they thought into something other people could pick up and carry around without them being in the room. Once that work existed, it kept working. It does the introductory call when they're not in the room. It convinces a CFO who has never met them that the engagement is worth signing off. Most of why this group kept getting hired before LinkedIn, before AI, and now, comes down to that.
The current market makes the point even sharper. AI hasn't really changed what makes a fractional sales leader trustworthy. The criteria for being chosen are mostly what they were ten years ago. What AI has done is widen the gap between producing content and having a recognisable body of work. Most AI-generated material is technically fine and almost completely interchangeable. The thing it cannot really do, at least not yet, is sound like a particular person who has run sales orgs through real situations and seen things up close.
I'd add one more thing to this, which has more to do with feeling than with strategy. The knowledge that experienced fractional sales leaders carry around inside them is a real asset. Twenty years of pipeline patterns watched, hires made and unmade, founder dynamics worked through, comp plans torn up and rebuilt. If none of that ever gets out into the world in any form, it disappears with the person, which is a small waste in any one fractional's case and quite a large one once you start adding up across the profession. That part of it bothers me as much as the commercial argument does, probably more.
So if there's a single lesson worth pulling out of all of this, it's roughly this. The fractional sales leaders who still get hired in this market are the ones whose thinking lives somewhere outside their own heads, in a form a founder or a board member can actually find. It doesn't have to be a bestseller, or a TED talk, or anything as ambitious as either. It does have to be a real piece of work that does the explaining for you when you aren't yet in the room. That was already true ten years ago, and I'd argue it has become a lot more urgent in the last two.
A note on what this means in practice. Most experienced fractional sales leaders haven't done this work yet, and it's rarely because they couldn't be bothered. The questions involved are overwhelming. How do you start? How do you actually write it? Is it any good? How long would it take? How much would it cost? Where do you even publish it once it's done? The traditional version of the answer is brutal too: a real book typically takes 18 to 24 months, costs the author £20,000 or more once you factor in time off, ghostwriting, editing and design, and very often never gets finished.
That's roughly why I started SPV Creative Press. I capture the thinking through interviews rather than asking the author to write it themselves, then handle the editing, the structuring, the design and the publishing on their behalf. The whole thing takes about two months, at a fraction of what traditional publishing services charge. I do similar work with elders who want to leave a written record for their families, with young authors (which is actually how SPV started, with a book my daughter wrote when she was seven), and occasionally with whole villages that want to capture their own history before it disappears.
If any of this lands and you'd like to see how it would work for fractional sales leaders specifically, you can read more HERE.