What a Fractional VP of Sales Actually Does (and When It Is the Wrong Call)

The title gets attached to three fairly different jobs, and founders often buy one expecting another. Worth separating them before anything else.

Three things sold under one title

All three are legitimate purchases. The problem arises when a founder buys advisory hours while expecting the pipeline to be run, which produces a frustrating six months for everyone.

The distinguishing test is decision authority. If the person can change your stage definitions, sit in your pipeline review as the one asking the questions, and tell a rep a deal has not earned its place in commit, they are running the function. If everything routes back to you for a decision, you bought advice and kept the job.

What the week actually looks like

A real fractional engagement has a recognisable rhythm rather than a set of deliverables.

• A standing session with the founder. What changed, what is stuck, what decision is needed this week.
• Pipeline review with the team. The same four questions per deal, every week, covered in why your forecast is wrong.
• Live deal work. On calls for the deals that matter, doing pricing and negotiation rather than observing and commenting afterwards.
• Systems work in the background. Stages, routing, reporting and handoffs being rebuilt while the quarter continues.
• Documentation, continuously. Anything that exists only in their head at the end recreates the problem you hired them to solve.

That last point is the one to press hardest on in a first conversation. A fractional leader who has not written anything down by week six is building a dependency, whatever the pipeline is doing.

The maths against a full-time hire

A VP of Sales and Marketing at this stage costs $250k to $350k all-in once salary, variable, equity and employment costs are counted. The hire takes roughly four months, and ramp takes several more.

The number that actually decides it is the cost of getting it wrong. This is one of the most commonly mis-hired roles in early-stage companies, partly because the skills that work at Series D look impressive in an interview and transfer badly to a company with six reps and no process. A mis-hire costs the salary, the recruitment, the ramp, whatever the team unlearned, and most expensively the two or three quarters before anyone admits it.

Against that, a fractional engagement is smaller, faster to start, and considerably easier to end. It also improves the eventual permanent hire, because you are recruiting into a documented motion instead of asking a candidate to invent one.

When it is the wrong call

Four situations where the answer is something else.

1. You have not found product-market fit. There is no repeatable motion to systematise yet, and trying to build one produces expensive structure around guesses. Keep selling personally until the pattern shows up.
2. You want capacity rather than leadership. If the motion works and you simply need more conversations, hire a rep. A leader with nobody to lead will spend their time on systems you may not be ready to use.
3. You are not willing to change anything. A fractional leader who cannot change the stages, the messaging or the way reviews run has been hired to validate existing decisions, which is an expensive way to be agreed with.
4. You already have a VP who is struggling. Bringing in a second leader on top rarely helps either of them. Coaching for the existing leader is usually the better intervention.

How to judge one

Four questions worth asking in a first conversation, and what a good answer sounds like.

"What would you change in the first thirty days?" A good answer is specific and mostly about definitions and process. A vague answer about culture or hustle means they have not looked at your pipeline.

"What does the handover look like?" They should describe documentation and a successor from the first week. Anyone who has not thought about leaving has not thought about the engagement properly.

"Which stage of company do you work badly with?" Everyone has one. A person who claims to work equally well with a seed startup and a Series D org is telling you something about their self-awareness.

"What did you get wrong in your last engagement?" The answer should be concrete and unflattering. Operators accumulate specific scar tissue, and the ones who cannot produce any usually have not carried a number recently.

If you are weighing this up, our version is ninety days with a documented playbook at the end, and it starts with a free teardown that doubles as the scoping conversation. The findings are yours regardless of what you decide afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Zachary Mondragon Founder, Arekko Solutions

Zachary works with founder-led B2B SaaS companies between seed and Series B, as a fractional VP of Sales and Marketing and through the team that builds their revenue operation on Throughline.

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