You need a senior sales partner

You are still the closer. You are still the forecast. You are still the person who knows why a deal is real and why it is not.

That is not a strategy. That is a bottleneck with a founder’s name on it.

Most founders and CEOs do not come looking for a sales consultant, a fractional VP of Sales, or a special project. They come looking for help. The title question shows up because hiring language is built around boxes, and you have been told you need to pick one.

Do not pick a box. Name the work that is still sitting on you.

You already know what is not getting done

You can feel it in the week.

The deal that needed a second set of eyes sat until Thursday. The pipeline is a list you defend in your head. The first hire, if you made one, would inherit a motion that only you can run. The board wants a number you can stand behind, and you are not sure you would bet the company on the one in the deck.

None of that is solved by a title. It is solved by a senior operator next to you — someone who has carried a number before, who will tell you the truth, and who will do the work with you instead of handing you a plan and leaving.

Most founders at this stage need a blend of help

You rarely need one kind of commercial work. You need a mix, and the mix changes.

That is the point of the work being fractional. You are not making a five-year org-chart decision. You are putting a senior partner next to the CEO at the intensity the next two quarters require — with a clean way to turn it up, turn it down, or hire the full-time version when the stage finally justifies it.

My work falls in three places. You need the mix that matches what is still on you.

Sales Consultancy work. You can still close, and you should keep closing. What you cannot keep doing is being the only person who sets the strategy, inspects the deals, stress-tests the forecast, and shows up on the call that cannot wait. You need the system built right and a commercial counterpart. Not someone who takes the keys. Someone who keeps you honest.

Fractional VP of Sales work. The process lives in your head. The stages are informal. Coaching is whatever you had time for after the last close. A junior hire will not fix that. Someone has to run the motion — ICP, stages, exit criteria, coaching, the weekly rhythm, the forecast a board believes — and stay in it until a team can run it without you in every deal, bringing you in only where a founder is the difference. That is running the motion with you, not a playbook PDF.

Special-project work. One pursuit you cannot afford to lose. One partnership that has to be built from zero. One RFP, one market-position review, one search for your first sales leader. Scoped to the work, with the ending named at the start — and still answerable for the outcome.

The mistake is forcing one of those labels onto a company that needs two of them this quarter and a different mix the quarter after.

The work should move with the company

A full-time hire locks the title before the work is clear. Fractional work does the opposite.

Some weeks the job is deal inspection and a hard conversation about the forecast. Some weeks it is building stages and coaching the first reps. Some weeks it is standing in front of a board with a number that has to hold.

That is why the engagement is built to move: more intensity when the next two quarters demand it, less when the system is running, a clean path to a full-time leader when the stage finally justifies the box on the org chart.

You stay the CEO. You do not outsource judgment. You stop being the only senior commercial mind in the building.

Start with what you need help with, not what you want to hire

I will tell you on the first call which of that work is missing, and which of it should stay with you. Sometimes the answer is none of me. That is a useful hour too.

Start with a conversation about constraints and desired outcomes.