Fractional Sales Leadership
Creating Focus-at-Scale for Small and Emerging Growth Businesses
Fractional Sales Leadership
Creating Focus-at-Scale for Small and Emerging Growth Businesses
Solving the sales puzzle is hard
Why Fractional versus Full-time?
At some point in their journey, founders without a background in sales hit the seemingly universal challenge of getting sales leadership ‘right’. By nature, sellers can tell a good story, but very often aren’t system builders and end up being expensive mis-hires, costing the organization valuable time and money. Fractional leadership gives founders and business owners access to a proven system and a team builder without a big comp structure or frustrating delays and expense of mis-hires.
What do Engagements look like?
On a contract basis, Tim will join your leadership team as a part-time executive. He understands the nuances of small, scrappy and early stage businesses and comes supported by carefully vetted team members if necessary, and a set of proven tools including the PropelSMB Focus and Delivery Model. He will assess, recommend, and lead a combination of in-house and outsourced execution resources to help deliver results while building a sustainable revenue model for your business.
A typical engagement will include an initial fee and a month to month agreement with a simple and transparent fee structure, generally expected to run between 6 and 18 months. When a company gains the scale to justify a proper full-time leader, Tim will help you hire a full-time leader, and leave your business with a capable team and system to scale and achieve your long-term goals.
About Tim Koivisto
With a verifiable track record of success, Tim has spent the the past 25 years building early-stage sales and customer teams. With a passion for small and early-stage businesses he developed a Focus and Delivery model by combining a mix of personal best practices, large company best practices, academic principles and most of all, a system to blend the art of people and process to deliver revenue growth in resource-light organizations. Stylistically, the “tell you what to do” type of consulting isn’t for Tim so the PropelSMB model is a team + model approach that gets Tim in the trenches with clients.
Contact Tim:
(320) 828-4655
Propelling your business with a proven model
PropelSMB Focus and Delivery Model
Built around the motion of sustainable propulsion forward, the PropelSMB Focus and Delivery Model is a focus-minded framework to support as Tim gets in the trenches with you and your team. The messy growth stage is full of possibilities so we remove the idea of a single silver bullet, and instead drive focus and accountability on the fundamentals needed in strong sales organizations.
Why is this right for small and emerging growth companies?
When small businesses and emerging growth companies reach their acceleration phase, there is no substitute for accountability and fact-driven decision making. The PropelSMB Focus and Delivery Model cuts through the noise to the most important focus areas. This drive to clarity fits well with small and emerging growth companies as they are often quickly burning capital and do not have the margin to spend years solving the sales puzzle; and absolutely can’t afford bad sales hires.
Common Challenges founders face
Expensive talent misses. Hiring an expensive “industry person” is a common strategy for early-stage companies, but it often backfires when the person may not be a good fit for company culture, or they fully rely on legacy personal connections instead of skills and competencies. Market knowledge is just 1 of 4 key talent-evaluation areas to ensure sales success.
Their ‘proven’ head sales is stuck. Many early-stage companies invest a large salary in a proven head of sales from a larger company for their experience and learn that it’s common for them to be unable to adapt to the unique needs and constraints of a scrappy, growth company.
Lack of passion by the sales team. The best salespeople are motivated differently than most other roles and it’s rare that they will share the same passion for the product as the founder. It takes experience to operationalize salespeople’s motivators in a way that drives engagement and results.
Can’t get sales traction - Many early-stage companies have good products but struggle with focus in the market, often adopting a ‘try everything and see what works’ approach. This can lead to lack of direction, misaligned efforts, and a ‘water pump’ effect in which a lot of effort is expended without gaining traction.
Low accountability across the team- Poor definition of roles and responsibilities impacts morale, focus, and sales results. Structured accountability through well designed coverage and capacity, territory logic, defined rules of engagement, and comp modeling have significant impact on sales efficiency and team engagement.
Poor lead conversion - Many companies operate with unpredictable lead flow and disconnected sales and marketing processes, creating misalignment in expectations and lack of revenue delivery.
Low Integrity Pipelines - Forecasting is a hard discipline to master but is necessary for any growth organization if they want to remove the ‘game of chance’ when planning investments for the business.
Predictable revenue growth in a repeatable system is possible.
If you are an entrepreneur or run an emerging growth business ready to build a sales engine, or are tired of wasting time and money trying to figure out how to build one, let’s connect and explore if this model is a fit for you.