Fractional CRO for B2B SaaS companies

Someone to own the plan, not just write it

For B2B SaaS companies with revenue between £5-25 million. For six months, a fractional CRO embedded with your leadership team, go-to-market team, and building the commercial system your company runs on after I leave.

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James Ker-Reid seated at a table in an office, ready to start the implementation project.

15+ years scaling B2B tech. 60+ go-to-market builds. 6 exits.

The GTM audit gives you the leakage map and the 90-day plan. This is what happens next: I take that plan, run it, hire against it, and hand back a revenue function that no longer depends on the founder or on me. I hold a maximum of two clients at any one time, and I work 1:1 with the founder or CEO every week. That is the whole model — deep, not wide.

Why good GTM plans stall

An audit tells you what is broken and what to do about it. Most plans still do not get executed, and it is almost always for one of three reasons.

No one owns it

Your CRO carries a number. Your CMO carries a campaign calendar. The cross-functional work — ownership, SLAs, handoffs, definitions — belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.

The founder is still the system

The proposition, the pricing judgement, the difficult deals and the escalation path all still route through one person. Every plan quietly assumes their time, and their time is the constraint.

There is no operating cadence

Sales meets. Marketing meets. Not one collective GTM meeting, with the same numbers, on the same day, every week. Without that, a 90-day plan is a document.

How the six months runs

Every engagement starts with the three-week audit. I will not implement before one — that is brain surgery without a scan.

  • Weeks 1-3 — Audit

    Data analysis plus workshops with your team, around 14 hours of their time. Out of it: the leakage map, the 90-day plan with owners, dates and definitions of done.

  • Month 1 — Install the cadence

    One joint sales and marketing meeting, with the pipeline review straight after. Valur proposition improvemtn and ICP selection. CRM reconfiguration starts to reflect how you actually sell and the flows you use. Legacy pipelines and stages are cleared so the forecast means something. The least glamorous month, and usually the fastest value.

  • Months 2-4 — Build the system

    Proposition and pricing rewritten for the buyers you want. The sales motion documented and enabled. Operating models built and imrpove for multiple parts of the business — marketing (inbound and outbound, sales, channel, and customer success. Own recruitment and run it end-to-end where the plan needs additional talent. A new 90-day plan is created after the first quarter.

  • Months 5-6 — Hand it over

    Your permanent leaders run the cadence while I am still in the room. Board reporting comes out of the CRM rather than a spreadsheet and an aggregation of 5 different sources. I leave a written inventory of what is built, what is half-built, and what decays if nobody owns it going forward. You'll have the option to extend on a rolling 3-month term if the transition is not quite complete.

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What I take ownership of

Not advice on these. Ownership, with my name against the outcome.

Proposition and pricing

The three-level value proposition — C-suite, VP, user — and the commercial model behind it. What you sell, to whom, at what price, and why they should care.

Purple outlined tag icon with three horizontal lines on a black background

Pipeline and the sales motion

Stages that match how you actually sell. Qualification your team can apply the same way twice. A forecast your board can trust, produced out of the CRM.

Purple funnel filter icon on a black background

RevOps and HubSpot

Data quality first, because everything downstream is built on it. Then the workflows, properties, reporting and automation that make the system self-sustaining.

Purple database cylinder icon on a black background

Channel and partnerships

Where indirect revenue is the right answer: partner tiering, commercials, enablement and the operating model to run it — usually built from a low base.

Purple branching network icon with four circular nodes on a black background

Team and structure

The org design the plan actually needs, then the hiring against it. Roles, scorecards, interview process, offers. And the hard calls about the people already in place and whether they're right for this next stage.

Purple hierarchy/org chart icon on a black background

What six months looked like

A PE-backed cyber security business with Founder-led sales, four commercial functions with unclear ownership, and no forecast the board could trust. Six months as fractional CRO — including the CRO and CMO exiting inside 90 days, with me covering the gap so execution never stopped. Months after I left, the Monday meeting cadence is unchanged.

+74% qualified pipeline

Rebuilt out of a CRM the board had stopped trusting: eleven sales stages cut to five, 748 legacy opportunities cleared.

2 months faster

Average deal cycle, after the proposition, qualification and sales motion were rebuilt around the buyers that were actually closing.

79% forecast accuracy

From no forecast in the CRM at all — the first forecast the business had ever run out of its own CRM within seconds.

What one of our clients says about us

"We got to a point where we couldn't see the wood from the trees. A lot of things weren't getting done, and we couldn't even trust our eyes anymore. James was exactly what we needed. The clarity, speed, and quality of implementation you gave us were really, really useful and valuable.

Damon Rands
Damon Rands
CEO
PureCyber, a BGF portfolio company

Questions founders ask

Why can't we start with the implementation?

Because I would be guessing. The audit is three weeks and around 14 hours of your team's time, and it is what makes the following six months worth paying for. I do not take implementation work without one.

How is this different from hiring a CRO?

A permanent CRO carries a number and builds a team over two to three years. I build the system in six to 12 months and leave, usually having hired the permanent people into it. If you already know who your CRO is, I make their first year easier. If you do not, sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need one yet.

What if we already have a CRO or a CMO?

Then I work above or alongside them, whether C-level or VP-level and you should expect an initial read of whether they are right for where the business is going from me during the audit. That conversation is uncomfortable, and it is part of what you are buying. I have made that call before, and covered the gap myself while the replacement was hired.

How much of our time does it take?

The audit is about 14 hours across three weeks. After that, an hour a week with the CEO or founder — non-negotiable, and the single biggest predictor of whether the engagement works — plus your leadership team's normal operating cadence and a 1-hour GTM meeting, which I run and lead.

What does it cost?

Engagements run six months, occasionally longer, and I hold a maximum of two clients at any time. The audit is a fixed one-off; the build is a monthly retainer for a six-month term. Book a call with me and I can run through the details with you.

What happens at the end?

A written handover: what is built, what is half-built, and what decays if no one owns it. Some clients extend — engagements have run to fifteen months. Most do not need to, which is the core value of my service. Hire someone to build, in a fractional capacity, once built, hire an operator(s) to run it.

Do you execute, or manage people who do?

Both, and I am clearer than most about which. I build — proposition, process, platforms and hiring — and I will step into a leadership gap temporarily when one opens. What I am not is a long-term line manager for your team. That job belongs to the permanent people I help you hire in my engagement with you.

It starts with the audit

Three weeks, a GTM leakage map, and a 90-day plan you can run with or without me. If you want me to run it, that conversation happens at the end of week three — when we both know what and how we are going to execute on the plan.

Book a GTM audit