What a fractional Head of CRM actually does

The term “fractional” has spread faster than any shared definition of it, which means the same job title now covers everything from a genuine leadership seat to a monthly advisory call with a nicer invoice. Since I sell one of these, here is precisely what I mean by it — including where it does not fit.

It is the role, not the advice

What separates the two is what the person is on the hook for.

A consultant is paid for recommendations. The deliverable is the thinking, and the engagement succeeds when the thinking is good. What happens afterwards is somebody else’s problem, and often somebody else’s failure.

A fractional Head of CRM holds the role. That means owning the lifecycle roadmap and defending it in front of the executive team, running or mentoring the CRM function, making the vendor calls, and carrying the retention number as a target they are measured on rather than a metric they comment upon. If retention does not move, that is their problem.

Everything else — the cadence, the contract, the day rate — is implementation detail. If the accountability is not there, you have hired a consultant, and you should pay consultant prices for it.

What the week actually looks like

The irreducible core of this job is smaller than the org chart suggests. Strip out the meetings that exist because the person is available, the campaign approvals that a competent team should be making themselves, and the internal reporting that exists to justify the function’s existence, and what is left is deciding, unblocking and reading the numbers — none of which scales with hours in the building. That core is what the seat gets sized against, which is a conversation with the client rather than a number I arrive with.

In practice my week splits three ways, and roughly evenly.

• The roadmap and its trade-offs. What we are doing next quarter, what we are explicitly not doing, and the argument for both in front of people who have competing priorities.
• The team and what is blocking it. One-to-ones, unblocking, and the uncomfortable conversations — with agencies, with engineering, occasionally about performance.
• The numbers, looked at directly. Churn curves, contribution by cohort, what the current program actually does to them. I write the queries myself, because the summary is where the problem hides.

What is not in the week: campaign production, creative direction, and anything that needs a permanent employee’s signature. If you need those, you need a hire, and a fractional leader who pretends otherwise is selling you something.

The first ninety days

A reasonable shape, and one you should hold any fractional leader to.

Weeks one and two — look at the data. Build an independent view rather than inheriting the dashboard. The existing dashboard is usually the reason nobody has noticed the problem: it reports what was easy to instrument rather than what determines the outcome.

Weeks three and four — name the constraint. One page. Where retention is actually leaking, what it is worth in currency, and the three things that would move it. Presented to the executive team and argued, not delivered as a document.

Weeks five to ten — ship something. Something real, in production, inside the first quarter. Early credibility is what buys the room for the structural work behind it, and structural work in CRM takes longer than anyone’s patience.

Weeks eleven to thirteen — set the operating rhythm. The forecast, the review cadence, the definitions everyone finally agrees on. This is the part that survives the engagement ending, and it is the part most consultants skip because it is not interesting.

Three cases where it is the wrong answer

The pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming.

You need hands, not judgement. If the bottleneck is that nobody has time to build the flows, a fractional leader will produce a better-prioritised backlog that still does not get built. Hire an operator, or brief an agency, and spend the money there.

Nobody senior wants this to happen. A fractional seat works only if it is a real seat: in the leadership meetings, on the internal email domain, told bad news at the same time as everyone else. Where the arrangement exists because one director wanted it and the rest of the executive team is indifferent, the role decays into advisory within two months.

The problem is upstream. If the cohort curve never flattens, the constraint is the product, and no lifecycle program will fix it. Any retention specialist worth hiring will tell you this in the first month, at the cost of the engagement.

How to brief one

Four lines is enough, and more than four tends to be aspiration rather than fact.

1. What is not working, in one sentence, without the proposed solution attached.
2. The stack — messaging platform, and where customer data actually lives.
3. Whether the role is vacant, newly created, or currently held by someone who would be reporting to this person.
4. What you would consider a good outcome twelve months out.

The fourth is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that determines whether the engagement is a success or an argument.