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S1 · Fractional leadership
Fractional Head of CRM & Lifecycle
Senior retention leadership without the full-time hire. I take the seat — own the roadmap, lead the team, carry the number.
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Short answer
A fractional Head of CRM is a senior lifecycle leader who holds the role for part of the week, inside your organisation, with the same ownership as a permanent hire: the lifecycle roadmap, the team, and the retention number. It suits companies where the role is real but not yet twelve months of full-time work — or where the permanent search is going to take two quarters you don’t have.
What the seat actually involves
Judgement formed across thirty-plus markets and half a million customers, applied to your problems in the week they arrive.
In practice the week splits three ways: the roadmap and its trade-offs, the team and what’s blocking them, and the numbers — churn, LTV, contribution by cohort — which I read directly at source.
Years at Adobe on the vendor side of the martech table sit behind the platform calls — useful when I’m negotiating on yours.
What I own
- The lifecycle roadmap, and the argument for it in front of your exec team
- The retention number, as a target I’m measured on
- Line management or mentoring for the CRM and lifecycle team
- Vendor and agency decisions — including the uncomfortable ones
- The data model underneath the program, close enough to write the queries
What stays with you
- Day-to-day campaign production
- Brand and creative direction
- Anything that needs a permanent employee’s signature
- Shape
- Interim or fractional Head of CRM / Lifecycle
- Cadence
- From one day a week, set to what the role needs
- Capacity
- Never more than two clients at a time
- Commercials
- Retained day rate, reviewed quarterly
- Notice
- One month, both ways
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The first ninety days
What the first quarter looks like, near enough.
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Weeks 1–2 · Look at the data
Cohorts, churn curves, what the current program does to them. I build my own view rather than inherit the dashboard, because the dashboard is usually the reason nobody has noticed the problem.
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Weeks 3–4 · Name the constraint
One page: where retention is actually leaking, what it’s worth, and the three things that would move it. Presented to your exec team and argued line by line.
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Weeks 5–10 · Ship the first thing
Something real in production inside the first quarter. Early credibility buys the room for the harder structural work behind it.
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Weeks 11–13 · Set the operating rhythm
The forecast, the review cadence, the definitions everyone agrees on. This is the part that survives me leaving.
Sounds like the seat you need filling? Tell me what’s vacant and when.hello@andersson.consulting
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Where the judgement comes from
The reason to take an outside seat is the pattern library that comes with it.
- 30+
- marketsCRM run across IKEA’s European organisation — governance, localisation, one stack, many countries.
- 20+
- brandsMulti-brand lifecycle orchestration at Bauer Media.
- 550k
- customersFour countries, as Head of CRM & Lifecycle Strategy at Tibber.
- 23
- teamsReviewed and scored for AI leverage — an internal program inside one organisation.
In-house leadership
- IKEA
- Adobe
- Bauer Media
- Tibber
Independent engagements
- Schibsted
- Compricer
- Vivino
How is this different from hiring a consultant?
A consultant advises and leaves; the recommendations are the deliverable. A fractional Head of CRM holds the role — the roadmap, the team, the number. If retention doesn’t move, that’s my problem, not a finding in a document I handed you.
How is this different from an interim hire?
Mostly in cadence and cost. An interim is full-time and usually bridges a specific gap. Fractional is part of the week, indefinitely, which fits companies where the role is genuinely part-time work — or where you want senior judgement now and a permanent hire later.
What does the seat cost?
A retained day rate for the days we agree, reviewed quarterly, on one month’s notice. The number of days decides the total rather than the length of the contract. The pricing page sets out what is fixed, what varies and how the sum compares with a permanent hire.
What happens when the engagement ends?
The intent from week one is that it can. Definitions written down, models documented, the operating rhythm run by your team. Often the endpoint is a permanent Head of CRM starting, and I spend the last month handing over to them.
Do you sign an NDA and work inside our systems?
Yes, and yes — your tooling, your access reviews, your security process. On personal data I work to the standard I’d expect as a customer: the minimum access needed, and no customer-level data leaving your environment.
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Related services
S2
Lifecycle & Retention Programs
Contact strategy, LTV tiering, churn prediction and orchestration — designed and built with your team, in your stack.
A quarter and up
S3
The AI Marketing Audit
Every team and workflow reviewed and scored for where AI creates leverage — and where it’s theatre.
Three weeks, fixed price
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Available for new engagements
Start a conversation
If the timing fits, email me directly. There is no funnel behind it, and the reply comes from me.