If You’re Serious About Growing Your Business, You Need a Fractional Chief Growth Officer (CGO)

A Fractional Chief Growth Officer (CGO) is an experienced business leader who is responsible for revenue growth across the organization. They deliver strategic growth leadership to drive business expansion and revenue growth, through flexible, expert oversight that’s tailored to the needs of companies that want to scale effectively without the overhead of a full-time executive. 

Unlike the typical senior leader who heads up a single functional area, the Fractional CGO’s domain is much broader: They serve as an organizational growth catalyst, aligning and synchronizing critical functions that all contribute to revenue growth but often operate in isolation—such as sales, marketing, customer service, and product. 

The Fractional CGO develops and drives the execution of a coordinated, enterprise-level growth strategy and plan that supports your overall business objectives, getting every function that contributes to growth working in concert. As a member of your executive team, they have the responsibility and autonomy to align and hold those functions accountable for generating profitable growth. 

Dramatic shifts in your customer’s buying journey make the CGO role more essential than ever. Today’s buyers have more control over their journey, seeking much more information about your business and your services and taking a much more circular path before they engage with a sales rep. In fact, Gartner research shows that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience that doesn’t involve a rep. The typical journey delivers an average of 62.4 marketing touches across 3.5 channels and takes about 56 days (or longer for some big-ticket sales). Along the circuitous path from awareness to purchase, your B2B buyer is likely to act more like a consumer, bringing expectations shaped by their experiences with leading consumer brands. 

This new reality demands a more holistic approach to attract, engage, and nurture buyers all the way through the decision process and retain them as loyal, profitable customers. But most mid-sized companies don’t have a single leader responsible and accountable for this complex buyer journey from end to end. Instead, all the functions required to ensure a seamless experience that drives growth tend to operate in silos, often with different or even competing strategies and priorities. This traditional model wastes finite resources and yields poor results, leaving critical growth goals unachieved. Growth-minded organizations realize they won’t hit their targets without a single leader accountable for growth across the business.  

When you partner with a Fractional CGO to drive revenue and profitability, you should expect the engagement to begin with rigorous due diligence. Your Fractional CGO will meet with the leaders of key functions that impact revenue—such as sales, marketing, customer service, and product—to understand how they operate, the objectives they’re working toward, and how they contribute to growth. A Fractional CGO will also research the broader landscape to assess your company’s current position and growth potential, as well as your competitors’ market share, positioning, and digital footprint. As part of the due diligence process, your Fractional CGO will conduct a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis.  

Based on their research and analysis, your Fractional CGO will develop a growth strategy and plan that becomes a roadmap to achieving your growth goals, spanning every function involved in generating revenue. They’ll share your growth plan with all relevant functional leaders and help to gain buy-in, ensure alignment, and provide clarity on roles and expectations.  

The due diligence and planning phase of a Fractional CGO engagement typically take 8-12 weeks, though the timeline can vary by company. Once your growth plan is finalized and communicated, it’s the Fractional CGO’s job to ensure the plan is executed flawlessly and timely, coordinating with all the internal teams and external vendors involved. They’ll also develop relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) for revenue and profitability (such as month-over-month or rolling 12-month growth) and report on them just like any other member of your leadership team. 

The main reason to hire a Fractional CGO is to generate more revenue and accelerate your growth. As they help you achieve this goal, their value will become evident in many other ways as your business realizes benefits like the following. 

• Greater objectivity. A Fractional CGO brings a third-party perspective and fresh thinking, unencumbered by corporate politics or historical baggage. They can stand back, evaluate the business objectively, and help to set priorities without the constraints of sitting within any one functional area. This objectivity is crucial when determining how to allocate budget and other resources for the greatest growth impact.    

• A best practices approach. The most effective Fractional CGOs have worked extensively in your industry and the B2B space generally, and they leverage that experience to your advantage. They’ll share how similar companies have tackled common growth challenges, the strategies they’ve found most successful, and the best ways to apply technology, talent, and processes to drive growth. 

• The ability to break down silos. A Fractional CGO is in the unique position of spanning multiple functions that often struggle to work together toward common goals. That gives them the ability to look across siloed groups, identify barriers to growth, and drive and manage effective change. Those changes might include strengthening your technology infrastructure, transforming your processes, or improving capacity, for example. 

• A better path to customer retention. It’s common knowledge that it costs less to retain an existing customer than it does to attract a new customer. That makes customer retention a potentially big driver of revenue and profitability growth. But building loyalty is more complicated than ever, as B2B customer expectations are continually evolving. Adding a Fractional CGO with accountability for customer retention keeps this critical objective front and center.   

• Data-driven decision-making. No organization can afford to waste resources on efforts that don’t align with the business’s strategy and don’t move the needle on revenue growth. Yet many companies make daily decisions that impact revenue without leveraging data to ensure those choices are well-informed. A Fractional CGO brings the discipline of data-driven decision making, ensuring your teams are doing the right things in the right way to drive predictable, profitable growth.  

While every company’s situation and needs are unique, the following tend to be strong indicators that your business could benefit from adding a Fractional CGO to your senior leadership team.  

• Your revenue is flat or declining.   

• Your customer churn rate is high or trending upward.  

• You continually fall short of achieving your ambitious growth goals. 

• You’ve defined company-level growth goals, but you haven’t translated them into a specific growth strategy or plan.  

• You’ve developed a growth plan, but it doesn’t incorporate every function required to execute it effectively.     

• Different functional groups tend to have competing or conflicting priorities.  

• Function-specific goals don’t always align with your enterprise-level goals.  

• Your product or service lines have stagnated, and they no longer align with the buyer’s evolving needs and expectations.   

• Your leadership team tends to focus on short-term, tactical planning and reactive activities vs long-term, proactive, strategic planning designed to generate sustainable growth.     

B2B companies that are serious about growing the business are adding the CGO role to their leadership teams. Most find that hiring this strategic business leader on a fractional basis is the most effective approach, similar to the common practice of contracting with a Fractional CFO or Fractional CMO. 

The overhead required to maintain a full-time in-house CGO is often out of reach for middle market B2B companies, making the fractional model more feasible and financially attractive. This model provides just the right slice of an experienced strategist’s time and expertise, providing greater flexibility and leaving more budget for execution.  

In many cases it’s easier for a mid-sized business to obtain the best talent for the job by hiring a CGO on a fractional basis. This is a unique and multi-faceted role: part visionary, strategist, innovator, process improver, bridge builder, orchestrator, and data analyst. To check all those boxes, the CGO needs extensive senior-level experience across many business functions and the educational background to complement that real-world experience, such as an MBA. As a result, the pool of viable candidates is relatively small and difficult for mid-sized businesses to compete for when attempting to hire this role as an FTE.  

Hiring a CGO on a fractional basis also enables you tap the expertise of a leader who’s worked with many different companies in a variety of environments and knows the most effective ways to eliminate obstacles and build accountability for growth.   

Though every engagement is unique, there are several services that most Fractional CGOs provide and responsibilities they take on as they help drive revenue across every functional group that impacts growth. 

• Your Fractional CGO ensures each function’s specific goals and targets ladder-up to your enterprise-level growth objectives and strategies.     

• They manage the entire demand generation funnel, ensuring a seamless handoff from marketing to sales at a minimum and often extending through to customer service. 

• They develop a deep understanding of your buyer personas, track how they’re evolving, and hold various functions accountable for meeting the unique needs of each buyer type. 

• The Fractional CGO owns the buyer journey from end to end—including how you interact with buyers after they become customers, driving better loyalty and retention.  

• They continually evaluate growth opportunities, such as expanding into new market segments, leveraging new channels, introducing new products, or enhancing existing solutions. 

• They help break down silos that inhibit growth and ensure the buyer has a smooth, seamless experience when they interact with any function within the business.  

• The Fractional CGO keeps your organization aligned with evolving demands and expectations by monitoring trends, soliciting and analyzing customer feedback, and assessing the voice of the customer.  

• They work closely with your IT team to leverage technology and integrate business function for a seamless customer experience.  

• They manage the budget associated with your revenue-generating functions and optimize your ROI. 

• They oversee some of the administrative aspects of revenue growth, like identifying training needs and leading cross-functional meetings about growth strategies and plans.  

• They provide a holistic view of growth across the organization by maintaining a shared scorecard that consolidates function-specific reporting. 

Though it’s possible to hire a Fractional CGO on a stand-alone basis, these professionals are most valuable to your B2B company when they sit inside a full-service agency. This model allows the Fractional CGO to tap an experienced, highly skilled team with the capabilities to execute your growth strategy and plan in the most effective and seamless way.  

By drawing from the agency’s own team of specialized professionals and complementing it with targeted outsourced resources, the Fractional CGO can bring in the best talent to execute your growth plan. You end up with a full-service growth planning and execution function on a fractional basis, which is ideal for most mid-sized B2B companies.  

When you’re ready to add a Fractional CGO to your leadership team to drive profitable revenue, you need assurance you’re choosing a strategic partner with the capabilities to help you achieve your growth goals. The following process can help you choose the right Fractional CGO Agency for your needs. 

Before beginning your search, be clear about what you want to achieve by hiring a Fractional CGO. Since this will likely be a new role for your business, it’s important to articulate what you expect from this senior leader. The more aligned you are at the outset, the better your results will be. 

Take the time to understand how the Fractional CGO agency works and the credentials of the strategic partners you’ll work with. Do their Fractional CGOs have experience in the B2B space and your industry specifically? What company types and sizes have they worked with? Can they provide success stories that demonstrate their results? Do they only provide strategic growth planning, or can they also take your plan through execution?  

As a member of your leadership team, a Fractional CGO needs to fit well with your values and culture. Involving a variety of decision-makers in the process is a great way to assess whether this individual and their supporting cast are compatible with your company and can work well with other leaders across the business.   

Why You Need a Chief Growth Officer (and How to Add One Affordably)  

3 Ways a Fractional CGO Can Transform Your Revenue Growth in 2023 

What is a Chief Growth Officer (CGO)? 

What’s the Difference Between a CGO and CMO?   

Is the CGO the New CMO?