Most software businesses hire one to fix a revenue engine that was never built. The new CRO spends a year building it, misses the number while they do, and leaves. The board pays for the search, the package and the flat year after.
Veridian Revenue Partners puts an operator in the revenue seat first. On your board as an adviser, or inside the business as a fractional CRO one or two days a week. We build the system alongside your team. Then you hire someone to run it.
Fractional CRO support brings our operator-led advisory into the commercial decisions your team makes each week.
Depending on whose research you read, a CRO lasts somewhere between 17 and 25 months. Harvard Business Review found that 62% of companies saw growth flatten or fall in the year after one left. Add the search fee, the package, the equity and the two best reps who follow them out of the door.
It's rarely the person. Nobody had defined the ICP, the stages, the forecast method or the comp plan, so the new CRO spends year one building them. Meanwhile they're judged on a number they had no chance of hitting.
Then there's the contract book, which almost no board looks at. Customers still on terms from 2019. Renewals at last year's price. Usage well past what's licensed, and well past what's invoiced. That gap rarely makes the board pack, and when it does nobody owns it. Every acquisition brings its own paper and widens it.
Close both and the first few points of growth come back from customers you already have.
Sources: A Sales Growth Company (tenure range); Harvard Business Review, October 2024 (the 62% figure).
We take the revenue seat at board or leadership level, part time. We test your plan, your forecast and your contract book the way a buyer's diligence team will in a couple of years. Better to hear it from us first.
Board advisory. A monthly review with the board or portfolio team, a deeper one each quarter, and a phone that gets answered in between. For businesses that already have a revenue leader and want someone independent checking the work.
Fractional CRO. One or two days a week for six to twelve months. For businesses that need the engine built before a permanent CRO can run it. It finishes with that person specified, hired and onboarded into a system that already works.
Either way, we agree at the start which number we're accountable for. If we can't name it, don't pay us.
A diagnosis, in writing, inside four weeks. Your live CRM data, two quarters of wins and losses, conversion by stage and by rep, the comp plan, pricing and the contracts. You get back a ranked list of what's actually costing you money (usually three or four things) and a 90-day plan you can hold us to.
A forecast the board will sign off. Stages with exit criteria someone can test. A weekly deal desk for every deal above an agreed size, where the qualification gets challenged in the room instead of ticked in a CRM field. A commit, best case and pipeline call your CFO can defend.
The contract book. What your contracts let you bill, set against what you actually bill, and a plan to close the difference: excess use, legacy terms, price, term length. Your account managers have the customer conversations. We show them how.
Retention. With gross retention below 90%, most new business just refills the bucket. Renewal work starts in month three, not month eleven, and account managers get paid on net growth.
Acquisitions. One pipeline definition, one comp plan and one forecast across everything you've bought.
Your permanent hire. We write the spec from what the business needs now, help run the search and hand over a working system. Your CRO is useful in month one rather than month six.
For investors. The same lens across a portfolio: buy-side commercial diligence before a deal, and the first 100 days after it. For the 18 to 24 months before a sale, that work has its own page: Exit readiness.
Bookings and ARR are history by the time they move. These shift about six months earlier, so they're what we put in front of the board:
Thirty minutes on a call. No deck. If we're the wrong answer, you'll hear it then.
A four-week diagnostic at a fixed fee. The written diagnosis and 90-day plan are yours whether or not we carry on.
A monthly retainer, board advisory or fractional CRO, with scope agreed at the start and reviewed at 90 days. Every engagement has an end point written in: a permanent hire, a system your team runs, or an exit.
We cap how many clients we take on at once. You're paying for attention.
Sometimes fractional is the wrong answer, and we'll say so on the first call. Usually it's because:
Past that size, board advisory is how we work alongside your CRO, not instead of one.
Veridian Revenue Partners is led by Paul Price, Partner, who spent nine years in senior commercial roles inside a PE-backed UK software group with 20 operating companies and around £1.6bn of ARR.
The partner on the first call is the one at the last board meeting. There's no bench of associates behind the proposal.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no obligation. Show us the forecast and we'll tell you how much of it we'd believe, and why.
