Here’s the Problem With Every Option You’ve Already Considered
You’ve probably looked at three paths. Each one has a catch.
Hire a VP of Sales or a full-time CRO. Good luck finding one who understands manufacturing and dealer channels, and good luck affording the salary, the ramp time, and the risk if it doesn’t work out.
Hire another marketing agency. They can get you more leads. They stop the moment those leads become quotes. What happens after the lead is not their problem. It’s yours.
Bring in an operations consultant. They’ll tighten your shop floor and your lean processes. They won’t touch your CRM, your rep onboarding, or the quote that’s been sitting in someone’s inbox for three weeks.
A Fractional CRO from The Prepared Group is the fourth option: senior revenue leadership that owns sales, marketing, and the operational systems between them, at a fraction of what a full-time hire costs, starting faster than a search firm can get you a candidate.
Who This Is For
✔ You’re doing $3M to $10M+ a year and you’ve outgrown “the owner handles sales.”
✔ You’ve paid for marketing, sales training, or an operations audit before, and revenue still isn’t predictable.
✔ You don’t know, with a straight answer, how many open quotes are sitting untouched right now.
✔ Your reps or dealers each run their own version of your sales process, and none of the versions match.
✔ You want one person accountable for revenue, not three vendors pointing at each other.
If any of those sound familiar, keep reading.
What a Fractional CRO From The Prepared Group Actually Does
We run your revenue operation through our proprietary Predictable Revenue Framework, an eight-step system built to close the exact gaps that stall companies like yours. The first four steps find out where revenue is leaking, get clear on why a customer should buy from you instead of the next shop that can also hold a tolerance, and build (or fix) the CRM and quote-follow-up systems your sales team actually uses day to day.
The step most consultants in this space skip entirely: Revenue Expansion, the rep and dealer channel work. Territory design. Rep onboarding that actually activates instead of gathering dust in a binder. Dealer co-op programs that give your channel partners a reason to push your product over the next guy’s. This is the capability that’s usually missing between an agency (leads only) and an operations consultant (shop floor only), and it’s often where the fastest revenue is sitting untouched.
The remaining steps, Stick Programming, Retention, and Referrals, keep the customers you already have reordering and referring instead of quietly shopping around.
We stay inside the business while this runs. We’re building and operating these systems ourselves, the way an executive would if you’d hired one full time, not handing you a deck and stepping back.
The Real Math
A full-time VP of Sales or CRO at this level typically runs $150,000 to $225,000 in base salary alone, before benefits, payroll tax, or the months a search firm needs to fill the seat. Add bonus and profit sharing, and total compensation commonly climbs to $225,000 to $300,000 or more, with no guarantee the hire works out once they start.
A Fractional CRO engagement with The Prepared Group runs a fraction of that cost, and starts producing visibility into your revenue system within the first few weeks. Every quarter you wait costs you the same leaking quotes and quiet reorders you already know about. It doesn’t cost less to keep guessing. It just costs later.
Why Not Just Do More Marketing?
Because marketing was never the whole problem. If your close rate is fine but your reorder rate is falling, more leads just means more quotes falling into the same gap. A Fractional CRO looks at the whole system: the marketing that brings people in, the sales process that closes them, and the operations that keep them coming back. Fixing one without the other two is why the last few things you tried didn’t stick.
What Happens When You Click “Let’s Chat”
1. You’ll book a Deep Dive Needs Assessment call, not a sales pitch.
2. We’ll look at where your revenue is actually leaking: sales, marketing, operations, or (most often) the seams between them.
3. You’ll walk away with a clear picture of what’s holding you back, whether or not we’re the right fit to work together.
4. No contract is presented on this call. That comes after we’ve both decided it makes sense.
Either way, you’ll leave the call knowing exactly where your revenue is leaking. Most owners haven’t had a straight answer to that in years.
If you’re not sure whether you need a Fractional CRO or just need your existing team pointed in the same direction, that’s exactly what the call is for. Bring your actual numbers. We’ll tell you straight whether this is the right fit or whether something smaller solves it.