When founders are ready for their first sales hire, one of the things to consider is fractional sales versus full-time sales. There is no right answer to this. As always, it depends, but there are a number of things to consider when making this decision, including:

• The Cost: Fractional sales can be less expensive than a full-time hire. The total spend is less and there are no extra government fees. Fractional sales providers typically include research tools, computers, and phones. In addition, there is no paid vacation or healthcare benefits to cover.
  
  
• Experience and process for a new sales hire: Hiring your first salesperson can be tough—from the interview process through to managing the new employee. If you don’t have a lot of sales experience yourself, understanding what to look for in a good salesperson can be challenging. Hiring a seasoned, fractional rep can take this pain away, allowing the company to scale faster and the founder to focus on other things.
  
  
• Time for sales leadership and management: Understanding the systems, methodology, and effort required to be successful in sales, without a background in it, can make things challenging. A founder is tight on time and ramping up a new sales hire takes a significant amount of it. Fractional sales allows a founder to focus on what they know best (their product) and move the heavy lifting of managing a salesperson and all the items that support the sales effort off their plate. This is not to say they are not intimately involved in the sales process, as they should be participating in sales messaging, discovery calls with prospects, and helping to close.
  
  

With all this being said, if you as a founder have the time, money, and experience, it definitely is better to hire full-time. You would get more economies of scale with your own employee.

There Are Exceptions

There are certain situations where even if you have the time, money, and resources to hire full-time, it makes more sense to consider fractional sales help. These include:

• International Expansion: An international company looking for their first hire into Canada or North America. The fractional sales offering gets you a local presence quickly without hiring internationally or going through the process of having one of your team members move to Canada.

• Exploring New Markets: Companies that have a sales team, but want to explore a new ideal customer profile or launch a new product. You may want to do a small experiment without disrupting the focus of their existing sales team.

• Outbound Sales Support: Some companies have a big focus on customer success versus outbound sales. Customer success team members may not be comfortable or good at cold outreach. This is a great use case for a fractional salesperson, as they can work on the cold calls and emails. They can then turn the opportunities over to a sales leader at the discovery meeting.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of how full-time sales hires stack up against a fractional model: