How do I find a fractional CRO in Dundalk in 2027?

The job a fractional CRO is actually hired to do in a border-town business

Most Dundalk companies that start looking for a fractional CRO are not looking for a salesperson. They are looking for someone to take the revenue function off the founder's desk without adding a €180K salary, employer PRSI, a car, and a redundancy risk to a business doing €2–5M in annual revenue. That is the honest framing, and it is worth saying out loud before you start a search, because it determines who you should be calling.

The job breaks into four distinct workstreams, and a good candidate will separate them for you unprompted. First, diagnosis: what does the pipeline actually look like once you strip out the founder's optimism? In a founder-led business the "pipeline" is usually a mix of live opportunities, warm conversations from a trade show eighteen months ago, and two accounts the founder is personally embarrassed to chase. A fractional CRO's first deliverable is a defensible number, not a bigger one. Second, process installation: a repeatable qualification standard, a deal-stage definition that means something, a forecast the accountant can plan cash against. Third, coverage design: who calls which accounts, how often, and with what offer — including the awkward question of whether the founder should still be the person calling the top ten customers. Fourth, capability building: turning whoever is already doing sales-adjacent work (often an internal-sales person who quotes and takes orders) into someone who can actually run a discovery call.

Where this differs in Dundalk specifically is the weight on diagnosis and coverage over the other two. A company in the M1 corridor selling into logistics, precision engineering, agri-tech, food processing, or construction supplies typically has strong customer relationships and terrible pipeline visibility. The revenue is real but it is concentrated, undocumented, and sitting in one person's head and phone. A fractional CRO who arrives with a SaaS-shaped playbook — MQL-to-SQL conversion targets, sequenced outbound, a demo-to-close ratio — will be solving a problem the business does not have while ignoring the one that is actually killing it: key-person concentration risk and no second engine for new logos.

There is also a job that goes unstated in most engagement scopes but shows up in every real one: founder therapy. The person hiring you built the company on personal relationships, often over twenty years, often in a town where the buyer's kids and your kids play for the same GAA club. Asking that founder to step back from a customer relationship is not a process change, it is an identity change. Any fractional CRO who cannot handle that conversation with some grace will get six months in and find that the founder has quietly gone around them on the three accounts that matter. When you shortlist, probe for this. Ask a candidate to describe a time a founder undercut them on price mid-deal, and listen for whether they tell it as a war story or as a system they fixed.

Worth naming the adjacent roles too, because a good chunk of Dundalk businesses that go looking for a fractional CRO would be better served by something cheaper. A fractional sales manager (roughly half the day rate) fixes activity, coaching, and pipeline hygiene when the strategy is basically sound. A RevOps contractor installs the CRM, the reporting, and the data plumbing for a fixed project fee and then leaves. A commercial advisor or non-executive director gives you two days a month of judgement without owning a number. You want a fractional CRO specifically when the *strategy* is the broken part — wrong segment, wrong pricing, wrong route to market, no repeatable motion — and someone needs to own the number while they fix it. If the strategy is right and execution is sloppy, hire cheaper and hire narrower.

How the role fits into the wider RevOps stack

A fractional CRO does not sit above your systems, they sit inside them, and the fit matters more in a small company than a large one because there is nobody to absorb the friction. In most Dundalk mid-market businesses the stack is thin: an accounts package (Sage, Xero, or a legacy on-premise system), a CRM that is either absent or a Pipedrive instance somebody set up in 2019 and stopped updating, a shared mailbox, and spreadsheets doing the actual work. That is not a criticism — spreadsheets are a rational choice at €3M with fifteen customers — but it means the fractional CRO is inheriting a stack with no source of truth.

The sequence that works is deliberately unglamorous. Get the customer and opportunity list into one place before you touch anything else. Define the six or seven fields that must be populated for a deal to be considered real. Agree with the finance person what "committed" means so that the sales forecast and the cash forecast stop being two different documents. Only then look at tooling. A common and defensible landing spot is HubSpot's free or starter tier for pipeline plus the existing accounts package for invoicing, with a weekly manual reconciliation until volume justifies an integration. Resist anything that requires an implementation partner in the first ninety days.

The RevOps dimension that gets underestimated in cross-border businesses is quoting and pricing mechanics. If you sell into both the Republic and Northern Ireland, you are quoting in euro and sterling, applying different VAT treatments, and — since the post-Brexit trading arrangements settled — dealing with different conformity marking and customs documentation depending on where goods end up. That is not a CRM configuration problem, it is a commercial-policy problem that shows up as a CRM configuration problem. A fractional CRO who has run a cross-border book will build the currency and VAT logic into the quote template on day one. One who hasn't will discover it in month four when a margin review shows that sterling deals booked in Q1 lost four points to FX drift.

One more stack consideration: reporting for external stakeholders. Many Dundalk companies have obligations beyond the founder — an Enterprise Ireland or Local Enterprise Office relationship, a bank facility, sometimes an angel or a family shareholder group who wants a quarterly update. The board pack a fractional CRO produces has to serve all of them. In practice that means it leads with cash conversion and pipeline coverage ratio, not with activity metrics. Nobody funding an Irish mid-market manufacturer cares how many calls were dialled. They care whether the next two quarters of revenue are covered and how concentrated it is.

Pricing, engagement models, and what the money actually buys

Fractional CRO pricing in the Irish mid-market clusters into a few recognisable shapes, and knowing them before you start conversations stops you from being anchored badly in the first meeting.

Day-rate retainer is the most common. You buy a set number of days per month — typically two to four — at a fixed rate, invoiced monthly. For a Dundalk company at €2–5M revenue, an all-in monthly figure in the €8–12K range for two to three days a week of engagement is a realistic market band, though it moves with the seniority of the operator and how much travel the role demands. Below roughly €6K/month you are generally buying a fractional sales manager wearing a CRO title, which is fine if that is what you need — just do not expect strategy work at that price.

Project-plus-retainer is the shape that suits a business with one specific broken thing. You pay a fixed fee for a defined piece of work — a pipeline audit, a pricing review, a channel strategy for the Northern Ireland market — and then a smaller ongoing retainer to keep the changes alive. This lowers the initial commitment, which matters when your finance person is instinctively hostile to consultancy spend, and it gives both sides a clean exit if the fit is wrong.

Equity or performance-weighted structures come up regularly and deserve caution in a business that is not venture-backed. A fractional CRO taking a reduced cash rate against a share of incremental revenue sounds efficient until you try to define "incremental" in a business where 70% of revenue comes from repeat orders that would have arrived anyway. If you go this route, base the variable component on something clean and countable — new logos closed, new-market revenue, gross margin improvement on a named product line — never on total company revenue.

Time-and-materials is worth avoiding for this role. It incentivises the wrong behaviour and makes the accountant's job miserable. Fractional executive work should be priced on outcome or on a committed block of time, not on the clock.

On duration: a six-month initial term is the default request from the buyer side and a twelve-month term is the default request from the operator side, and both positions are honest. Six months is genuinely not long enough to see referral-driven pipeline turn over in a business with a sixty-to-ninety-day sales cycle and seasonal grant-driven buying spikes. Twelve months is a lot of commitment to make to someone you have met three times. The workable compromise is a twelve-month engagement with a defined break clause at month four or five, tied to specific deliverables agreed up front — pipeline documented, forecast accuracy within a stated band, a named number of new qualified opportunities in the corridor. That gives the founder a real exit and gives the operator a real runway.

On grant support: Local Enterprise Offices and Enterprise Ireland run a range of supports for management development, mentoring, and capability building, and companies do use them to defray the cost of senior part-time expertise. The rules, eligibility bands, and co-funding percentages change from year to year and by scheme, so do not take anyone's word for what is available — including a candidate's. Talk to your LEO directly, get the current scheme documentation in writing, and understand the reimbursement timing before you build it into your cash plan. The common trap is real: many supports are reimbursed after spend, which means you fund the full engagement from working capital and recover later. If cash is tight, that timing difference matters more than the headline percentage.

A related budgeting point that founders miss. The fractional CRO fee is not the total cost of the change. Installing a real sales motion means CRM licences, possibly a data or list source, marketing collateral that does not look like it was made in 2014, and — most significantly — internal time. Somebody in your business is going to spend a day a week on this for the first quarter. Budget for it or the engagement stalls in month two when the founder's assistant, who was supposed to own pipeline hygiene, has thirty other jobs.

Where to actually look, and how to run the search

Three channels, run in parallel, because none of them is reliable alone.

Fractional executive networks and marketplaces. A number of networks now exist specifically to place part-time revenue leaders, and their value is pre-vetting: they have already checked that the person has carried a number rather than only advised on one. The trade-off is that network members are frequently based in Dublin, London, or further afield, and you will need to test genuinely for Irish mid-market and cross-border experience rather than assuming it. Ask the network for two candidates with border-region or Irish manufacturing backgrounds specifically, and be prepared for them to come back with none — that answer is itself useful information.

The local referral web. Dundalk Chamber of Commerce, InterTradeIreland's programmes, the Louth Local Enterprise Office, and the M1 corridor business networks all know who has done this work locally. So do the regional accountancy and legal firms — the corporate finance side of a mid-tier accountancy practice sees these engagements constantly and has an unsentimental view of which ones worked. Ask your own accountant who they have seen do a good job for a client. That question, asked of five professional advisors, will surface two or three names you would never have found through search.

Direct search. LinkedIn remains the practical tool. The useful search is not "fractional CRO Dundalk" — that returns almost nothing and what it does return is mostly title inflation. Search instead for people who have held Sales Director, Commercial Director, or CRO titles at Irish companies in your sector or an adjacent one, filter for the Dublin, Louth, Meath, Newry, and Belfast geographies, and look for the ones who have recently gone independent or list multiple concurrent advisory roles. Those are the people doing this work whether or not they call it fractional. Cold outreach to that group converts far better than you would expect, because the good ones are always quietly looking for their next one or two clients.

A note on remote versus local. The instinct is to insist on someone within driving distance, and there is a real argument for it: this role requires sitting in customer meetings, walking a factory floor, and being visible to the team. But the talent pool within thirty minutes of Dundalk is genuinely thin at this level, and holding out for local proximity can cost you six months. The workable middle is a candidate within about ninety minutes — which opens up Dublin, Drogheda, Newry, and much of Belfast — with a contracted commitment to a fixed number of on-site days per month. Get that number in the agreement. "As required" means zero by month five.

Two adjacent options to keep live while you search. Some companies bridge the gap with an interim full-time hire on a six-month contract, which costs more per month but buys full attention during a crunch. Others run a hybrid: a fractional CRO for strategy at two days a month plus a full-time internal sales hire for execution, which can land at a similar total cost to a mid-level Sales Director while giving you far better judgement at the top. Neither is obviously wrong. What is wrong is spending nine months searching for a perfect fractional candidate while the revenue problem compounds.

How to evaluate and shortlist candidates without getting sold to

Fractional executives are, by definition, good at selling. That is the job. So the evaluation process has to be built to get past a polished narrative and reach evidence.

Start with a written brief before you talk to anybody. One page: current revenue, revenue mix by segment and geography, the three biggest customers as a percentage of total, what has been tried, what the founder will and will not give up, and the budget band. Send it to candidates ahead of the first call. Half of them will respond with generic enthusiasm — that half is filtered. The ones who come back with three sharp, uncomfortable questions about your customer concentration are the shortlist.

In the first conversation, ask for a specific reconstruction, not a philosophy. "Walk me through the first ninety days at your last engagement — what did you find in week two that changed your plan?" Good operators answer this in detail and include the thing that went wrong. Weak ones give you a framework. Frameworks are cheap; anyone can draw a funnel.

Test domain proximity honestly. You do not need someone who has sold your exact product, and over-indexing on that is a common mistake. What you need is someone who has sold in a comparable *motion*: long-cycle, relationship-driven, technically specified, low-volume, high-value, often via distributors or specifiers. Someone who has run that motion in industrial automation can absolutely run it in food processing. Someone who has only ever run high-velocity inside sales for a software product will struggle, regardless of how impressive the logos are.

Test cross-border literacy if it is relevant to you, and for most Dundalk businesses it is. Reasonable probes: how have you handled quoting in two currencies without losing margin to FX? What did you learn about selling into UK public-sector or NHS-adjacent buyers versus Irish public procurement? How do you structure a channel when your distributor covers both jurisdictions? You are not looking for encyclopaedic answers — the rules change — you are looking for whether they have lived it or read about it. The difference is audible within two minutes.

References, done properly. Ask for two founders they have worked with, and ask for one engagement that ended early. The second request is the informative one. Everyone has an engagement that did not work; a candidate who claims otherwise has either not done many or is not being straight with you. When you call the reference, do not ask whether they were good. Ask what changed in the business that would not have changed otherwise, and ask what the founder had to give up to make it work.

Run a paid trial piece before the full engagement wherever you can. Two or three days of work — a pipeline audit, a pricing teardown, a target account map for a new geography — for a fair fee. You learn more about how someone works from one real deliverable than from four interviews, and it is a cheap way to discover that the person who interviewed beautifully writes a report you cannot act on. Good operators generally welcome this; it is a low-risk way for them to demonstrate value and to sanity-check whether your business is one they can help.

Finally, be explicit about capacity. A fractional executive with six clients is not going to give you the attention your engagement needs, and a fractional executive with one client is at risk of turning into an employee with worse economics. Three to four concurrent engagements is a healthy portfolio. Ask directly how many they have and what their commitment is to each. Ask what happens if one of the others has a crisis in the same week you do.

A decision framework for choosing between the options

Once you have two or three viable candidates and a realistic view of cost, the decision usually comes down to four questions asked in order. Answer them honestly and the choice tends to make itself.

First: is the problem strategy or execution? If your win rate on the deals you actually pursue is decent and the issue is that nobody is pursuing enough of them, you have an execution problem and a fractional CRO is expensive medicine. Hire a good sales manager or a strong individual contributor. If you are winning the wrong deals, or discounting to win, or watching your best customers buy adjacent products from someone else, that is strategy — hire the CRO.

Second: will the founder actually delegate? Not "does the founder say they will." Look at evidence. Has this founder ever let go of a customer relationship? Does anyone else in the business have pricing authority above a trivial threshold? If the honest answer is no, a fractional CRO will spend the engagement negotiating internally rather than externally, and you should either fix that first or scope the role to net-new business only, leaving the legacy accounts with the founder explicitly and permanently.

Third: can you fund twelve months? Not six. Referral-driven pipeline in a sixty-to-ninety-day cycle with seasonal buying patterns does not turn over fast enough to prove anything in six months, and a fractional CRO who knows this will either refuse a six-month term or take it and then optimise for visible short-term wins at the expense of the system you actually needed. If twelve months of fee plus internal cost is not fundable, scope smaller: buy a defined project instead.

Fourth: what does success look like in a number? Write it down before you sign. Not "grow revenue" — something like: new-logo revenue of a stated amount, or forecast accuracy within a stated percentage, or a documented pipeline with a coverage ratio of 3x against target, or the top-three-customer concentration reduced by a stated number of points. If you cannot write the number, you are not ready to hire and no candidate can save you from that.

The framework has one deliberate bias built into it: it pushes you toward smaller commitments earlier. That is the right bias for a business at this scale. The failure mode is rarely that the fractional CRO was not senior enough — it is that a twelve-month engagement was signed on a vague scope with a founder who was never going to let go, and everyone spent nine months being polite about it.

What happens after the engagement starts, and how it ends well

Worth thinking about the exit before you sign the entry, because how the engagement ends determines whether the money was well spent.

There are three healthy endings. Conversion: the fractional CRO becomes full-time, or the business hires a full-time Sales Director underneath a continuing lighter-touch advisory relationship. This is usually the signal that the model has worked — you have outgrown two or three days a month. Watch for it around the point where the operator is spending most of their time on account management and team supervision rather than on the strategic work you hired them for. That is the tell.

Handover: the system is built, the internal team can run it, and the engagement tapers to a monthly check-in and then to nothing. This is the ending a good fractional CRO designs toward from day one, and it is worth asking candidates directly how they think about it. Someone who cannot describe how they make themselves unnecessary is planning to be necessary forever.

Clean stop: it did not work, both sides say so, and you part at the break clause. This is not a failure of the model, it is the model working — the entire point of fractional is that being wrong costs you four months of fees rather than a full-time salary, a notice period, and a redundancy conversation.

The unhealthy ending is the drift: eighteen months in, the engagement continues because nobody wants the conversation, the fractional CRO has become a very expensive account manager, and the strategic work stopped a year ago. Guard against it with a scheduled review at month six and month twelve where you re-answer the fourth question above — what does success look like in a number — and check honestly whether you are still tracking against it.

One downstream effect that is easy to miss: a fractional CRO engagement usually surfaces problems that are not revenue problems. Pricing that has not moved in four years. A product that cannot be sold into the UK market without a certification nobody budgeted for. A customer-service function that is quietly losing you renewals. Operations that cannot fulfil the volume the new pipeline would generate. A good operator will name these; a great one will help you sequence them. But you should go in expecting that the revenue diagnosis becomes a business diagnosis, and that some of what comes back will be uncomfortable. That is generally a sign you hired well, not badly — and it is the main reason a RevOps-literate operator, one who thinks in systems rather than in quotas, tends to be worth the premium in a business this size.

Related questions

What does a fractional CRO cost in Ireland compared to a full-time hire?

A fractional engagement at two to three days a month typically lands well below the fully-loaded cost of a full-time revenue leader once salary, employer PRSI, pension, car, and variable comp are counted. The trade-off is attention, not capability — you get senior judgement, not senior availability.

Do I need someone based in Dundalk specifically?

No, but you need contracted on-site days. The senior revenue talent pool within thirty minutes of Dundalk is thin. Widening to a ninety-minute radius opens Dublin, Drogheda, Newry, and Belfast — with a written commitment to a fixed number of on-site days each month.

How long before a fractional CRO shows results?

Pipeline hygiene and forecast accuracy improve inside sixty days. Revenue impact follows the sales cycle — in a relationship-led business with a sixty-to-ninety-day cycle, expect six to nine months before closed revenue clearly attributable to the engagement appears.

Can grant funding cover part of the cost?

Some Local Enterprise Office and Enterprise Ireland supports for management development and mentoring can defray senior part-time expertise. Schemes and eligibility change yearly, so confirm current terms directly with your LEO and check whether reimbursement is paid after spend.

What is the difference between a fractional CRO and a sales consultant?

A consultant advises and leaves a report. A fractional CRO owns a number, sits in your forecast meeting, and makes pricing and coverage decisions. If nobody is accountable for the outcome, you bought consultancy regardless of the title on the invoice.

FAQ

How do I verify a fractional CRO candidate has genuinely carried a number rather than only advised on one?

Ask for the specifics of a plan they owned: the target, the actual, the gap, and what they did about it in the second half of the year. Operators who have carried quota remember those numbers viscerally and will tell you about the year they missed. Advisors describe methodology. Then reference-check with a founder — not a peer — and ask what changed in the business that would not have changed without them.

Should I sign a six-month or twelve-month engagement?

Twelve months with a break clause at month four or five, tied to written deliverables. Six months is genuinely too short to see relationship-driven pipeline turn over in an Irish mid-market business, and a candidate who accepts a six-month term will rationally optimise for visible quick wins rather than the durable system you actually need. The break clause gives you the protection that a short term was supposed to provide.

What if my finance person blocks the spend as "consultancy"?

Reframe it in their language. Present the fully-loaded cost of the full-time alternative, the cost of the status quo expressed as customer-concentration risk, and a defined set of deliverables with dates. Then propose a paid two-to-three-day trial piece — a pipeline audit or pricing teardown — so the first decision is a small one. Finance people rarely object to the concept; they object to open-ended spend with no measurable output.

How much cross-border experience is genuinely necessary?

It depends on your revenue mix. If a material share of revenue comes from Northern Ireland or Great Britain, it is a hard requirement — currency exposure, VAT treatment, customs documentation, and different procurement processes all show up in the commercial policy a CRO sets. If you sell almost entirely within the Republic, prioritise motion fit and sector adjacency instead, and treat cross-border experience as a bonus for future expansion.

Can a fractional CRO work if the founder still owns the top customer relationships?

Yes, if you scope it explicitly. Carve the legacy accounts out and give the fractional CRO ownership of net-new and of the system. What does not work is ambiguity — where both parties nominally own the same accounts, the founder will win every time and the engagement will quietly become advisory. Write the split down and revisit it at the six-month review.

What should I have prepared before the first candidate conversation?

A one-page brief with revenue, mix by segment and geography, top-three-customer concentration, what has already been tried, what the founder will not give up, and a budget band. Plus the number that defines success. Sending this in advance filters candidates efficiently — the generic responses self-select out, and the ones who come back with hard questions about your concentration risk are your shortlist.

Sources

• https://www.leo.ie/ — Local Enterprise Offices, national portal for Irish small-business supports and mentoring programmes
• https://www.enterprise-ireland.com/ — Enterprise Ireland, state agency supporting Irish company growth and export development
• https://intertradeireland.com/ — InterTradeIreland, cross-border trade and business development body for the island of Ireland
• https://www.revenue.ie/en/vat/index.aspx — Irish Revenue Commissioners, VAT rules including intra-EU and cross-border treatment
• https://www.gov.uk/guidance/trading-and-moving-goods-in-and-out-of-northern-ireland — UK government guidance on Northern Ireland trading arrangements
• https://www.dundalk.ie/ — Dundalk Chamber of Commerce, local business network and member directory
• https://www.cso.ie/ — Central Statistics Office, official Irish enterprise, employment, and regional economic data
• https://www.localenterprise.ie/Louth/ — Local Enterprise Office Louth, regional supports covering Dundalk and Drogheda
• https://hbr.org/topic/subject/sales — Harvard Business Review, research and analysis on sales strategy and leadership

Related on PULSE

• What does a fractional CRO actually do day to day?
• Fractional vs full-time revenue leadership: cost comparison
• How to run a 30-day pipeline audit
• Building a forecast your CFO will actually trust
• Selling across the Ireland–UK border: commercial policy basics
• When founder-led sales stops scaling