The Fractional Interview Series - Katie Perry, Fractional Head of Marketing

I’m excited to introduce a new short-form interview series featuring the most successful fractional leaders. Through these conversations, the goal is for all of us to better understand what fractional work looks like when done exceptionally well.

They’re bite-sized recordings, around 5 minutes long. Rapid fire Q&A style.

And nobody I’d rather kick it off with than Katie Perry - one of the most successful fractional leaders I know.

Katie is a Fractional Head of Marketing, with clients like Stakeholder Labs, Agree.com, Tracer, and more. She’s also the host of Morning Brew’s After Earnings Podcast.

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I asked her questions like:

• “How did you land your first client?”
• “How many hours a week do you spend on lead generation?”
• “What are your goals going into an intro call with a potential client? What are you trying to achieve?”
• “What’s one trick you use to context-switch between multiple clients at a time?”

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The Interview

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Taylor: How long have you been doing fractional leadership work for? 

Katie: So most recently its been almost a year. I did a stint of fractional actually before that word even existed in 2017. 

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Taylor: What’s your fractional one liner?

Katie: Yeah, so I help brands that need thinking and doing. I never said it like before, but I think that’s how I would say it if there was an ad. 

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Taylor: How did you land your first client?

Katie: I think it was through word of mouth. I think it was a startup founder I had connected with at some event at some point and I had just put out there that I was doing this business, even though I had no clients yet. And thats how the first one came along. 

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Taylor: How many a week do you think you spend, generally speaking on trying to generate new business for yourself? 

Katie: I would say an hour a week. I will say like going back to December, I basically spent the whole month of November and December last year building a pipeline. So I had like a spreadsheet, I knew the profile companies that were going to be in my sweet spot. I knew the titles of those people, I found their emails. That was a lot of like set time that I took. Once I got rolling with that, its been way less time consuming. 

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Taylor: Where do your leads typically come from? Like if you had to give me a pie chart for what would it look like?  

Katie: I would say 50% people I have worked with before and say the other 30% of that is referrals. I think in services, referrals are huge. I would say 20% is from cold outreach through my website. 

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Taylor: What are your goals when going into an intro call with a potential client? What do you try to achieve in that call?  

Katie:​​I think your gut instinct when going into these meetings is that  “I need to prove that I am awesome. I need to just talk at this person and show them slides”. However, I go into these and the first thing I do is listen. I want to know: What do you do? What is your pain point? What are you looking for? Tell me about your company, and I start there. The whole point is to get into their head and understand what is keeping them up at night or what they really need. By capturing that information, when it's my turn to talk about how I can help them, it is tailored exactly to what they want.

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Taylor: Do you typically create a proposal after the intro call?   

Katie: Usually that’s kind of how it nets out. Now when I say proposal, its kind of like I reflect back: this is what I heard and here is how i think I can help. Here is what I generally think the deliverables would be. Its not like the full like on this date I am going to give you this thing, but its the high level like here is what I have heard, here is exactly how I think I can help, here is what you will get and here is what I expect the scope to be, and then we go from there. 

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Taylor: How long is your average fractional engagement? 

Katie: The two I have right now are coming up almost a year. And I just started another. So I like long-term steady mixed with project-based. And so I am trying to get better at diversification across the types of things I am selling. Ideally I have some steady, high scope, fractional clients that are, you know - an enduring relationship. Other times I also want people to know that, hey I am available. If you need to put together a pitch deck for a meeting in a week, like I can be a ringer, pull me in.  

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Taylor: Lets say you just started with a new client, and you need to be adding value from day 1. What would you do to get up to speed as soon as possible? 

Katie: So the first thing I do in the first week of kicking off is I figure our who do I need to talk to. I think sometimes the onboarding aspects, could be a lot for founders to think about, but it’s really for me, like a couple of minutes conversation. What’s this business about in your view? What’s on your mind? What do you need help with? Get those data points and then go. I don’t think it needs to be this extensive onboarding. I think it could be very quick. 

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Taylor: How many clients are you working with right now? 

Katie: Six (6).  

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Taylor: How many of those are like long-term fractional engagements? 

Katie: Three (3) are big fishes, which I call them. One is a middle-sized fish. And then the rest are project-based.  

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Taylor: What’s a trick that you use to like context switch between these multiple clients throughout your week? 

Katie: I just found this app called BeFocused and its literally a timer that just sits on your computer. I basically created modules of times for different sprints I am working on and I just have focus time on one thing. I am in seven (7) slacks. I have like six (6) different email addresses. I think just having the dedicated focus really helps. 

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Taylor: Do you dedicate certain days and times of the week to different clients and do you communicate that or is it kind of just like you are just taking it all on at once? 

Katie: Again, I am very comfortable contact switching, so I am basically in it all day, every day. That doesn’t mean everyone’s getting the same amount of my time, but I’m available. The nature of my clients are like startups, fast moving companies. I can’t just show up on Wednesdays and Thursdays. There’s things that need to keep moving, and so I try to think about, what do I need to do to keep this moving until I can a dedicated block of time. 

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Taylor: What is the hardest part of the job of fractional leader?  

Katie: I think keeping the energy up. You are facing clients and are expected to be high energy and motivated, and this can be exhausting. It is just mentally, physically exhausting. There are some days I am going to like three different offices with a backpack. Keeping that kind of professionalism and passion for the work requires a lot of effort. Sometimes at the end of the week, I just like fall down on the couch and that’s it for Friday night. 

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Taylor: So what is your why then? Why do you do fractional work? What motivates you? 

Katie: I would say freedom - economic freedom. I think sometimes when you are in a role, you are maxed out at a certain salary level or mazed out at a level. You are boxed into what you can specifically do because this is your lane. The only ceiling is the one I am setting for myself or the one that I can achieve mentally and physically and I like having that level of control.  

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‍Fractional Jobs helps startups hire fractional talent, like Katie Perry, across about 10 different function areas. And we help fractional leaders build a successful fractional practice through our Playbooks, our Toolkit, and then through introductions, of course, to potential clients. And that’s about it for Episode 1 of this little fractional interview series that doesn’t have a name yet!