Fractional CRO Robin Ayoub shows SMB owners how to stop winging sales and start building a system that works without you.
GROWTH PILLAR: Sales & Revenue
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear picture of what a fractional CRO actually does, how to build a repeatable sales process, and why your ideal customer profile matters more than your product.
Most small businesses don't have a sales problem. They have a system problem.
Robin Ayoub, founder of N49 Networks and a fractional Chief Revenue Officer with 30 years of global revenue leadership, joined East Trade Winds to lay out exactly why growing businesses stall — and how to fix it without hiring a $200,000 VP of Sales.
Robin built companies from under a million to over $100 million in revenue. He's scaled sales teams across Canada and internationally, launched new markets from scratch, and now brings that same firepower to SMBs on a fractional basis. He's not a consultant who hands you a report. He diagnoses, designs, deploys, and scales — and then builds something that holds up after he leaves.
Key topics covered:
Connect with Robin: Visit N49 Networks | Connect with Robin on LinkedIn | Read Robin's blog
Hosts: Bernie Franzgrote | Wayne Pratt | Percy Barr
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Robin (00:06)
Before I get started, I'm not used to speaking about myself, to be honest with you. I always speak about other products or other people or representing people around the podcast talking about various other ideas. It's very tough for me to speak about myself. And I guess the subject of today is CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. Just to get into it, just to give you a little bit of background on me.
And I think I've done this on a podcast with Bernie. You can probably refer to that earlier when I told my story, but just briefly, I was born and raised in Beirut during the civil war. That's for those of you who are my age now, you probably grew up watching flicking televisions back in the seventies and the eighties and seeing the civil war in that part of the world, dodging bullets, digging bunkers, trying to survive.
You know, early twenties, I left the country. I ended up in Cyprus where Naomi is right now. I lived there for a few years. I worked for a TV producing company, TV production company. And from there I found my way ⁓ to Canada after a bit of a struggle, but I ended up in Canada and I landed in Fredericton, New Brunswick on February 19th, 1990.
Robin (01:16)
and
Robin (01:16)
I came from the Middle East straight into a middle of a blizzard in a town. didn't know, you know, I just remember this like vividly like yesterday coming out of the plane and the Air Canada attendant tells us, welcome to Fredericton. And we're looking outside back in the days those planes did not connect to the airport. And I'm looking outside and saying, where is Fredericton? see all I see is a white. I don't see anything. We're in the of a snowstorm, apparently. Long story short.
Here I am, fast forward till today, 30 years in business development and I speak three languages. They become very handy, especially when you go in stealth mode. I was in a conversation last week. Somebody was speaking French. They didn't know I speak French and I interjected the conversation in complete French, sort of blew them away. And also last November, I was doing sales presentations in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Nobody knew that I can do sales presentations.
Robin (01:54)
and
Robin (02:10)
or presentations workshop in a, I did that quite well. So they become handy when you're doing global business. So let's talk a little bit about the problem that every growing small to medium enterprise or startup are facing today. One, you've outgrown what got you here. And this is something people struggle to understand. No time. So basically the,
Robin (02:12)
Arabic and
⁓
Robin (02:34)
current administration, if you will, or the current people that runs the company, stuck doing many things, including selling instead of running the business. No structure. A lot of people would say, well, I have a sales team, but they are not structured. So they don't have a repeatable, predictable sales process. no small companies cannot afford the
Robin (02:51)
budget.
Robin (02:54)
luxury of having a VP sale. And I put 200k in there. This is the moderate, small to moderate compensation. You got a tack on top of that many other things. ⁓ If you want to get a senior individual, you're looking around half a million dollar Canadian ⁓ if you are going to be doing this properly.
Robin (03:05)
and you
Robin (03:13)
So what is a fractional CRO? A fractional CRO, it relieves you from the headache of having somebody on payroll and all the additional that comes with that. So you don't have to pay a base salary plus variable.
Robin (03:22)
And
Robin (03:30)
You don't have to pay benefits. You don't have to pay expensive travel. In fact, I was just told the story last week. Somebody got hired. I don't mind sharing the name of the company, HP here in Ontario and Toronto. That individual no longer with the company after a couple of months in the company. He was hired as a regional VP of sales in one of their divisions ended up within less than a month charging them $35,000 on a credit card.
Robin (03:37)
and
and
Robin (03:57)
of the ⁓ company. They were doing an audit on where did he spend that money? Nobody knows. And he ended up getting let go after all this.
Robin (04:00)
and
⁓
Robin (04:07)
The key here is when you have these arrangements in place, large company or small company, you're not used to that. This is your probably as a small company, this is your first time you're hiring a chief revenue officer. So you need to build a trust relationship with whoever you're trying to do business. To have that trust relationship, you can't just open the door wide open, know, here's a fat salary, here's a fat benefits and, you know, welcome aboard and
Robin (04:25)
with.
and
Robin (04:35)
Now let's get some business done together. It is highly likely that you probably want to start this arrangement of having this function in your organization small at first, have a fractional CRO on board first, dip your toes in the water, see if it works, see how the process work, sort of a process first, and let's move on from there.
Robin (04:54)
some
So what do I do?
Robin (04:59)
for your business. And I currently have a few customers I'm working with. I currently help customers in a variety of ways. There's a customer in Washington right now. They're asking me to train or to support their sales team. So basically I put them on a call and I coach them on what to do, which opportunities to chase, what is the key criteria to win some of those opportunities, how to respond. You might not think of that,
Robin (05:17)
in
Robin (05:25)
People are struggling in what we seem to think it's basic. What is the appropriate pricing mechanism for doing an RFP? What is the appropriate value proposition that you can put in? How to win on a technical note, some of you are, I'm not sure if some of you are familiar with how to respond to an RFP, but there is rated criteria in a specific RFPs for instance, there's the technical rated criteria, there's the pricing mechanism, rated criteria, et cetera.
How do you win an RFP, for instance? Those are basic. Everybody should know them. Not everybody does. So in this particular case, that's what I do. In another case, I'm developing a new service to a specific market that the customer wants to develop and I'm training their sales team on it. Third case where I'm acting a fractional CRO for a specific company, this is exactly what I'm delivering to them. Build the process.
Robin (06:10)
and a night.
So I built and I've done.
Robin (06:19)
The revenue engine,
over in line, you'll see this in a second here. build this, I build revenue engines for company. I design, implement repeatable process. ⁓ I design your pipeline, the sales pipeline. For those of you who not familiar with sales, sales has a pipeline, not just oil sales has a pipeline. And, because everybody's talking about oil now, I guess every time I flipped the channel on there's oil discussion. So sales pipeline goes from your top of the funnel all the way down to closing. What does that mean? It means.
Robin (06:28)
and
and what
Robin (06:47)
How do you generate leads and how do you make those leads turn into revenue? There is a process for that. And if the process is not designed, that means you're approaching to sales generation is willing to rely on, I called my cousin or I called my friend, he got me an opportunity. If you don't put a process together, you will never have a repeatable way to predict what revenue comes in and define what are the success criteria for your business.
Robin (06:57)
and
Robin (07:12)
Now, the second thing is we need to define the go-to-market strategy. What is your go-to-market strategy? What is your ICP? ICP stands for ideal customer profile. Who is your ideal customer profile? Do you know? And believe it or not, some small to medium enterprise, they think the world is their ideal customer profile. They haven't yet narrowed down to who is the actual person that can buy what you're making. A lot of times we need to have those tough conversations with
Robin (07:36)
And the
Robin (07:40)
some of those small, medium to businesses, because some of the products they develop, they develop without doing a lot of research for them. And so they end up being, in some cases, the wrong fit to market. And then you have to go back to square one and try to figure out how do we modify this offer if it's a service? If it's a product, maybe too late, but you may have to re-engineer a few things. But if it's a service, it's easier, because then you can modify the service to fit your market. And then we have to develop sales team.
This is very important. And I've talked about this on several podcasts in the past few years. hear a lot that somebody is in, managers say that, owners say that, you know, an engineer or in, come from the language industry or a translator who's an outgoing and an individual would say to me, these are good in front of people. So I might not make them a salesperson. They may be good in front of people, but they're not a DNA salesperson.
Robin (08:13)
You know, I
Yeah
Robin (08:34)
You're born with this. I come from the Middle East. I'm a Phoenician by heritage. So I sell anything to anybody. But if you're not born with a specific DNA in your body that says you are a salesperson, and there is a way to detect that. There is a, what we call a profile indexing that I do, where we can detect, for instance, if you were born for this job or you're not. You can fake your way around it. It's not gonna work. It won't work because these will detect.
several traits of your character, tell us who you are as a person, and then we define if that's a fit for you. I end up with this, they have internal project, and tell your project manager or somebody that works with them, good in front of people. heard them talking to customers and those conversations, they impressed me. So I'm gonna put them in front of people. They're not hunters, A, they can't go get you the brand new customer. The second thing is they can't repeat that. They may get lucky one or twice.
Robin (09:08)
A lot of people they
Robin (09:27)
but they can't repeat that. It's not what they get up in the morning for to do in the morning. And how do we align these sales talents around your structure in a way that if one of them quit, this is another one too. So you've got one salesperson who is good and if that person quits, now what? The entire sales engine breaks down. So you got to create that repeatable process in terms of hiring, training. If that individual quit, we get somebody
Robin (09:35)
So,
else
on.
Robin (09:52)
It's not easy. you know, anybody could create an idea. Like the long days are gone where you create a product and people flock to you to buy it. That's the nineties. It doesn't happen anymore. Every minute we started the conversation, compete globally, master your trade as a, at a global level. These things are not going to happen to you immediately just because you create something unique in your mind. And believe me, if you do a little bit of research, there's nothing unique anymore. There's a bit of a twist here and here and there. Fine.
Robin (09:53)
thing.
Robin (10:21)
But if you go look around, the only differentiator is you as an individual, as a salesperson who's connecting a product to a market, that's what people connect to. That's what lasts in people's mind more than what you product. How do we do that? So just let me talk a little bit about my ⁓ bit of a track record here.
Robin (10:34)
So how do you, and
But man.
So in an
Robin (10:42)
In
90s, was a company in Ottawa called Empowered Networks. For those of you who are in Ottawa, probably remember that company on Dairy Fox. I started with that company. They were like about a million dollar. Within about a year, a year and a half, I took them to $16 million. I was selling fiber optic testers, test beds for telecom networks. So my customer would have been things like Cisco, Nortel Networks, Avaya, those types of companies on Marsh Road, where the Silicon Valley of Canada.
Robin (10:55)
and
Robin (11:08)
used to be I'm not sure if it's still there now.
Robin (11:10)
And so that company, I remember.
Robin (11:13)
I remember I was leading a sales team and I was doing the actual sales as well. Somebody says to me, like, how do you do that? Here's an example. A customer one time calls me. was competing with H-Gilent. They had a division called Agilent. They do fiber optic testing. He called me up and he says, Robin, I'm looking to buy a test bed for my fiber optic switch.
Robin (11:17)
So how do you do that? So here's
I was, be agile.
And he
Robin (11:39)
said, okay, when can you meet with me? He said, what about today? How about 10 minutes, 15 minutes? I said, yeah, I know where your laboratory is. I'd drive to your laboratory and I'll just go meet with you. He said, you mean today? I said, yeah, I'll go see you now. So I left the office, I went drove over to him. I've had my, my equipment with me, the demo equipment, they call them. And I got a laptop back in the days you were not like doing all this stuff right now. I'm a programmer by trade. So I wrote a code where I can
do the quoting right on the fly. And the customer was talking to me over coffee in a cafeteria at the Moody Drive location in Ottawa. He's telling me like, here's the system, here's the specs, et cetera. And I was quoting, putting all this stuff in my program. And by the end of it, it ended up being a $3 million US project. I burned it on a CD. I gave it to the customer. And by the time I got to my office,
Robin (12:12)
in the
So I put it.
Robin (12:32)
Now I have a purchase order of 3 million US dollars on my fax machine at the time. Now we receive all these things electronically through other means. When the CEO of the company, which was based in Honolulu at the time, found out I was a reseller for these guys, found out that we got a $3 million order, he flew from Honolulu over. said, I want to meet this customer. I want to figure out why didn't I buy? And that's a very important question. Nobody asked. Why did you buy? Why did you select us and learn from that? Not just why did you leave us? A lot of people ask that.
Robin (12:48)
HONNELU
Robin (13:00)
But why did you select from us? And he came in, I arranged a lunch and he asked like, why did you buy from us? He said, well, when I called you competitors, they booked me in, you know, two months out to have a meeting with them, to book the lab, to do the demo, to give me a quote. That's a six months. I don't have six months, six months time. When I called Robin within 15 minutes, he showed up to my office. So we ended up buying.
Robin (13:09)
They had me
Robin (13:23)
Innovation. Innovation is a company based in St. John, New Brunswick. I'm proud to say I know one of my executive mentors. He's 90 years old now, Jerry Pond. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the New Brunswick landscape. He's still around.
Robin (13:36)
And
Robin (13:36)
I was working in Ottawa. They called me up. said, we need your help. come down. I said, what do you need help with? He said, we don't know. We've got a bunch of engineers working in the lab. Go see what we can figure out what to productize out of that and take it to market. At the time, they were creating a bunch of things, telecom related. They created something called Reverse 911. Basically, would call the 911 operator. We'll call, that's the idea by concept. You will call the
a subdivision or an area, geographical area, you tell them there was a threat of sort. It wasn't developed, it was a concept. So I developed it, partnered with hardware companies, partnered with software company, GIS company, built it together and started selling this thing, zero to $35 million. Lexitech International. I was coming back from Washington for my meeting ⁓ with the ⁓ IT director of the White House, working on a different initiative at the time.
Sitting beside me there was a gentleman who running a company in Moncton New Brunswick called Lexitec International. I was living in New Brunswick at the time. He convinced me to go work for him as a VP of business development on a company that's got $800,000. By the way, at that time, Lexitec International was owned by JD Irving, by Jim, which I used to meet with him on a quarterly basis to go over the finance and he beats me over the head with my financial statements.
I said, the idea, said, we have five year plan. We need to get to a significant growth so we can sell the company. Five year plan to that company to $29 million sold it to a company called CLS communication, which then I became the global head of sale for them and took that company to 110 million dollars.
Robin (15:07)
And I did.
Robin (15:07)
We
a US launch during which for the CLS communication, we put an office together in New York, we started selling in the US and did a $5 million growth from zero in that area.
Robin (15:19)
also developed the
Robin (15:20)
federal government practice for them from zero to close to $15 million at that time. Today, that particular division is still there. I'm no longer part of the big corporation anymore. I left the corporate world in November last year. That's why I'm a CRO, CRO work right now.
Robin (15:35)
And I'm doing that.
Robin (15:38)
So who is this for? Small to medium enterprise company, one to $20 million. It could be more, it could be less. Even startups, to be honest, who are trying to figure out where is the customer coming from and what's my next possible business development opportunity look like. If you are CEO and founder or de facto head of sale, because as you know, you are new, you're small to medium, you do everything. Sales, HR, finance, et cetera. You may want to take a look at
Robin (15:40)
a
and
Robin (16:05)
somebody you can partner with on the revenue side of things and try to help you out and try to figure out what's next for you.
Robin (16:12)
You have a small sales.
Robin (16:13)
team
with energy, but no consistent process. Maybe you need to put some of that stuff in place, build your CRM, build your cadence, build your go-to-market strategies, et cetera. You've tried hiring salespeople. I hear this all the time. We hired a salesperson that did not work out. Well, I don't know. Did you hire the right person? Maybe you did not hire the right person. What is it that did not work out? And that's when you start getting into the qualifiers.
Robin (16:33)
and what
Robin (16:38)
and you see that it's not for them to do. Like the old saying goes, hire a professional, don't leave it to amateurs.
Robin (16:40)
and
speaker-6 (16:45)
You
Robin (16:46)
You need
to structure. ⁓
Robin (16:49)
and accountability,
a clear go to market. And I always use this comparison. It's a three-legged stool. You need a product, you need a market that wants the product, and you need a connector to connect the product and the market. And that connector is your salespeople. We need to evaluate all three elements to figure out if we're gonna get a successful formula, or no.
So how do we work together? First, we diagnose the problem. Two, we design. And three, we deploy. And four, we scale. And we do this. I do this with the owner and with the teams that they're influenced by this. So either I'm working with an internal team on behalf of the owner, or I'm working directly with the owner trying to shape the strategy.
Robin (17:25)
and
Robin (17:27)
pretty straightforward. It doesn't really require, you know, most of the stuff we've talked about. It doesn't require a lot of design here from the get go because I'm flexible because you're working with one individual. If we need to tweak things, we tweak them. If we need to move on the strategy, we'll move the strategy. If we need to adjust what we've agreed to at the beginning, we can adjust that as well. And you're not committed to a long term
you know, individual that you're probably going to hire full time and down the road have what full time I was one up to November in the corporate world down with was done with that.
speaker-6 (17:59)
Not too...
Robin (18:04)
So why me, for instance? You know, this is my first presentation and that's the first time I'm CRO services. Up till now, all customers that I've got, and I got like three, four of them, my days are pretty much fully booked. They came because they know me. And as soon as they found out that I left, the large corporations say, Robin, we're going to tap into you. I try to see if you can help us out. Let me explain why would you choose somebody like me or me personally?
Robin (18:05)
and I
So bye.
Robin (18:31)
I've got 30 years in revenue leadership. I've got a well-rounded knowledge around IT, for instance, technology in general. do AI automation, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel. It doesn't matter where. I do a lot of IT automation. I speak three languages.
Robin (18:39)
you
do.
And I.
Robin (18:48)
help scale your companies and drive them into acquisition mode because everybody builds a business for one reason. You're not hanging on to that business for the next life. You're building a business for an exit strategy. So we'll build the exit strategy together. We'll work together on figuring out what to do with the organization at that end. Again, I've got a global reach. I speak three languages.
been president of various associations. So I'm not sure if this helpful, but I think it does because I've got a bit of an influence out there. Sales structures that survive after I leave. So once you build the blocks, when you build what you need to build, even though I withdraw from that arrangement, whatever I build, it's sustained itself. It becomes ongoing.
Robin (19:20)
I built
And also I do.
Robin (19:35)
Although I have a global reach, but I'm also a Canadian, so I'm rooted here in the Canadian market. I grew up selling in the Canadian market coast to coast, in every province, pretty much every town.
Robin (19:46)
And also.
Robin (19:47)
The math works here. I don't need to explain it. You guys know what the math look like. Fractional is cheaper than hiring at full time, but you get more flexible and better benefits.