Cedric Charpenet on mastering modern sales, fractional leadership and the future of sales tech

If you look at Cedric Charpenet’s CV, it feels like three careers packed into one. Finance, wealth management, coconut water projects, enterprise consulting, then B2B tech and now fractional sales leadership with his firm CharpStrat.

On paper it is eclectic. In practice it is exactly the kind of background you want if you are trying to sell complex solutions to serious buyers.

This Startup Sales Talks episode with Cedric is basically a guided tour of where sales is going next. In this post we will walk through the main ideas from the conversation and turn them into something you can actually use in your own work.

From trading floors to enterprise deals

Cedric started in finance, not SaaS. That matters more than you think.

In mutual funds and wealth management, he was selling investment ideas and complex financial products to people who were trusting him with their life savings. That taught him a few habits that transfer directly into B2B sales.

He learned to take something very complex and make it simple enough for a normal person to say “I get it”.

He learned that the relationship is not “company versus company”. It is always person to person. Even when there are logos and board decks involved.

He also learned that you are almost never selling features. You are selling confidence, security and trust.

Later, when he jumped into enterprise consulting and then tech, he skipped the classic SDR ladder and went straight into big deal territory. That only worked because he already knew how to listen, how to frame a project as a business case and how to talk to senior decision makers without shrinking in the chair.

That is the first quiet lesson in his story. You do not need a perfect linear “SDR to AE to manager” staircase to earn the right to work big deals. You do need a way to think clearly about risk, value and people.

Selling to Asia is not the same as selling to Europe

Cedric was born in Asia and raised with both Eastern and Western business cultures. For anyone trying to sell globally, his framing is a useful shortcut.

In many Asian markets, hierarchy is much stronger. You can talk to people down the org chart, but the decision is made above. The person at the top often carries the whole responsibility and acts accordingly. Multi threading is still important, but you need to respect the ladder.

In Anglo cultures, things are more distributed. You might have a clear budget owner, a technical champion, several operators and a sponsor, and they all expect to be heard. The decision can be more collaborative and the process more open.

In continental Europe, you get a blend of both, plus national quirks. A German enterprise and a French scale up do not behave the same, even if they use the same CRM.

The point is not to memorise stereotypes. The point is to assume that “copy paste outreach across continents” is lazy and expensive. If you plan to sell in a new region, hire people who understand that market, or at least invest time to learn how decisions are really made there.

Why fractional sales leadership is taking off

Cedric now works as a fractional sales leader. Meaning he joins a company on a part time, high impact basis and helps them solve specific commercial problems, often around moving up market.

Why would a startup choose someone fractional instead of hiring a full time leader

Because of timing, speed and flexibility.

Sometimes you are in between stages. Your revenue team is too big to manage casually, but too small to justify an expensive senior executive with a long notice period and stock package.

Sometimes you know you want to go after enterprise deals, but nobody on your team has actually done it before.

Sometimes you are recruiting a senior leader and the search will take months, yet you cannot afford to let sales direction drift while you wait.

In those situations, a fractional leader can jump in fast, ramp quickly and start fixing things. They are more like a partner than a traditional employee, and they can also be easier to part ways with if it is not working. No long probation drama, no emotional hangover.

It also fits how a lot of senior talent wants to live now. Many experienced operators would rather work deeply with a few companies than live in one executive job until burnout.

Fractional versus full time what is the real difference

A full time sales leader is embedded. They own the team, own the board slides and become part of the political fabric of the company. That is powerful and needed at a certain scale.

A fractional leader is more surgical.

They are best used when you have a well defined mission. For example

You sell mostly to small customers and want to build an enterprise motion from scratch.

You have a handful of big accounts but no proper account management or expansion strategy.

You have sellers but no consistent process and no real forecasting discipline.

Cedric’s example makes it tangible. He joined a services firm that sold mostly to enterprise customers but behaved like a new business machine. They were chasing fresh logos all the time and more or less ignoring expansion within the accounts they already had.

He came in, shifted the focus toward proper account management, built plays for upsell, cross sell and multi threading inside existing clients and helped them build recurring revenue streams instead of one off wins.

Same product. Same clients. Same market.

Different process, better revenue mix.

That is the kind of situation where a fractional leader shines. You do not need someone to sit in every daily standup forever. You need someone who has seen this movie and can skip you past the boring parts.

How to actually find a good fractional sales leader

Right now there is no perfect marketplace for fractional leaders. Discovery is still relationship based.

Cedric’s view is simple. Start with people you already trust.

Ask your investors, advisors and experienced founders who they would call if they needed help with enterprise sales, pricing, sales ops or go to market.

Look on LinkedIn not just for the title, but for proof they have done what you want to do. Enterprise AEs who have turned into consultants, VPs who have actually carried a quota, not just managed decks.

The good news is that if you choose badly, you will know relatively quickly. A fractional engagement that is not working can be ended far faster than a senior employment contract.

There is also a cheeky business idea hiding here. A proper curated directory of fractional leaders, with honest case studies and references, would probably get crowded very fast.

Enterprise sales is about trust, not tricks

When Cedric talks about selling to big companies, there is almost no “hack” language. The core themes are very boring and very real.

Treat senior buyers like intelligent humans with real pressure on their shoulders.

Be transparent about what your product can and cannot do, especially on feature gaps and timelines.

Respect their decision process. Instead of trying to sneak past the org chart, ask who is involved, what they care about and how they prefer to handle internal approvals.

Start from the top when you can. If a chief executive or other senior leader has explicitly asked someone in their team to speak with you, that introduction changes everything.

Do not dump the responsibility of selling you internally on a nervous middle manager. Offer to attend the board session or leadership meeting where your project will be discussed, or at least equip your champion with clear business cases and concise internal decks.

Above all, be honest. If you will not be a good fit for a prospect, say so. Cedric has seen that backfire less than the usual “overpromise and patch later” approach. In many cases, honesty does not kill the relationship. It simply moves the deal into the future or turns into referrals.

The quiet power of account expansion

One enormous blind spot Cedric sees in many revenue teams is the obsession with net new logos.

New business is important. It is also slow, risky and expensive.

Existing accounts already trust you enough to have bought once. If they are happy, they are far more likely to buy again, to introduce you to other teams and to expand the contract, sometimes quietly and repeatedly.

The maths here is brutal. Win rates for expansion can go into the sixty to seventy percent range. Win rates for cold new logos often sit around fifteen percent. Same seller, same week, wildly different probabilities.

So Cedric pushes teams to build proper account plans. Within each enterprise customer you should know

Who else inside this company could benefit from what we already deliver

Which regions, business units or brands are still untouched

What strategic projects are on the horizon where we could be relevant

What success stories can we package and reuse inside this logo

This is where he sees the biggest upside for teams that have at least some big customers. Their future growth is already in the building. They just need to learn how to look for it.

Sales tech that actually matters

Both you and Cedric like shiny tools. The trick is not letting the tools run your week.

He makes a few important distinctions.

You will always need a real CRM as your base layer. Something reliable where deals, contacts, activities and forecasts live. HubSpot, Salesforce, choose your flavour, but pick one and treat it as the source of truth.

On top of that, there is a new wave of tools that change the way you work rather than just adding friction.

Social selling layers that sit directly on top of LinkedIn or other networks and help you track what your prospects are doing, then engage in a more natural, conversational way.

Digital deal rooms like trumpet that let you create a shared space for each opportunity. Instead of sending ten different email threads and five different slide decks, you give the buyer one link that contains everything they need, and you get visibility on who views what and when.

Business case builders like fluent that help you co create an economic case with your champion. This not only makes your Discovery better, it gives your champion an internal selling weapon that the competition rarely provides.

Prospecting platforms that integrate email, validation, warm up and messaging in one place. The details will differ, but the goal is to produce fewer, better, more relevant touches rather than pure spam volume.

He is also clear on one thing. Tools should follow strategy, not the other way round. Decide what behaviour you want in your team and what problems you actually need to solve, then add the minimum tech needed to support that.

AI is here, but the fundamentals are still human

Cedric is optimistic about AI in sales but not naive about it.

Usage based pricing is becoming more common, especially for AI heavy tools where cost ties directly to volume. Generations are shifting. Younger buyers prefer to do deep self education online before they speak with anyone. Content, reputation and dark social all matter more than ever.

Hyper personalisation at scale sounds nice, but a lot of AI powered outreach still reads fake and jarring. The better play for now is to use AI to speed up your research, summarise calls, draft first versions and free your time for actual thinking and relationship work.

One theme keeps coming back.

We are selling to humans. Humans with careers to protect, bosses to please, boards to convince and limited time to think.

The tech will help you reach them and serve them faster, but it will not replace the part where you listen properly, build trust and take responsibility for the recommendation you are making.

Continuous learning and staying sharp

Cedric lives in this world every day and still treats learning as a core part of the job.

He listens to sales and revenue podcasts rather than just reading. He hangs out in communities, even if they are noisy, because sometimes one thread or one talk is worth a week of scrolling. He invests in structured learning such as Pavilion style programs when needed.

The pattern is simple. The market keeps changing. Buyers keep changing. Tools keep changing. If you are not curious, you will wake up one day and realise all your habits are outdated.