Mastering Modern Sales Leadership with Cedric Charpenet

From finance to fractional, from Asia to AI

“A lot of companies are starting to realize you know to sell 10 enterprise deals is the equivalent of selling you know 100 to almost a thousand SMB deals and the effort there is very different.”

That one sentence from Cedric Charpenet, founder of CharpStrat and guest on the GrowTech Startup Sales Talks podcast, captures the reality shift happening in B2B sales right now.

The volume game is fading. Precision, process and senior sales leadership are becoming the real unfair advantage. And more often than not, that leadership is no longer a classic full time VP sitting in your office. It is fractional. It is global. It is deeply strategic.

This blog walks through Cedric’s journey and his views on

• selling in very different cultures
• when to bring in a fractional sales leader
• how that leader changes your sales process
• the role of AI and tools in enterprise selling
• why your online reputation now sits inside the sales funnel

All grounded in his own words.

From trading floors to B2B boardrooms

Cedric did not start in SaaS or inside sales. He started in finance, on trading floors and inside mutual funds.

He studied finance because, as he puts it, he always loved the “commotion” of trading floors. That environment taught him three skills that now define his work with B2B companies

• very high attention to detail
• deep analytical thinking
• the ability to explain complex topics simply

In mutual funds and wealth management he learned to speak with investors who did not live in spreadsheets.

He had to take complex products and, in his words, “simplify everything of why you want to do this what is your investment philosophy why do you want to invest in that thing.”

Later, managing money for high net worth clients, he also learned something many salespeople forget in B2B

“You are not just selling to an account or a business you are selling to a human.”

That human to human mentality stayed with him when he moved into selling consulting projects and then B2B tech. Instead of starting as an SDR, he jumped straight into enterprise sales because someone took a bet on his background and way of thinking.

It worked.

Selling to Asia and Europe is not the same game

Cedric was born in Asia and has lived and worked across Europe. That gives him a rare practical understanding of how culture shapes deals.

He points out that even inside Asia, the differences are huge, just like between countries in Europe. Still, there are clear patterns.

In many Asian companies structures are more hierarchical. When you are multithreading, you can expect input from people lower in the organisation, but, as Cedric explains

“The ultimate decision will be taken for sure by that person and almost the entirety.”

In more Anglo cultures like the United Kingdom or the United States, decision making is often more distributed. Budget holders, champions and technical evaluators share influence. Multithreading has a different flavour there.

In Europe you get every possible mix in between, depending on whether you work with local companies or global groups.

For founders expanding into Asia or unfamiliar regions, Cedric’s simple advice is to respect the way decisions are made on the ground and to hire locally when the stakes are high. You cannot force your home market playbook onto a culture that buys in a completely different way.

Why fractional sales leadership is booming

Cedric runs CharpStrat as a fractional sales leadership practice. Before that he spent years in classic full time revenue roles.

He has lived both models and sees the shift from very close range.

The move toward fractional is driven by three forces

• The world went remote during Covid and never fully went back. Flexibility became normal.
• Startups realised that senior go to market talent is expensive and hard to hire fast.
• Many companies want to go up market into enterprise but lack that specific experience.

“Often,” Cedric says, “you have a team you want to grow and a motion you want to change, but it is not yet big enough or stable enough to justify a senior full time exec.”

A fractional leader can

• join quickly
• plug into founder level strategy
• build the motion
• stay for the transition or longer

He describes the relationship as different from a normal employee

“A fractional is more of a partnership you are really becoming a strategic partner and doing what the founder hopes that you do in a growth path.”

You get leadership as an operating expense, not a permanent headcount, which matters a lot in cash sensitive environments.

Full time versus fractional in practice

Cedric does not position himself as anti full time. In his view, both models have their place. The key is timing.

Full time makes sense when

• the sales team is already sizeable
• there is a clear, stable motion
• leadership needs to scale and manage more than reinvent

Fractional shines when

• you are in transition
• you want to move up market
• you are still searching for the right full time leader
• you need expertise now rather than in nine months

One very pragmatic benefit Cedric points out

If you make a wrong call on a fractional leader, you will see it quickly and it is much easier to part ways than with a full time executive on a long notice period.

How a fractional leader actually changes your sales process

This is where things become real, not theoretical.

Cedric shared a concrete example of working with a service based company that mostly sold to enterprise clients. Despite serving large accounts, they obsessed over new business and neglected expansion.

They were winning logos, then barely mining them.

Cedric came in and deliberately shifted the motion. Together they built a playbook that

• kept new business running
• put serious focus on account management
• systematised expansion inside current customers

They worked with the team to ask better strategic questions, understand long term goals of those enterprise clients and design recurring value, not just one time projects.

He cites a simple statistic to justify that focus

“Your win rate can go up to around 60 to 70 percent if you are selling to an existing client. If you are selling to new business it tanks to 15 percent on average.”

It is not either or. You keep prospecting, but you stop leaving money on the table in accounts where you already have trust and access.

Going up market is the real twenty twenty four trend

Cedric sees a clear pattern in his work with founders and revenue teams.

Many are trying to move from SMB or mid market to enterprise because, as he notes, ten enterprise deals can equal hundreds of small ones. Revenue density is much higher. The complexity is higher too.

You move from quick one or two call sales to long cycles with many stakeholders and multiple approvals. Your discovery skills, project management and internal champion building all need to level up.

That is why his own niche at CharpStrat is so focused

“Teams that are trying to move up market which apparently is a twenty twenty four trend so all good for me in that respect.”

The AI and tool stack Cedric recommends

Cedric freely admits he and Dom from GrowTech are both tool junkies. The trick is to choose technology that fits your stage and motion, not to collect shiny objects.

He insists on one base layer

A solid CRM such as Salesforce or HubSpot as the single source of truth. Without structured data you cannot measure, and without measurement you cannot improve.

On top of that, he highlights several categories and tools.

Social selling and workflow around LinkedIn

He likes tools that bring CRM context into LinkedIn and social platforms and make engagement easier. For example

• folk and Breakcold for combining contact management with social touches
• Surfe, which Dom mentioned, for moving LinkedIn data directly into Salesforce

Digital deal rooms

For larger deals he is a big fan of tools such as Trumpet.

They let you send a single interactive link instead of scattered slide decks and attachments. Prospects can explore the narrative, internal champions can share it, and you can see who is engaging.

As Cedric says, you need to know

“Who is interacting with your deal and who is the stakeholder who is the budget holder.”

Deal rooms make that clearer.

Business case tools

He is a strong believer in collaborative business cases for big tickets and often points to Fluent as an example.

When you co create a financial and strategic case with your champion, you give them a powerful internal selling asset. Deals become less about feature comparison and more about quantified outcomes.

Prospecting and AI

He mentions tools like Salesforge that combine data, email infrastructure and AI written outreach, including different languages.

He is cautiously optimistic about AI personalization. When it is done well, it saves time. When it is done badly, it feels fake and hurts trust. His own preference is to blend technology with human touch

Start with visible engagement on LinkedIn. Comment. Add value. Then connect. Only then move into outbound sequences. Let people recognise your name and face before they see your pitch.

Reputation and founder led content now live inside the funnel

One of the most striking points Cedric raises is about online reputation.

He references data that around seventy five percent of B2B buyers research online before they ever talk to sales. They check your site, your LinkedIn, search results and reviews.

You cannot treat marketing and brand as something separate from revenue any more.

He points to companies like Gong and Chili Piper, where founders and sales leaders are extremely active on LinkedIn, share real insights and build awareness long before any outreach.

He also loves how some teams turn their brand into a media engine. Many run their own podcasts, like GrowTech does with Startup Sales Talks, to capture attention and build trust through education, not just cold messages.

Your future buyers might be listening during their commute months before your SDR ever touches them.

Learning like a modern revenue leader

Cedric describes himself as a lifelong learner who prefers audio to text.

He listens to shows like The Revenue Formula from Growblocks, enjoys the mix of operations, strategy and humour, and uses communities such as Pavilion, Modern Sales Pros and RevGenius for peer learning and structured courses.

He is also very aware that communities can become noisy, so he treats them as tools, not as a place to live.

The pattern is clear

He never stops tuning his thinking, even after years of selling and leading teams. That curiosity is probably one of the reasons he thrives as a fractional partner rather than only in a single long term role.

Final thought

Cedric’s story and perspective can be summed up in one simple idea

Sales is changing from a volume race to a precision sport.

Enterprise focus, smart use of AI, deep respect for culture, account expansion motions and founder led reputation building are all part of the new landscape.

Whether you bring in someone like Cedric Charpenet through CharpStrat, or work with a partner like GrowTech, the question is not only how many people are in your sales team.

It is how strong the leadership and thinking behind that team really is.