Alexander AnderssonLifecycle & CRM consultant
ENSV
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S1 · Fractional leadership

Fractional Head of CRM & Lifecycle

Senior retention leadership without the full-time hire. I take the seat — own the roadmap, lead the team, carry the number.

Start a conversationAll three services in detail

[email protected]

Phone+46 70 209 71 11

Short answer

A fractional Head of CRM — hired across Europe and the Nordics just as often under the title interim Head of CRM, or Head of Retention and Lifecycle — is a senior lifecycle leader who holds the role for part of the week, inside your organisation, with the same ownership as a permanent hire: the lifecycle roadmap, the team, and the retention number. It suits companies where the role is real but not yet twelve months of full-time work — or where the permanent search is going to take two quarters you don’t have.

What the seat actually involves

Judgement formed across thirty-plus markets and half a million customers, applied to your problems in the week they arrive.

In practice the week splits three ways: the roadmap and its trade-offs, the team and what’s blocking them, and the numbers — churn, LTV, contribution by cohort — which I read directly at source.

Years at Adobe on the vendor side of the martech table sit behind the platform calls — useful when I’m negotiating on yours.

What I own

  • The lifecycle roadmap, and the argument for it in front of your exec team
  • The retention number, as a target I’m measured on
  • Line management or mentoring for the CRM and lifecycle team
  • Vendor and agency decisions — including the uncomfortable ones
  • The data model underneath the program, close enough to write the queries

What stays with you

  • Day-to-day campaign production
  • Brand and creative direction
  • Anything that needs a permanent employee’s signature

A fractional seat only works if it’s a real seat. I sit in your leadership meetings, use your email address, and get told bad news at the same time as everyone else. Consultants kept at arm’s length produce arm’s-length work.

Shape
Interim or fractional Head of CRM / Lifecycle
Cadence
From one day a week, set to what the role needs
Capacity
Never more than two clients at a time
Stack
Braze · Salesforce Marketing Cloud & Data 360 · Databricks · SQL · Python
Commercials
Retained day rate, reviewed quarterly
Notice
One month, both ways

The first ninety days

What the first quarter looks like, near enough.

  1. 01

    Weeks 1–2 · Look at the data

    Cohorts, churn curves, what the current program does to them. I build my own view rather than inherit the dashboard, because the dashboard is usually the reason nobody has noticed the problem.

  2. 02

    Weeks 3–4 · Name the constraint

    One page: where retention is actually leaking, what it’s worth, and the three things that would move it. Presented to your exec team and argued line by line.

  3. 03

    Weeks 5–10 · Ship the first thing

    Something real in production inside the first quarter. Early credibility buys the room for the harder structural work behind it.

  4. 04

    Weeks 11–13 · Set the operating rhythm

    The forecast, the review cadence, the definitions everyone agrees on. This is the part that survives me leaving.

Problem Brief

Pressure-test the fractional route.

Two practical questions show whether a senior seat is the likely next move or whether something needs settling first.

One sentence is enough.

You are talking to an AI assistant grounded in this site’s published pages. What you type is sent to it and used to write this read; nothing reaches Alexander unless you send it at the end. Describe the problem rather than named people — it needs no personal data.

Rather not do this? [email protected]

Where the judgement comes from

The reason to take an outside seat is the pattern library that comes with it.

30+
marketsCRM run across IKEA’s European organisation — governance, localisation, one stack, many countries.
20+
brandsMulti-brand lifecycle orchestration at Bauer Media.
550k
customersFour countries, as Head of CRM & Lifecycle Strategy at Tibber.
23
teamsReviewed and scored for AI leverage — an internal program inside one organisation.

In-house leadership

  • IKEA
  • Adobe
  • Bauer Media
  • Tibber

Independent engagements

  • Schibsted
  • Compricer
  • Vivino

Questions about the fractional model

Every question, answered

How is this different from hiring a consultant?

A consultant advises and leaves; the recommendations are the deliverable. A fractional Head of CRM holds the role — the roadmap, the team, the number. If retention doesn’t move, that’s my problem, not a finding in a document I handed you.

Fractional or interim Head of CRM — which one is this?

Both words get used for it, and they split by which side of the market is speaking. “Fractional” is the supply side’s term, American in origin, and it means part of the week alongside other clients. “Interim” is what European and Nordic employers write when they post the role — often covering a parental leave or the gap before a permanent hire — and it usually implies something nearer full-time for a fixed period. What I do is the first shape: part of the week, indefinitely, with the same ownership either way. If what you actually need is a full-time interim for six months, say so — sometimes that is the right answer, and it is a different conversation.

We call the role Head of Retention, or Head of Lifecycle. Is that the same seat?

Yes. The title moves around more than the work does — Head of CRM, Head of Lifecycle, Head of Retention, CRM Director, Lifecycle Manager — and I have held it under several of them, most recently as Head of CRM & Lifecycle Strategy. What I step into is the accountability, not the label. Send the role description you have actually written and you will get a straight answer on whether it is mine, including when it isn’t.

What does the seat cost?

A retained day rate for the days we agree, reviewed quarterly, on one month’s notice. The number of days decides the total rather than the length of the contract. The pricing page sets out what is fixed, what varies and how the sum compares with a permanent hire.

What happens when the engagement ends?

The intent from week one is that it can. Definitions written down, models documented, the operating rhythm run by your team. Often the endpoint is a permanent Head of CRM starting, and I spend the last month handing over to them.

Do you sign an NDA and work inside our systems?

Yes, and yes — your tooling, your access reviews, your security process. On personal data I work to the standard I’d expect as a customer: the minimum access needed, and no customer-level data leaving your environment.

Related services

Available for new engagements

Start a conversation

If the timing fits, email me directly. The reply comes from me — no autoresponder, no sequence.

[email protected]