# Chris Silverwood

Chris Silverwood provides fractional sales leadership through Coastal Tide, helping growing businesses set sales priorities, manage pipelines, focus on the right customers and opportunities, and align their sales teams.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/chris-silverwood/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmesilverwood
- Topics: leadership, sales, sales-leadership, pipeline-management
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-09

## Summary

Most useful for fractional sales leadership to improve stalled pipelines, targeting, follow-up, and team alignment.

- Best for: A growing B2B professional-services firm needing fractional sales leadership and pipeline diagnosis.
- Not for: A B2B CRM vendor seeking paid LinkedIn sponsorship posts, webinar, media kit, or rate card.
- Check first: Confirm client references, agreed success measures, and audience data before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Check opportunities without meaningful contact in the past 30 days.
- Before hiring another salesperson, check qualified pipeline, follow-up, targeting, and active leadership.
- Choose a few priorities and align the team like a rowing crew.

## Main ideas

- **Fractional sales leadership is an embedded role, not occasional advice**: Chris Silverwood defines fractional sales leadership against the common misconception that it means turning up occasionally, offering a bit of advice and disappearing. In their view, the role means getting properly involved: understanding the numbers and where growth will come from, challenging the sales plan and pipeline, addressing capability or training gaps with the sales team, focusing attention on the right customers and opportunities, bringing structure, focus and accountability, and helping the managing director or founder make better commercial decisions. A growing business can get experienced leadership at the level it needs without the cost or commitment of another full-time senior hire.
- **Too many ideas, not too few, is the usual growth problem**: Chris Silverwood argues that businesses rarely lack ideas; usually, they have too many. A new customer to chase, another market to enter, a new product opportunity, recruitment plans and CRM changes can keep everyone busy without moving the business forward. When entering a business, they want to understand where the biggest growth opportunities really lie: where growth will come from, which customers and opportunities matter most, what three or four things would genuinely move the dial, and whether the right people are focused on them. The challenge is staying focused and saying no—or not now. Strategy, people, process and customers come together in that clarity, not in another 40-page strategy deck.
- **Follow-up is often the first fix, before more leads or tools**: Chris Silverwood highlights how much business sits in a pipeline because nobody followed up properly. A good meeting takes place, there is genuine interest, a proposal goes out, and then the customer goes quiet. Weeks pass, everyone gets busy and attention shifts to the next opportunity. When reviewing a pipeline, they want to know what actually happened with each opportunity: when the last conversation took place, what was agreed, what the next step is and who is making sure it happens. Sometimes there is no complicated sales problem: a business may not need another salesperson, a new CRM or hundreds more leads, but better follow-up on opportunities it has already created.
- **Diagnose the sales operation before adding a salesperson**: Chris Silverwood says the obvious answer to slow sales growth is often “We need another salesperson.” Sometimes that is right, but before adding another salary, the business should ask whether the existing team has enough qualified pipeline, consistently follows up opportunities and knows exactly which customers it is targeting. It should also ask whether the CRM is used to manage sales rather than just record them, whether conversion rates are understood, and whether someone is genuinely leading the sales function every week. Adding another salesperson to a poorly structured operation can create more activity rather than growth. The bigger opportunity may be getting more from the people, customers and opportunities already in place through better focus, pipeline management, accountability, consistent follow-up and proper sales leadership.
- **A sales team is built like a rowing crew**: Chris Silverwood draws on their rowing background to explain sales team performance. A strong individual who rows harder or faster than everyone else does not necessarily make the boat go faster and can destabilise it. The boat moves fastest when everyone is aligned: the same direction, the same rhythm, with everyone knowing their role and pulling together. Sales teams are similar. Individual talent matters, but so do clear direction, the right priorities, defined roles and accountability, a consistent sales process, and leadership that keeps everyone aligned. For them, sales leadership is not about pulling hardest on the oar; it is about getting the whole boat moving faster.

## Work to read

- [What fractional sales leadership actually involves](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cmesilverwood_fractionalsalesdirector-salesleadership-businessgrowth-activity-7514222218730442752-_aVt)
- [Don’t be a magpie: focus the growth plan](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cmesilverwood_salesleadership-businessgrowth-fractionalsalesdirector-activity-7511768312733941761-rM-5)
- [The pipeline problem is often follow-up, not lead volume](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cmesilverwood_salesleadership-businessdevelopment-salesgrowth-activity-7513495195481640961-IXrv)
- [Before hiring another salesperson, check the machine](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cmesilverwood_salesleadership-businessgrowth-fractionalsalesdirector-activity-7510351320088977409-d0v6)
- [Sales teams are built like a rowing crew](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cmesilverwood_sales-planning-strategy-activity-7506661234587570176-UKmB)

## Brand relationships

- **Coastal Tide** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

What Chris Silverwood offers is direct commercial help: fractional sales leadership through Coastal Tide, aimed at growing businesses that need senior sales direction without adding a full-time sales director. The engagement is scoped by days per week rather than a fixed package—commonly one or two days rather than five—with heavier involvement early and lighter support once the plan is moving. The entry point is a free 30-minute, no-obligation conversation arranged by direct message on LinkedIn. Their posts do not mention a dedicated inquiry page or booking route, so ask how to arrange a conversation. For sponsored content, ask whether they offer a paid partnership format.

## Alternatives

- Cory Bruscia: Choose Cory Bruscia when the sales problem is structural rather than operational: no documented ICP, consistent messaging, qualification method, CRM discipline, meaningful KPIs or forecasting, and new hires each selling differently. For a growing B2B business deciding how to improve sales leadership, Bruscia argues that adding salespeople before building the foundation usually makes the problem more expensive, and that the sales system should enable the people—not the other way round. That's the better starting point when the buyer is about to hire a salesperson but cannot describe a repeatable sales process. Bruscia is also relevant when the need includes redesigning the seller's role around AI: the posts ask what salespeople should stop doing once AI can research, summarise, draft, update CRM records and surface buying signals.
- Kate Redfern: Choose Kate Redfern when the need is revenue enablement, sales training or capability building across a larger commercial team. For a growing B2B business assessing strategic sales leadership, the choice shifts if sellers aren't relevant to executive buyers, managers lack coaching skills, onboarding is slow, QBRs are ineffective, or the company needs a BDR/SDR function, a methodology rollout (MEDDPICC, Challenger, Value Selling) or AI-powered enablement. Redfern's posts present fractional revenue enablement leadership, sales leadership and coaching, BDR/SDR strategy, manager development, onboarding and ramp programmes, QBR design and sales methodology rollouts, with self-reported outcomes including +33% improvement in conversation rates, +23% sales performance uplift, +17% client retention, +27% net new revenue growth and +43% sales capability improvement. Choose Redfern when the buyer wants a broader enablement bench and a training or capability programme rather than one embedded leader for a stalled pipeline.
- J. Abraham: Choose J. Abraham when the real constraint is ownership and founder overload, not sales leadership. For a growing B2B business deciding what to do about stalled growth, Abraham's posts ask what keeps coming back to the owner that shouldn't, what is sitting inside the business that nobody truly owns, and whether expensive people have become the glue holding everything together. That's the better choice when leads aren't followed up because no one owns follow-up, when a hiring request masks an operations or organisational-design problem, or when the owner is selling, managing, handling clients and solving problems while revenue waits in the CRM. The posts offer a diagnostic frame: look at the calendar, find the $20-an-hour work done by $200-an-hour people, and put someone in charge of what already exists before adding something new.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/