What Happens While the Search Runs

The search takes longer than the calendar says

The number a CEO has in their head is 45 days. That is SHRM's 2025 median time-to-fill for executive requisitions, and it stops at offer acceptance (SHRM 2025 benchmark, via Pin). A retained search for a commercial leader is a different animal. Ninety to 120 days to a signed offer is the working norm, and even the fastest private-equity search specialists average about 90 days to close (Bespoke Partners, February 2025). A CMO search specifically runs about 3.8 months, and senior sales leadership four to five (Talentfoot, 2025).

Then the real clock starts. A sitting leader gives 30 to 60 days' notice. The first 30 to 90 days on the job go to learning the products, the channels, and where the bodies are buried. Add it up and the seat is functionally empty for five to eight months. Nobody budgets for that. Everybody lives through it.

Boards bridge the CFO seat. They let the commercial engine run headless.

Here is the asymmetry that should bother you. In Heidrick & Struggles' 2026 client data, interim CFOs are 51% of all interim leadership requests. Marketing and sales together are 7% (Heidrick & Struggles, 2026 High-End Independent Talent Report, p. 7). No board lets a $30M manufacturer go six months without someone closing the books. Most boards let it go six months without anyone owning price exceptions or the pipeline review.

That is changing, from a small base. Requests for interim marketing and sales leaders rose 33% year over year in that data, and interim CMO requests doubled. More than four-fifths of interim demand now comes from small and mid-sized companies, and 42% of engagements run longer than six months (Heidrick & Struggles, 2026 Talent Lens Survey, an August 2025 survey of 3,810 independent executives). Industrial is the fourth-largest client industry for it. Your clients are already in this market. Most of them do not know it yet.

What actually drifts, and what does not

Let me kill the bad math first. The vacancy calculators that divide annual revenue by headcount and multiply by days empty are nonsense, and every CEO knows it. Repeat orders keep coming. Distributors keep stocking. The installed base keeps buying parts. Revenue does not stop when the VP Sales leaves.

What stops is the saying of no. Three leaks open, and none of them shows on a dashboard until the quarter is over.

• Price realization drifts. Exceptions that used to get a hard look now get a shrug, because the person who said no is gone and the CEO is approving quotes between other jobs. One point of discount drift on $25M of revenue is $250,000, straight off EBITDA, and nobody will be able to tell you when it happened.
• Pipeline stalls between stages. Deals that needed a nudge sit. The weekly review turns into a status update, then stops. Forecast accuracy decays and nobody notices until the number misses.
• Spend runs on autopilot. Campaigns keep billing. Trade shows keep getting booked. Nobody is reading results or changing the plan.

There is a fourth cost, and it is the one that lands on you. A CEO watching the quarter soften gets impatient and pushes the search. Rushed searches produce rushed hires, into a system nobody documented, with expectations nobody reconciled with reality.

The slower version of the same leak, inside companies that already won, is the subject of The Other Wall: Why Success Is What Slows You Down.

What the gap costs, in honest math

Put two identical $25M manufacturers through a six-month transition: four months from search launch to start date, two more for the new hire to learn the products, channels, and pricing. In both, 70% of revenue is repeat orders and installed-base run rate, and it keeps coming. Only the other 30% is newly quoted, competitive business.

In the first company the seat stays open. Price realization slips 1.25% across the half year as reps grant small concessions and surcharges stop getting enforced. Win rate on competitive quotes drops three points, 25% to 22%, because nobody is running the quote-turnaround review. In the second company someone holds the pricing floor and runs the cadence while the recruiter runs the search.

About $308,000 of EBITDA and $600,000 of revenue in six months, from two small slips nobody would notice week to week. Stress it however you like. Hold win rate flat and let price slip only 1% and the leak is still about $125,000. Hold price firm inside an automated ERP and lose only two points of quote conversion and it is about $105,000. If the vacancy lands in year four of a hold with a 10x exit multiple in view, $308,000 of trailing EBITDA is about $3M of enterprise value.

Illustrative model, not a forecast. It leaves out the salary saved while the seat is empty, the search fee, and the cost of any coverage. Whether your exposure sits nearer the conservative case or the base case is easy to check: pull the discount spread and the quote turnaround from the last quarter a commercial seat sat open. The same arithmetic over a full hold period is in The Growth Thesis Is Underwritten. The Commercial Engine Isn't Built.

Short tenure is not failure. It is a deadline.

The "revolving door" story about commercial leaders is mostly wrong, and I would rather you hear that from me than from a candidate. Spencer Stuart's 2026 study puts average S&P 500 CMO tenure at 4.1 years, against 5.0 for the C-suite overall. Of 218 CMO exits from 2021 to 2025, 62% were promotions or moves to a similar or bigger role (Spencer Stuart, CMO Tenure 2026). People leave because they got the next job.

Which makes the first two quarters the whole game. A leader who spends them undoing drift instead of building has burned the window that earns the promotion. That is the placement that stalls, and the one that comes back to your desk.

One more number from the same study matters to anyone recruiting in industrials. When industrial and technology companies hire a commercial leader from outside, about three-quarters come from inside their own industry. The pool is narrow. The people in it are sitting performers with options. They do not jump into a black box where the founder still overrides every price and the pipeline is fiction. A working commercial system is not just good for the business. It is part of the pitch.

Three rules that make an interim help the search instead of threaten it

I know what a boutique search founder hears when a consultant says "interim": someone about to tell your client they do not need you. So here are the rules I work under. Put them in writing before day one.

1. I am not a candidate. Written non-candidacy, no conversion-fee games, no auditioning. The permanent seat is yours to fill.
2. Decision rights on day one. Heidrick's 2026 survey of interim executives says the same thing from the other side: an interim moves only as fast as the mandate and decision rights the company sets, and the fix is to name an internal approver for the calls usually reserved for permanent roles (Heidrick & Struggles, 2026 Talent Lens Survey). I need a discount ceiling I can approve, a named approver above it, and nothing else.
3. No irreversible moves. No comp-plan rewrite. No CRM rip-out. No reorg. Those belong to the permanent hire. An interim who rebuilds the team in month two hands the new leader a second transition inside six months, and that is worse than the drift.

And the honest version of when you do not need me. If the commercial system is documented, pricing holds without the CEO in the room, and there is a respected number two, appoint an acting internal lead and run a weekly CEO pipeline review. If daily sales are fine and one thing is broken, run a bounded six-week project on that thing. An interim seat is for the black box: incumbent gone, founder back to approving every quote, search running five months or more. That black box is the company I describe in The $10M Wall Is a System Failure, Not a Market Failure.

The 90 days, by the month

• Days 1 to 30, stabilize and calibrate. Set decision rights. Reinstate the weekly review. Audit the last 20 lost quotes and reconcile pipeline stages against actual orders. Then write a two-page operating reality brief for the CEO and for you, the recruiter, so the scorecard matches the job before the longlist is final. Your biggest headache is a spec that changes on day 75. This prevents it.
• Days 31 to 60, run the cadence and stop the leaks. Weekly pipeline and quote-turnaround review with the existing reps. One named owner for elapsed quote time. Campaigns that work keep running. Nothing irreversible.
• Days 61 to 90, hand off. One to two weeks of overlap with the incoming leader. Five assets, not a slide deck.

What the permanent hire inherits

1. A pipeline reconciliation ledger. Every open opportunity graded by a verifiable buyer action. Stalled deals purged, not hidden.
2. A pricing exception log. Every discount approved during the gap, why it was granted, and where realization is leaking.
3. The operating rhythm. The one-on-ones, the distributor and rep review cadence, honest notes on each direct report.
4. Campaign and vendor commitments. Active contracts, trade-show dates, lead-routing rules, cost per qualified opportunity.
5. An open decisions queue. The calls I deliberately held for them, territory realignment, next year's comp structure, with the data already gathered so they can decide in month one.

The rhythm is the part people underrate. At Powerblanket we ran it on wall dashboards in every business unit, sales bullpen, custom engineering, marketing, the shop floor, all rolling up to the president's office where the management team met. A new leader who walks into that does not have to invent a cadence. They have to run one. Whatever tools get bolted on during the gap inherit that rhythm or its absence, which is the argument of AI Won't Fix a Sales Process You Don't Have.

That is a leader who starts in month one, not month four. It makes your placement look good, which makes you look good. That is the whole referral.

If you place senior commercial leaders

I have done this handoff from both sides. At Powerblanket, we took the company from about $6M to $21M before the $35M sale to Thermon, and when I moved up to a Thermon corporate role the business unit kept growing on the systems we built and the people we trained. At Chip Cookies I built the B2B engine, trained the team, and handed the weekly cadence to their BD manager. The founder stopped answering every order himself. The system stayed. If you have a client with an open commercial seat and a search that is going to take a while, book 15 minutes and I will show you how the handoff works: https://www.evansadvisory.co/book/partner

Book 15 minutes →

Nate Evans
Founder, Evans Advisory | Fractional CCO for industrial manufacturers
Led Powerblanket from $5.5M to $21M in sales and through its $35M sale to Thermon.
evansadvisory.co

Quick answers

How long does a senior commercial search actually take?

Ninety to 120 days to a signed offer for a retained search, then 30 to 60 days' notice and 30 to 90 days of ramp. Plan on five to eight months before the new leader is making decisions you can rely on.

Does an interim commercial leader compete with the search firm?

Not if it is set up right. Written non-candidacy, decision rights agreed on day one, and no irreversible moves. The interim keeps the engine running and hands the permanent hire a working system. The search firm fills the seat.

When do you not need an interim?

When the commercial system is documented, pricing holds without the CEO in the room, and there is a respected number two. Appoint an acting internal lead and run a weekly CEO pipeline review. If daily sales are fine and one thing is broken, run a bounded six-week project instead.