You’re the CEO of an established manufacturing company, and Oliver, your CMO, in a full mid-life crisis, got himself a Harley and moved to Oregon to make his craft beer hobby his full-time job.
Or maybe you’re a technical co-founder of an AI startup in Silicon Valley. You’re in “founder mode,” and your product evolves quickly, but you need to lay the foundation for your company’s growth.
Two very different scenarios, but let’s consider all the options you have to turn things around:
- Hire a full-time, experienced CMO
- Hire a marketing agency
- Hire a junior marketer
- Hire a fractional CMO
- Procrastinate
You don’t have the luxury of procrastinating since you have an established marketing team that needs guidance right this minute. You have had a CMO before, have the budget to hire an experienced professional, and know the kind of person who may be a good fit for you.
Go ahead and hire a full-time CMO.
But if you’re setting up the marketing function for the first time, have had a CMO-shaped hole in your org chart for far too long, or don’t have the budget to afford an FTE, you should consider hiring a fractional CMO.
Fractional executives give you the possibility of hiring an experienced professional without long-term commitments.
It’s a flexible model that has been successfully applied to the CFO, CTO, CPO, and, obviously, CMO roles.
A potential alternative would be to hire a full-time junior marketer. The notable difference is that this person may not have the strategic depth you need and will depend almost entirely on your input for direction. It’s okay if you just want them to execute tasks.
Fractional CMOs, on the other hand, will help you build, train, and manage your team, set up marketing processes and initiatives, and create or refactor your business’s marketing strategy. Depending on the engagement they might work up to a couple of days per week, or part-time, until the agreed upon objectives are reached.
Consultant execs are different from fractionals because they typically don’t help with the execution side of things.
I mentioned marketing agencies as one of the options. They get a bad rap but they are actually great at hiding the complexity of some project’s execution and extending your team with a scalable pool of resources. With few exceptions, they are more tactical than strategic.
What’s your experience with fractionals, consultants, agencies, or empowering junior team members?
Would you consider hiring a fractional for your business?
