What Is a Fractional CMO?

What Does a Fractional CMO Do?

A fractional CMO does the parts of a chief marketing officer’s job that need senior judgment: deciding what marketing should focus on, writing the plan, setting the budget, and holding the people who do the work accountable to the numbers. The difference from a full-time CMO is the time, since a fractional CMO gives your company part of the week and other companies the rest.

In practice that means a fractional CMO owns:

• The direction, meaning which offering marketing should lead with and which buyer it’s aimed at, agreed with the rest of the leadership team rather than chosen inside marketing.
• The written plan, the one document that ties the offering, buyer, channels, measurement and budget together, which is what the Marketing Action Plan page lays out line by line.
• The budget decisions, including where the next dollar goes, which spend gets cut and when a proven channel has earned more.
• Accountability for the people doing the work, an in-house team, one agency or several, judged against your own sales records rather than each vendor’s report.

What a fractional CMO usually doesn’t do is the hands-on work: running the ad accounts, writing the content or building the pages. Some bring a team of their own for that, so know which you’re buying, because a strategist with nobody to carry out the plan produces a good document and little else.

How Does a Fractional CMO Work?

A fractional CMO works on a set share of time, often agreed as days a week or a monthly retainer, attends the leadership meetings where marketing decisions get made, and directs whoever does the work between those meetings. Engagements we see take one of three shapes, and the Marketing Action Plan page covers how fractional leadership fits alongside in-house people and agencies.

• An ongoing part-time role, where the fractional CMO owns the plan and the numbers month to month, often under a minimum term, because the first months go into setup and the payoff comes later.
• A defined project, such as building the marketing plan, choosing and briefing agencies, or setting up measurement, with a clear finish line.
• Interim cover, while a company searches for a full-time CMO, sometimes with the fractional leader helping to define the role and hire for it.

Pricing varies too widely for a single figure to mean much, and we haven’t found a published benchmark with a method we’d trust. What drives the price is the time committed each month, the person’s seniority and experience in your industry, the scope (strategy alone, or also managing agencies, a team or hiring), the length of the commitment, and whether hands-on execution comes with it. When you compare proposals, compare what each person will own and how often they’ll be in the room, since two quotes at the same price can cover different jobs.

If you’re still deciding between a full-time CMO, a fractional one and a head of marketing, What Should You Focus On When Hiring a CMO? compares the three.

What Should a Fractional CMO Deliver in the First Few Months?

A fractional CMO’s first few months should produce a baseline you trust, a written plan the leadership team has agreed to, and a clear view of what limits growth, with new revenue coming after that. Judge this period on the plan and the baseline rather than on sales, and see what a new CMO should get in the first ninety days for what the company should hand over at the start.

1. Get access to everything, including the CRM, the ad accounts, the analytics and the margins by offering from finance, all in the company’s name.
2. Build a baseline of what each channel costs per customer and what those customers are worth, from your sales records.
3. Settle the offering and buyer marketing will focus on, with the leadership team, or bring a recommendation to them.
4. Write the plan, covering the channels, the budget, how results will be measured and when it will be reviewed.
5. Line up the people doing the work, briefing or replacing agencies and setting what each one is judged on.
6. Find the limit outside marketing, such as sales follow-up, delivery or cash, before more spend runs into it.

When Is a Fractional CMO the Right Choice?

A fractional CMO is the right choice when you need senior judgment to set marketing’s direction and hold an agency or a small team accountable, but there isn’t enough strategic work to keep a full-time CMO busy. A fractional CMO is the wrong choice when what you’re missing is hands-on capacity, or when nobody inside the company will act on the plan.

It tends to fit when:

• marketing spend has grown past what an owner or a marketing manager can judge on the side, and agencies are effectively grading their own work;
• the leadership team keeps reopening which offering and buyer to focus on;
• you want the plan and measurement in place before deciding whether a full-time CMO is worth hiring.

It tends not to fit when:

• the gap is execution, because a fractional CMO who directs work nobody has time to do will leave you paying for strategy that sits on a shelf, and an agency or a hire may be the better first step, which When Should You Hire a Marketing Agency? helps you decide;
• nobody inside will act on the plan, since a part-time leader depends on someone in the building to follow through between meetings;
• marketing needs a full-time executive, with several teams, a large budget and decisions every day that affect sales, delivery and cash.

How Do You Judge a Fractional CMO?

Judge a fractional CMO the way you’d judge a full-time CMO, on proof that marketing they led produced customers and profit, rather than on activity such as campaigns launched, reports delivered or meetings attended. A fractional CMO works with several companies at once, so you can ask for more recent examples than a full-time candidate could give.

Before you hire one, ask them to walk through, for a past client, what each main channel cost per customer and what those customers were worth, where the ad platforms’ numbers disagreed with the sales records, and what they cut. The interview questions on What Should You Focus On When Hiring a CMO? work as well for a fractional candidate, and How to Measure Digital Marketing ROI shows how to check the answers.

Once one is working with you, review them against a few questions each quarter: whether the written plan exists and the leadership team uses it, whether the numbers come from your CRM rather than the platforms, whether you can see what each customer cost to win and what it’s worth, and whether the agencies and team know what they’re judged on. If the answers are still vague two quarters in, the engagement isn’t working, however busy it looks.