A Guide to Hiring a Fractional CMO in 2023

Fractional execs are gaining steam, but getting the most out of one can be confusing. Here's what I've learned about maximizing the ROI out of a fractional hire.

May 31, 2023

To put it bluntly, marketing is a bigger business driver than ever before. Platforms like AWS, no-code tools, open source, and remote work have dramatically reduced the cost of creating software products. Distribution is likewise easier than ever thanks to SaaS delivery models, App Stores, Amazon’s FBA, and 3PLs. This means that the way to differentiate a business has also shifted from product or distribution to marketing and customer experience.

Additionally, the CMO’s scope has vastly expanded—they need to be masters of traditional marketing areas like brand and paid advertising, as well as new frontiers like customer data platforms, privacy law, automation, and, increasingly, AI tools. Modern marketing leaders are expected to be data-driven, possess strong analytical skills, and demonstrate proficiency in leveraging technology. They must also excel in customer experience management, content creation, branding, and consumer behavior. That’s a lot of hats!

The result: the competition for the best marketing talent is fierce.

With the tightening fundraising environment, startups also need marketing leaders who can deliver incredible ROI. There was a time when startups could “pave over” unsustainable growth models with venture capital dollars (think WeWork, Fast). That time is gone. Now we’re in a year of efficiency and VCs are dusting off Sequoia’s famous “RIP Good Times” deck from the last downturn.

So do you risk hiring a scrappy young marketing leader who is hungry and affordable, but might burn our budget on unproven ideas? Or do you hire a seasoned veteran who is expensive, entitled, and equally likely to burn your budget on old-fashioned tactics and agencies?

The stakes are high. Startups need predictable revenue growth, but they also need hunger, scrappiness, and a sense of urgency.

Enter the Fractional CMO.

A Fractional CMO: An Attempt at Having Your Cake and Eating it too

A fractional CMO works part-time as a technical expert who can coach your team and up-level your hiring, strategy, execution, and alignment.

Here are areas where a fractional CMO can add value:

A fractional CMO can coach your in-house team.
Startups often hire teams that are hungry but inexperienced, and expect them to learn on the job. By pairing them with a fractional CMO who is a good subject matter expert and a good teacher, you can get better results out of that inexperienced team.

A great example is experiment design. Recently, our mid-career VP of Marketing (and the entire email team) wanted to measure our email program’s effectiveness using open rates and click-through rates. I challenged the team to focus on the email program’s outcomes. It was harder, but we figured out how to measure how many sales meetings each email had driven. Sales meetings are a strong predictor of revenue growth. Eventually, we reoriented all our email reporting to focus on meetings booked. Last week the sales team saw its highest number of meetings booked in company history.
A fractional CMO can drive business alignment. Earlier in my career I remember leading a team that was incredibly frustrated: our CEO wanted us to improve retention rates, but almost every “best practice” for driving retention required engineering help. We’d spend weeks building our case and negotiating with the product team, only to get almost nothing through the engineering queue. The situation sucked and created a tense work environment for everyone.

That’s why today I’m such a big proponent of cross-functional pods. Today in the same situation I’d push back on the exec team: either we allocate a few engineers to the retention pod, or there is no retention pod.
A fractional CMO can help you hire the right full-time leaders.
Hiring the wrong person can set a business back by months, sometimes by quarters. When hiring a leader such as your first Director of Demand Gen or Director of Product Marketing, the stakes are even higher. Getting that wrong will impact your trajectory for years.

That’s where a fractional CMO can help.

I interviewed over 100 VP of Marketing candidates and over 50 Director-level candidates last year. I’ve developed a framework for what type of leader is needed depending on the type of business and the go-to-market motion. For example, I’ve found that CEOs tend to over-index on startups they admire, and under-index on familiarity with the go-to-market motion. Here’s why that matters:

I once hired a Director of Marketing Automation who had no experience working with a sales team. I completely underestimated how much that gap would impact her ability to do her job. She wasn’t at all comfortable with how to think about appointment booking and lead routing. She also wasn’t comfortable working independently with our Director of Sales, and she constantly needed me to facilitate. She ended up leaving just after just 6 weeks, setting us back two quarters in terms of hiring.
A fractional CMO can help you avoid hiring “interview actors”.
CEOs often aren’t experts at marketing and growth, which leaves them vulnerable to hiring "interview actors"—people who speak confidently and drop the right buzzwords, but can't truly execute. This is where I can help: I’ve developed case interviews and take-home projects for every role I hire for.

And because I have used the same projects to assess candidates over many years, I’m not just evaluating the candidate in front of me against others in the loop. I’m actually comparing them to dozens of candidates I’ve encountered before—and because of this, I've got a nuanced understanding of what good looks like.
A fractional CMO can help you balance the team with the right talents.
When I was younger, I focused too much on hiring for experience and not enough on talent. We had just bought Marketo, which I hadn’t used before. When I was hiring a Marketing Automation Manager, I focused too much on experience and got the candidate with the deepest Marketo experience. But soon, we were pushing Marketo to do things it wasn’t designed for. We were integrating it with a dozen other things, and my hire hit a ceiling.

In retrospect, I should have hired someone with a talent for picking up new tools, rather than someone with experience in one particular tool.
A fractional CMO can separate the hundreds of activities we “should do” from the handful of projects that will “move the needle.”
I’ve seen plenty of businesses whose social media managers post diligently on their Facebook page, month after month, despite it getting almost zero engagement. I’ve seen plenty of businesses spend 3 months implementing a referral tool, only to get just a few referrals. Businesses do these things because they think they “should” or because it worked for someone else (often in an entirely different type of business)—but what worked for others won’t always work for you.

A fractional CMO should be pushing the business to focus on the handful of channels that have product-market-channel fit. For example, at MIRROR, we knew that our visual brand was incredibly important. So we hired multiple branding agencies, multiple influencer agencies, and obsessed over ensuring every email would render pixel-perfectly in any email client. That made sense for that sort of business.

When I joined Coding Dojo, in contrast, I pushed our Social Media Manager to pause our organic social campaigns and shifted her into a role where she was managing paid influencers, which is now delivering sales meetings at a more efficient cost than paid search and paid social.
A fractional CMO is a two-way door.
“Hire slow, fire fast” is a mantra in Silicon Valley. A retained search for a full-time VP of Marketing / CMO can easily be 6 months, and the tenure of that hire will be less than two years. That’s a lot of time.

When hiring a Fractional CMO, the risk is lower on both sides. You can afford to dramatically shorten the upfront evaluation process and get them working for you faster, and see how they do. It’s common to structure the contract so that if it’s not working out, you can part ways with just a few weeks’ notice—and no severance or unemployment concerns.

A fractional CMO can elevate your data/model and put you on a much stronger footing ahead of a fundraising round/investor narrative/acquisition.
When the fundraising market was white-hot last year, there were instances where deal diligence was very light. That's not going to work in the current climate. If you need to fundraise, you're going to need a strong revenue model as a backbone for your fundraising round.

The problem is that most finance folks have a pretty one-dimensional understanding of a company’s growth drivers, and VCs will rip them apart. A fractional CMO should have a more nuanced understanding of the key levers that drive growth, and how to build a bottoms-up revenue model that takes in assumptions and spits out realistic growth expectations.

How to Make Sure You’re Hiring the Right Fractional CMO

Do they have an unfair advantage? “Fractional” means their time is limited—so you need someone who already has an unfair advantage coming out of the gates. My first few fractional roles were with career training bootcamps—I’d already worked in that space for 6 years, so I had a huge unfair advantage.
I also look for businesses with a similar go-to-market motion: I’ve done a lot of PLG and a lot of low-ACV high-velocity sales motions. If it’s one of those two go-to-market motions, I’ve got a huge unfair advantage.
Now, I also have a third advantage: Very few people have been a fractional CMO at a high-growth business this many times. My experience usually gives startup execs the confidence to hire me.
Consider three archetypes for the head of marketing: the brand marketer, the product marketer, and the growth marketer. Next, rank them for what your business needs now.
Next, evaluate their strength for this archetype. For example, if growth marketing is one of your top 2, you’ll need a fractional CMO who’s comfortable wrangling data. Package up some data for them to analyze and see how their conclusions compare to the conclusions of your in-house team.
Bring in an outside interviewer such as another CMO who is referred by your board, and who has a background in the type of marketing you think you need.
Look at referrals: talk to other startups they’ve worked with. Keep in mind that you’re not looking for likeability—you're looking for someone who knows their shit and is a good teacher.

When is a fractional CMO worth it?

The fractional CMO model has gained a lot of traction in the past few years; however, it’s not for every company. The trade-off you’re making is that you won’t have a CMO who is fully committed to your business.

Hiring a fractional CMO can make a lot of sense in three scenarios:

Your company is early-stage: At this point, hunger and scrappiness matter a lot. A fractional CMO who is part-time can help ensure the full-time is high-talent, and allow you to prioritize the right things.
You have a hungry Head of Marketing who is inexperienced: Rather than firing them or layering them, a Fractional CMO can help you retain your Head of Marketing—as well as give them an advisor who can help them avoid common pitfalls and see around corners. One note here: this model requires a fractional CMO with the right personality: more Yoda, less Captain Kirk. More sensei, less barking orders.
Your current Head of Marketing is leaving: I’ve been approached a ton about doing shorter stints. Their current VP of Marketing is leaving, they want to run a proper six-month retained search to find a replacement, and they need a bridge. A Fractional CMO can help keep things together during this transition.

🐐🚨 Looking for a tried-and-tested Fractional CMO? I currently have one spot open for a client. If you know a startup that could use some marketing help, please reach out!