The Case for the Fractional Startup CMO

Patrick Coffee recently interviewed me (and Arlyn Davich of Little Fish, hi!) for The Wall Street Journal about what it means to be a fractional CMO.

First off, is "fractional CMO" even a new concept? Haven't people been working as part-time or consulting heads of marketing for years? Yes.

Do marketers love rebranding things? Also yes.

I'm not here to claim that every company is suited for a part-time head of marketing. But I do believe that it's something particularly for early stage companies to consider as they build out their marketing function—and there's a lot of power in being confident enough as a marketer to put it on the table as an option.

I've worked in tech marketing and communications my entire career: in-house, on the agency side, and for investors. It wasn't until I landed in VC and saw dozens of early stage portfolio companies close-up simultaneously that I realized that some of the traditional models for marketing orgs just don't fit. And yet, many senior marketers (like me) prefer working with younger companies, though they struggle to figure out the right moment and configuration to bring us on:

• Sometimes, we become advisors, and earn a small amount of equity (and perhaps a small amount of cash) to provide counsel from time to time.
• Sometimes, we work in VC so that we can give away our advice for free (assuming your firm values operating partners and doesn't want you to spend all of your time marketing the fund itself...)
• But more often, we come in as a very expensive hire, at the wrong time.

Does this sound familiar? I plan to explore all of these ideas in greater depth, but let me give you the quick & dirty version of why a fractional CMO role solves for the third, common, preventable bullet.

Why do full-time marketing hires at early stage companies go wrong? Cost misalignment; the "all-in" myth; and the lack of the right working conditions to yield best results.

Financially, fractional CMOs are a win-win for all parties. To be honest, most pre-Series B stage startups don't need, and probably can't afford, a full-time VP or C-level marketing leader. But let's be real: your 2-to-5 years of experience growth hacker in the trenches doesn't have the experience to advise you as a founder on things they haven't had exposure to. Let's be even realer: are you giving this person what they need to succeed in their role? Do you know what a successful junior marketer should be doing and how to gauge their impact and help them develop professionally to keep them around? Did you hire from the right marketing job spec?

A fractional CMO can advise you on operational and strategic stuff relevant to your startup (off the top of my head: hiring, setting OKRs, martech stack, marketing planning and budgeting, messaging and positioning, assessing needs for and evaluating external partners, internal and crisis comms, fundraising story, etc. etc.) as it comes up without you having to pay them to do work that a more junior person is capable of accomplishing. We can also buddy up with your junior marketer(s) in-house (or help you identify and recruit who you need to bring in-house) as someone who speaks their language and can give them what they need to be successful.

You get the most efficient, concentrated use of our time, at a price point that makes sense for the business, and without having to pay the overheads associated with a full-time hire. And I get the opportunity to fill the rest of my time working with other startups to fill the rest of my comp and maintain my freedom. Which brings me to my second point...

The network effect of fractional CMO work benefits you in a way a full-time hire may not. I'm a former agency person, and if you are, too, you probably get where I'm headed here. Back in the day, I often had conversations with prospective PR clients who were either going back-and-forth on hiring an agency vs. building a team in-house, or who had reservations about their agency team taking on clients in the same industry or broad competitive landscape. I'll bust those myths around fractional CMOs the same way I busted them for PR.

You actually *want* people who are solving for lots of different types of marketing problems working on your company. What a fractional CMO learns while working with other companies informs their perspective on what will or won't work for your company: an unbeatable vantage point. What's a decent CPA in our vertical market? What does a good open rate look like for cold emails? What are our chances of getting onstage at a certain industry event? Marketers who love what they do are constantly learning, and what fractional CMOs learn elsewhere—not to mention the connections we make, the talent we get to know, and so on—we can immediately bring to bear on your company's marketing strategy, instead of solely relying on past experiences to inform our work. And you know what that means?

Fractional CMOs are motivated, happy, and do great work. When you are paid properly for a clear, well-designed scope of work that suits your talents, for the types of companies you love to work for, get to solve many types of marketing challenges, and do it all on your own schedule, you do your best work. It's that simple.

...Now, a big caveat! Any time I've gone in-house full-time—and I almost certainly will again—I have never regretted it. I likely made the choice because it ticked all of the above parameters (the right comp, a juicy and challenging assignment, and the conditions to do my best work).

So fractional vs. full-time CMO isn't a binary proposition. I'm suggesting that given the reality of what startups need, and what CMOs want—not to mention the fact that the average tenure of a CMO gets lower every year, along with other macro factors at play *cough great resignation future of work cough*—we should get real and open ourselves up to new configurations of marketing leadership.

And if you're an investor who is pressuring your port co to hire a marketing leader, step back and assess whether this work could be done on a part-time basis. People like me are out here, ready to tap in, so reach out if I can be helpful.