The seven signs
- Growth has stalled and marketing isn’t moving it. The spend is going out, the activity is happening, and the revenue line is flat. Nobody can point at the cause, so the answer has been to do more of the same.
- The founder is still running marketing. It was fine at two million. At five, it’s the thing that’s stopping the founder doing the founder’s job, and the marketing is getting whatever hours are left over.
- Good people, no unifying strategy. The team is capable and busy, and every channel is run as its own project. Social doesn’t know what email is doing. Nobody owns the whole picture.
- The agencies are underdelivering, and you can’t tell why. The reports look fine. The results don’t. You don’t have anyone senior enough to challenge the agency on its own ground, so the relationship drifts.
- Marketing spend isn’t producing a visible return. The board asks what the money is doing. The honest answer is a list of activity, not a number.
- Leadership has lost confidence in marketing. Budgets get cut first, decisions get second-guessed, and the team stops bringing ideas because they stopped getting a hearing.
- Something big is coming. Investment, an exit, a new market, a repositioning. The marketing needs to be credible to outsiders within months, and it isn’t yet.
When you don’t need one
Honesty costs me enquiries here, but it saves both of us a bad first call.
You don’t need a fractional CMO if you have no marketing team and no agencies and you need campaigns run. You need an agency, or a good freelancer, and you need them more than you need strategy.
You don’t need one if the product isn’t working. Marketing can’t fix churn, broken pricing or a product nobody wants, and a fractional CMO who says otherwise is selling.
And you don’t need one if what you actually want is someone in the building every day. That’s a full-time hire, with a full-time cost, and a fractional CMO who understands the model will tell you so.
What a fractional CMO actually does about the signs
The job starts with a diagnosis, not a plan. A few weeks inside the business, looking at the numbers, the team and the agencies. Talking to the people doing the work. Then a one-page plan with three outcomes the CMO will be judged on. Then the work, run with the team in short cycles, and a monthly report against those three numbers. At ninety days you decide whether to expand, hold or stop.
That shape is the test. If someone offering fractional leadership can’t describe how the engagement starts, what the first ninety days deliver and how it ends, keep looking.
What it costs
In the UK, £700 to £1,400 a day, or £3,000 to £10,000 a month on retainer, against £180,000 to £350,000 a year for a full-time CMO. The full breakdown is in the cost guide.
What to do next
Count the signs. If it’s three or more, bring the numbers to a 30-minute call. In that half hour we’ll work out whether a fractional CMO is the right fix, or whether it’s something else. You’ll leave with a view either way.
