Imagine your business growth is beginning to slow. Or maybe you fear that it will because what you’ve been doing can’t possibly generate the same results long-term. This is usually the driver behind most CEO’s hiring their first CMO. It’s an expensive decision with long-term strategic impact. Given the importance and options between a full-time hire or a fractional CMO, how do you decide?
Financial considerations
The choice that organizations make is often a financial one by default. They are either in growth mode and are ready to go “all-in” on a full-time, high-price CMO hire or they are resource constrained and obtain fractional leadership by default. In either case, they know they’re ready for senior leadership to go to the next level, but finding the right path forward is rarely as simple as current “vibes” or short-term resource constraints.
Operational considerations
In many cases, the financial consideration is the decision-maker by default, and fractional options are the only path to senior leadership. However, if you’re truly making the choice between a full-time hire or a fractional CMO, there are some non-financial considerations which will help you make the right choice.
If you have a proven and diverse revenue generation system and you have a marketing department of 5 or more people who need daily leadership, then a full-time CMO is the right choice. It gives you the leadership and forward-looking advantage you’re seeking while equipping the current team and revenue system with the day-to-day oversight that it requires.
Conversely, there are some cases where a fractional hire is the right path. If your revenue system is broken or slowing and you need to fix or establish new systems, a fractional hire makes more sense. Or if you have the “need for speed” to impact, a fractional typically makes more sense. In this case, you may be looking at a three- to six-month horizon to find, hire, and onboard a full-time CMO. A fractional leader can be on board and making impact in 30 to 45 days.
In the case of strategy over management of a team, you need to evaluate the state of your revenue-generating systems. If it is broken, incomplete, or overly dependent on a single motion, a fractional leader focused on high-level strategy and tangible outcomes is often a more appropriate answer.
Other internal realities
In addition to the financial and operational considerations above, there are some other internal considerations that are unique to the business that you have to be real about if you really want to nail this decision.
- Internal Politics: In general, internal teams can get bogged down by company politics and legacy thinking. A fractional leader brings in cross-industry experience and total objectivity. They are typically immune to internal politics and care only about decisions that drive revenue. They will tell you the hard truths that employees might avoid.
- Institutional Memory: While broad knowledge and an arms-length separation are an advantage when navigating company politics, the fractional CMO will likely lack deep idiosyncratic knowledge of your buyer, your sales motions, and secrets to your client retention. All of which often have a cumulative benefit a full-time hire will leverage more effectively.
- The “In Between” Trap: Gut check time, as this might be the most common mistake when making this strategic decision. Are you going with the fractional leader by default until you “figure out what you actually need”? This can be negative in the near term and long term, as engagements like this can be open-ended and allow leadership to effectively punt the long-term decision on the marketing function. This sacrifices growth and marketing maturity in the process.
The key to getting this right is knowing where you are in the present moment, what got you there and where you’re trying to go. This is a unique decision for your business and is critical to get it right when considering all of the financial, operational and strategic realities. To help get clarity, ask yourself:
- Do I need to scale what I already have (full-time hire) or transform the entire marketing function (fractional)?
- Does my organization need to escape the gravity of legacy thinking (fractional), or do I need to make sure to protect the institutional memory and leverage it further?
- Am I really ready to make the right choice, or am I stalling?
Making the call
There’s no universal right answer here. Only the right answer for where your business stands today. A full-time CMO and fractional CMO aren’t better or worse versions of each other. They’re simply built for different problems.
What matters most is honesty. Honesty about whether your revenue engine is healthy or just quiet. Honesty about whether “we’ll figure it out later” is a strategy or excuse.
Get the clarity first, and the choice becomes obvious.
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