Fractional CMO vs. Consultant vs. Agency for B2B Growth

What’s the difference between a Fractional CMO, a Full-time CMO, a Growth Consultant, or an Ad Agency for B2B Growth?

Why has Forbes published multiple articles in the last few months highlighting the benefits of a Fractional CMO for B2B companies? In the past, growing companies only had a few options for achieving marketing success. In general, you could either hire a new employee with the necessary skills, or bring in an external partner to do it for you. Fractional executives, like Fractional CMOs have changed this landscape and offer significant advantages over the old school options.

External Marketing / Media Agencies and Marketing Consultants

For growing companies, external options seem ideal. Most likely the CEO or Sales leaders are carrying the weight of marketing and bringing in a “turn-key” external solution seems like a great idea, but there’s a difference between the Promise and the Reality

PROMISE

Low Risk: If they don’t work out, you can just fire them and
move on, it doesn’t impact your company culture
Focus: They claim to have a singular focus, and don’t get distracted by other things like office politics or other aspects of full-time employees
Efficiency: They don’t require benefits or a desk or a laptop etc. or other on-boarding inefficiencies of full-time hires
Effectiveness: They claim to bring the best thinking /
solutions to bear on solving your problems

REALITY

Huge Risk: If you have to switch, you’re further behind where you would have been with a better strategy and chasing competitors. It’s low risk for them, because they can always go find another client, but it’s high-risk for you.
Distractions: Agencies and External consultants like to chase shiny objects or the latest “growth hacks.” They may insist you buy a new tool or data that promises to be a silver bullet. This distracts you from the fundamentals of growth.
Waste: They may not require desks or laptops, but agencies do need onboarding. Creating a strong working relationship with an agency can take weeks or months, and often they’ll force you to adapt to their ways of working saying “they know how it should be done.”
Ineffective: Unfortunately, many agencies are simply not that effective. They only work hard enough to keep you from firing them. In fact, they have an incentive to keep you dependent on them. If you build more effective systems they’re out of a job, so they won’t always tell you the best way to solve the problem, just the way that keeps you shackled to them.

Hiring a Full-time CMO or Marketing Manager

Given the challenges with external solutions, you may be focused instead on hiring or training someone internally, and this can have it’s advantages, but there are some major limitations as well.

Cost: The Cost to hire a Full-Time CMO can be crippling for companies in early stage growth, particularly when the CEO or Sales Team has been wearing both hats for a while and there’s no budget set aside. Especially when the company is primed to begin investing in media to grow to a wider market, and a senior leader would eat up that budget.

Expertise: if you try to save on cost, you normally sacrifice on experience and know-how. This can create the illusion of having marketing covered, only to find out there is no strategy, and no depth of knowledge to overcome all the roadblocks that arise along the way.

Fractional CMOs Provide Strategic Leadership and Insights for a Bargain

Once your company reaches a certain size, you will want a full-time CMO. In the meantime, you cannot afford to trust your marketing to an underqualified, junior hire or an external vendor who may not have your best interest guiding their actions. Likewise, with the current instability in the marketplace, you cannot afford to overpay for expertise your company is not taking full advantage of.

The solution is a Fractional CMO. Fractional CMOs bring the experience that comes from decades of working with CEOs, Boards of Directors, Investors, and Sales Leaders, at a fraction of the price and with much less risk than a full-time hire.

Just as with the rise of Fractional CFOs, the fractional executive framework creates an opportunity to work with the best minds, with proven strategies and tactics with less financial commitment and lower risk.

Get The B2B Marketing Expertise You Need to Grow Your Business

Delegate your marketing outcomes to an expert and see a greater return on your marketing budget with the added benefit of getting back your time and sanity.