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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.