How to Get the Most out of Your Fractional CMO

Maybe you’ve heard Ice-T’s track “Don’t Hate the Playa.” Even if you haven’t, you’ve heard the line, “Don't hate the player, hate the game.”

The opposite is true for founders and CEOs when we discuss growth. They’re fine with the marketing game; it’s marketers themselves, the players, that have caused problems.

I often find myself in the strange position of being a fractional CMO while listening to people air their grievances about their current or last CMO or VP of Marketing. It’s happened so many times that I can predict what they’ll say and have to stop myself from completing their sentences:

  • “She became a glorified project manager who spent too much time in the weeds.”
  • “He did a lot of talking and got us excited but never really delivered.”
  • “She’s okay, but she’s not originating many new ideas.”

Marketing is challenging in part because marketing leaders must hold so many things in tension: strategy and tactics, ideation and execution, experimentation and measurement.

And as you may have experienced, things can get tense. Wheels tend to fall off the bus.

Perhaps I can help you diagnose what went wrong, and how, and when, and to that end, I’ll share seven risks to watch out for. I’ll also explain several key pieces of my approach to fractional CMO engagements.

You’ll glean an idea or two at the very least, and you may be intrigued enough to reach out to me. I turn down 60-70% of the folks who do, but I’ll still do my best to point you in the right direction.

Let’s begin.

6 Risks to Watch Out for

No marketing leader sets out to do a mediocre job. In fact, it’s in their best interest to knock it out of the park for you.

If they drive meaningful, measurable growth for your company, you’ll keep them around. Longer relationships means higher lifetime value means less pressure to close new engagements any given month. Satisfied clients make running a profitable practice a bit easier and make the work more satisfying for the consultant.

That alignment of interests (your growth and their stability and satisfaction) is worth remembering as you consider the risks I’ve outlined below.

1. Ill-defined goals, growth strategy, growth levers, marketing plan, weekly marketing schedule, meeting cadence, or metrics

Plans tend to drift, even when written down.

And if you don’t write down your strategy and plan, you’ve got nothing to revisit or recalibrate later, only the faulty memories of team members.

Improving over time is harder if time has erased some of the details: your working hypothesis and key assumptions, decisions made and the information supporting them, the anatomy of the strategy itself, and desired outcomes.

The fix here is so simple it’s easy to overlook: Put it all in writing. Create your strategy’s instruction manual for later troubleshooting.

2. Too much time in the weeds with creative direction or project management

I’ve been guilty of this one for sure. Long before I was leading marketing teams I was crafting copy. The work was familiar and comfortable, and who doesn’t love that dopamine hit of being good at something?

Most fractional CMOs have a security blanket—an area of original competence, such as media buying, SEO, PR, brand development, or events—and the challenge and opportunity for top-level marketing leaders is foregoing comfort so we can make our highest, best contribution through leadership, strategy, planning, decision-making, big projects, and hiring.

More on that in a moment.

3. Too little thinking time

Many effective CMOs rise up the ranks because we have a bias toward action.

But there comes a point, many points in fact, when what the situation demands is not doing but clearer, more rigorous thinking; not pellmell execution but reflection in the form of pen and paper, a walk, or an hour spent peppering the challenge or opportunity with better questions.

A quote from Peter Drucker serves here: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

4. No marketing manager / coordinator

Conscientious CMOs want to keep their promises, and if there aren’t enough hands on deck, they have to use their own.

Several CEOs I’ve talked to weren’t “getting enough” out of their CMOs because they hadn’t given them enough hands and had inadvertently forced them into the marketing coordinator role.

It’s the CMO’s job to tell CEOs what they need, but still, you can’t give a CMO two jobs and expect them to be superb at both. There won’t be enough time and attention to go around.

You’ll get more out of your CMO if you 1) give them a marketing manager / coordinator, and 2) also give them budget to hire specialists (agencies, consultants, freelancers) to move more projects along faster without overcommitting themselves.

5. Not enough pushback; no spiky point of view

Effective CMOs must have the confidence and self-possession to push back, say no, and confront CEOs.

(One of my fractional clients in the cleantech industry likes to say that confrontation is a competency. I’ve come to agree with him.)

If you want that marketing-type person to tell you all your ideas smell like rainbows and roses, you won’t have to look far. However, you’ll know you’ve got the right sparring partner when she has the guts to contradict you and advocate for the positive outcome.

You’ll know she’s a real gem when the results later prove she was right and she doesn’t throw them back in your face.

6. Inability to toggle back and forth between thinking and doing

Some CMOs are fantastic at ginning up excitement, and while it’s true that founders and CEOs need a thought partner who can drive ideation and strategy, they also need a marketing expert who can drive planning and decision-making, and delegation and execution.

There’s ongoing tension between thinking and doing, general and lieutenant, leading by empowering others and leading by doing it yourself.

The ability to toggle back and forth between the two is perhaps the most challenging part of the role. At least, that’s the most common complaint I hear: “My CMO really struggles to switch between the two.”

Promising ideas and strategy must become plans and timelines. Meetings must lead to the division of responsibilities and work. Activity must become tangible results.

Doing must eventually supplant thinking and talking about doing, but soon enough, the CMO must switch back to big picture thinking and strategy—again. See #3 above.

I find myself asking the same two questions:

  • What does the company need most from me right now?
  • How can I make my highest and best contribution?

Answering that question rightly and allocating time accordingly, again and again, is what separates effective CMOs from marketing managers.

One week, I may need to set aside pride and pay grade and fix the email newsletter myself, and the next week, I need to work with the marketing manager to fix the process that caused the issue because the company can’t afford for me to get distracted by lower-order problems.

Good discernment, judgment, and foresight make the difference here.

If you’re starting to think that being a CMO sounds like being a CEO with a narrower focus, you’re spot on.

What’s a good approach for fractional CMOs?

Most fractional CMOs aren’t bad actors who never intended to keep their promises. More fault usually lies with extenuating circumstances than with their incompetence or character defects.

That said, effective CMOs have to manage complexity and overcome adversity. Whether we like it or not, they come with the territory.

When a wheel falls off, in the rain, on a dangerous interstate, with the bus full of screaming, caffeinated kids, someone has to figure out what happened and fix the problem.

Someone has to take responsibility.

(That’s the irony of leadership, I suppose: Lots of people want the responsibility, but later, when things aren’t so peachy, a much smaller number actually take responsibility.)

So whether you’re rebounding from a fractional CMO engagement that never really took off, or this is your first time hiring for this role, here’s what I recommend:

  1. Hire for character first.
  2. Then, hire for clear thinking.
  3. Define the goals, metrics, levers, strategy, and plan before your CMO gets in the weeds.
  4. Take an experimental approach to figure out which strategies and tactics drive the results you want and do more of that.
  5. Figure out what doesn’t work and avoid it.

This approach may sound simplistic, but I’ve been leading marketing teams across industries since 2009 and can attest that the fundamentals work.

If you and your CMO position yourselves to avoid the most common blunders and black eyes—what the late Charlie Munger would call, “standard ways of failing”—then you’ll end up spending less time on what I call “janitorial” (troubleshooting, personality management, damage control).

That leaves you more time to spend on what you want, predictable, strategic growth, and that growth begins not with marketing but with goals, metrics, and levers.

1. Set goals.

“Growth” is a noun, not a goal. Not all growth is desirable. Some revenue isn’t worth the effort required to generate it.

This truth I learned the hard way during my tech startup days, 2013 to 2017. We found a predictable way to get new customers, but the revenue juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Seasoned founders and CEOs have an intuitive understanding of the need not for growth but profitable effort, yet it’s still easy for inefficiencies and excesses to creep in. Two types of goals can sneak into a company:

A. So ambitious they’re unrealistic

B. So ambiguous and squishy they’re hard to move

Perhaps your goals already have more detail than M.C. Escher print. I certainly hope that’s the case. If not, the right questions will help:

  • Who are your best customers and why?
  • Which products and services have the best margin?
  • What is good growth for you right now? Which source of revenue represents the most strategy growth?
  • What goals can we back out of that?
  • What stats, facts, trends, insights, market analysis, solid assumptions about marketing, and data about traffic and customer acquisition costs support that goal?
  • How are we going to achieve this goal with marketing and sales?

Start by clarifying where the bus is going: Los Angeles? San Diego? Cabo San Lucas? Destination determines direction, and direction determines strategy.

2. Pick magic numbers.

I’ll admit I must suppress an eyeroll when overcaffeinated marketers start slinging buzzwords: KPIs!!! OKRs!!! MQLs!!!

That said, we’ve got to track the important numbers.

Peter Drucker said that what gets measured gets managed. He’s right. A marketing dashboard will help you notice trends and make better, data-driven decisions.

And tracking too many numbers does more harm than good because all those rows and columns obfuscate the most important insights:

  • It’s easy to track all the “results” and output goals (e.g., more sales) instead of input goals that your marketing team can control(daily LinkedIn posts).
  • It’s easy to not trace the lagging indicator (not enough sales) to its upstream cause (fishing inconsistently and then, in the wrong holes).
  • It’s easy to become obsessed with a vanity metric—Instagram follower count, anyone?—and lose sight of your marketing number that rules them all (e.g., consultations booked or demos scheduled).

What we decide to measure will help to determine what which parts of the marketing funnel we focus on and optimize. The right “magic” numbers help you focus on what matters and strategically ignore what doesn’t.

If you aren’t confident in your KPIs, I recommend reading Brad Feld’s “Three Magic Numbers.”

3. Look for levers.

Revenue from certain services, product lines, or types of customers can pile stress and strain onto your team, or make your people sing with satisfaction like Disney princesses.

For example, I was talking to the CEO of a growing physical therapy practice. Most of their growth had come through referrals from primary care providers, but she had done enough digging to discover that two specific types of patients were the most desirable:

  • Young mothers referred by birth centers – Because they were cash pay, which meant the practice could avoid the hassle of coding and billing an insurance company.
  • Older men recovering from prostate cancer - Because they tended to be very diligent in doing the exercises their therapists recommended and getting the outcomes.

Dan Sullivan’s and Benjamin Hardy’s book 10X Is Easier Than 2X cited enough example worth sharing here: The CEO of a freight company called Stream Logistics dug into the numbers and realized that one type of customer (High Stakes Freight) made up only 5% of the revenue mix but accounted for 15% of the profit. Over the next four years Stream Logistics doubled down on High Stakes Freight clients and became 4x more profitable.

Every business and business model has growth levers. One may be buried in a report. Another may be hiding between the ears of a perceptive employee. A third may jump up, wave its arms, and shout, “Over here!” if I were to guide you through my 20 Stories Exercise.

By all means, get started on looking for levers without me:

  • Where are your best margins?
  • Who are your best customers?
  • Which marketing strategies bring those customers?
  • Which growth levers could should you be leaning into?
  • What are the top companies in the space doing that you’re not?

And of course, once you identify what’s working and double down on that, you also want to figure out what doesn’t work and avoid that.

(Remind me to tell you about the Costco membership fee and “intelligent loss of sales” concept.)

These first steps (goals, numbers, levers) precede nine others in my approach:

  1. Force-rank priorities.
  2. Poke the brand.
  3. Fix your positioning.
  4. Craft key messages.
  5. Create juicy offers.
  6. Plug the funnel.
  7. Build the assets.
  8. Increase traffic.
  9. Improve results.
For the sake of time, let’s land this plane bus.

Do you want to fix your marketing and feel more momentum?

If you made it this far, something I wrote resonated with you.

Maybe you want predictable results yet marketing continues to be complex, opaque, and last minute. Maybe your marketing team can finish projects, but they waste time on ideas and tasks that don’t move the needle.

I can help you get out of this situation by helping you and your team take a more disciplined (and frankly, more enjoyable) approach to growth.

Take that first step now by booking a 25-minute discovery call with me.