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Why, How, and When to Hire a Fractional CMO
104 Plays2 years ago
Over the last couple of years, the fractional CMO (FCMO) has been gaining momentum as companies look for marketing leadership without hiring a full-time and expensive resource.
As a fractional CMO, I've been seeing more interest and more people embracing the title.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, I talk with David Poulos, a fractional CMO, about why there is growing interest, when and why to hire a FCMO, how to establish the rules of engagement, and how long a FCMO should stick around.
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Transcript
Job Transition During Pandemic
00:00:07
Speaker
At the beginning of the pandemic, I lost my job as the VP marketing of a B2B SaaS company. To be honest, it wasn't a surprise. The CEO and I didn't see eye to eye, and I missed the freedom and flexibility of being a marketing consultant. I liked being the boss, setting my own schedule and not having to attend endless meetings to make decisions.
Rise of the Fractional CMO Role
00:00:30
Speaker
But as I reentered the consulting world, the key question was, what kind of a consultant should I be?
00:00:38
Speaker
a brand storyteller, a content marketing strategist, a digital marketing strategist, a strategic positioning consultant. None of them seemed to fit and none of them seemed to resonate. Business was slow, albeit in the midst of a global pandemic that had seen a lot of marketing disappear. But one day out of the blue, I decided to call myself a fractional chief marketing officer or fractional CMO.
00:01:07
Speaker
It felt like putting on a freshly ironed shirt. It felt good and reflected my strategic and tactical skills and experience. In calling myself a fractional CMO as a game changer, the leads and opportunities started to roll in and they haven't stopped coming. And the question is, why did a new title change everything?
00:01:29
Speaker
Personally, I have a few theories. One, my target audience, B2B SaaS companies, was looking for marketing leadership. They had plenty of access to tactical talent, but they wanted strategic guidance. Number two, the fractional CMO title was new, different, and somewhat mysterious. It piqued people's curiosity and broke through the marketing consulting noise.
00:01:57
Speaker
Over the past two years, I've talked to many people about becoming a fractional CMO, and I've started to coach fractional CMOs looking to raise their games. But to be honest, there's still a lot of confusion and lack of clarity around the fractional CMO, which is slowly but surely gaining traction.
Insights with Dave Polis
00:02:17
Speaker
And to help me peel back the onion, I'm excited to talk with Dave Polis, a fractional CMO, author, consultant, and speaker, welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:02:28
Speaker
Thanks Mark, I'm glad to be here.
00:02:31
Speaker
Why don't we start with a marketing 101 question or a softball question? What is your take on the fractional CMO landscape? When I started calling myself a fractional CMO in mid 2020, I thought that this was gonna be rolling thunder. I thought there would be a tremendous amount of momentum because fractional seemed to be the right title at the right time. And to be honest, I'm surprised that it's still a slow burn.
00:02:59
Speaker
It feels like there's some momentum, but not a lot of momentum. And you're also playing the same game than I am. What's your take on the landscape right now? Well, the landscape is one that evolves and evolves more slowly than you might have suspected. I first got hip to the fractional portion of all this in 2016. I was at a networking meeting here locally and ran across a gentleman who was a fractional CFO.
00:03:27
Speaker
I had never heard of that. They said, how do you do that job that requires your fingers in just about every pie in the company and only do it part-time? He said, when you analyze the amount of work that actually needs done, that the physical amount of being present and the number of meetings you're actually required to be in, and the amount of focus you could give to it if you limit that time,
00:03:48
Speaker
You can really do it in 15 hours or 20 hours depending on the size of the firm and have plenty left over to sell to somebody else. And as soon as that light bulb came on, this could easily be applied to marketing as well in many instances. The landscape has shifted and I think the effect that you experienced has to do with that change in title.
00:04:07
Speaker
because the consulting world had running to a point where the tacticians and the strategists were mixing and mingling freely. You could go on Fiverr and find somebody who was a marketing consultant, and all they would teach you to do is how to put ads on Facebook.
00:04:23
Speaker
That was his deal because that's all he knew about marketing. He'd been doing it five years, had cracked the code on making Facebook ads work, and figured he knew everything else. Wrong. They don't have the perspective. They don't have the depth. They don't have anything to go with that, including the structures and the strategies that go with it, and certainly not the engagement structure that a real consultant would have. But they were still calling themselves that. So a lot of people were going down blind alleys with what they thought were competent consultants that were actually tacticians or technicians.
00:04:52
Speaker
So you're a flip into the partial CMO world.
00:04:56
Speaker
automatically elevates people's mindset when they're looking and talking to you and saying, oh, this is a guy that does the top end. This is a guy that integrates my C-suite.
Challenges in Adopting Fractional CMOs
00:05:06
Speaker
This is a guy that connects those dots and wrangles those marketing cats and all those tacticians to make sure they're all going the same direction and manages them to the point where they're driving actual revenue that I as a founder or a CEO can get my mind wrapped around and understand.
00:05:23
Speaker
You know, I think it's interesting that the fractional CFO was a concept that had been around for a long time. In Toronto, where I operate, there was a fellow named Mark McLeod. And he was serving four or five or six different B2B SaaS companies at the same time. And they all love Mark because they were fairly early stage. They didn't need a full-time CFO, but they needed someone with a lot of experience to help them manage their, obviously, finances and capital raising. People were comfortable with the idea of a fractional CFO.
00:05:52
Speaker
I think it's taken time for people to come around to the idea of a fractional CMO because I think a lot of companies, it's a walk before you run thing with marketing. When they hire someone marketing, they don't want to, they eventually embrace it as opposed to tiptoe into it. The question that I had for you is the slow burn that we're seeing when it comes to being a fractional CMO. Is it because companies are not aware that that fractional CMO exists or
00:06:21
Speaker
Do they not see the benefits or aren't they not willing to embrace it yet? I'm just trying to get your sense on maybe some of the hesitancy or some of the things that are holding back the whole idea of hiring a fractional CMO and feeling good about hiring a fractional CMO.
00:06:37
Speaker
I think a lot of it has to do with the level of commitment that each individual company has towards its marketing and the mindset it has towards its marketing efforts. If it's still seen as an expense line, then you're probably not there yet. They have to realize that this is an investment and that it's an investment that will pay back multiple, multiple
00:06:58
Speaker
layers later, and years later, in fact, in some cases, and that you have to make a long-term commitment. If you want to make money fast, brew beer. If you want to make money slow, you become a distiller. You got to wait. You got to be patient, and you got to wait for this stuff to go. The slow burn effect you're seeing is the fact that the level of commitment amongst a broad swath of companies and sectors
00:07:21
Speaker
is not there for marketing yet. They've often had the bigger companies, the enterprise folks, have had CMOs for a long time because they realized the value. That's what got them there, was realizing the value of marketing and letting it drive the boat, drive the show, and pull in revenue as it is supposed to.
00:07:38
Speaker
The smaller companies, who often the founders are from the sales side or from the marketing side to a certain degree, think they understand it, but they don't have the depth and the breadth, and they're way, way overloaded with other corporate duties to be able to focus on it adequately.
00:07:55
Speaker
founders look for in some help is somebody who's not going to threaten their autonomy and their authority. Well, marketers are change agents. You call up that guy, you better be ready to reap the whirlwind because they're going to come in and make some fairly impactful changes fairly early to get you on the right track and to get you going strong and to get those cats all moving in the same direction. So I think there's some hesitancy there. The whole concept that asking for help is a weakness sometimes plays into that as well. And I'm sure you saw that in the consulting world,
00:08:25
Speaker
If you have to turn around and have somebody else solve a problem for you, maybe the board's going to question your abilities. So there's a certain amount of that going on. The other thing that I've noticed is that the people that are willing to embrace this are very, very comfortable knowing that someone else has taken that off their plate. The less secure the founder and the CEO is, the less comfortable he is making that commitment and delegating that authority and driving that change somewhere other than his chair.
00:08:54
Speaker
So
Understanding the Fractional CMO Role
00:08:55
Speaker
I think it's a combination of all three things that are driving the hesitancy and the slow creeping progress that CMOs have been able to make. The inroads are there, but you've got to catch the right people. It's like if you own a castle for a house. Yeah, everybody likes to live in a castle, but there's only two or three guys that can really afford it and understand how much work that really is so that your buyer pool is very limited for something like that, but it's a tremendous property.
00:09:19
Speaker
and you don't understand why their buyers aren't lining up. That's why it takes a very specific buyer to make that work. I think my view of the world is that a lot of people, they have a hard time understanding what a fractional CMO does. They understand what a director of marketing does, or a VP marketing. These are the people that are going to sit in the seat, they're going to drink the Kool-Aid, they're going to be there 24-7, and they're going to handle marketing, they're going to run marketing, and they're going to make marketing an integral part of our business.
00:09:43
Speaker
And I don't know whether people understand exactly the role of a fractional CMO or how much time they're going to invest. And that's one. And the other thing is really getting an understanding of the fact that there's different types of fractional CMOs. We're not all the same creatures. And my take is that maybe as fractional CMOs, we have to do more education.
00:10:05
Speaker
We have to walk people through how this engagement works and how the rules of engagement working with us are different than having a full time.
00:10:15
Speaker
I think I've seen the light bulb come on if I was able to get somebody into a couple of meetings and really get them engaged with me. And I said, why don't I send over my engagement agreement with some terms on it that I think I'm understanding that you'll be agreeable to, and we'll see what happens from there. And as soon as they open up that engagement, which is really only about four pages,
00:10:37
Speaker
and they read the specifics and they see what the limits are and the scope and the deliverables and everything else is all laid out in front of them, the light bulb comes on and they go, oh, this is what we're talking about. Now I'm comfortable with this because now it's concrete. Now it's specific that I can say yes to this, no to this, and oh, you're going to develop a plan in 20 days or you're going to put a plan in action in 60 days and you're going to read these results in nine months or whatever.
00:11:03
Speaker
You've got it it's like a lease you have a finite into it which makes people very comfortable you can live with almost anything as long as you know it's going to end a specific time so even if they if they're a little off about it in the beginning and they still sign off they know that if no matter how bad this gets it's got an end point so that they're a little more comfortable with that.
00:11:22
Speaker
The other thing is, once they've seen those specifics, now they can get back and put their CEO coat back on and say, okay, I'm going to hold this guy's feet to the fire with these specifics and these overall scopes and say, I know how to do that. I know how to manage department heads. I can manage that. And if that's what this looks like, the fact that he's only showing up to every third meeting, but it's the important one and it's the right one, doesn't bother me.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractional CMOs
00:11:44
Speaker
So they're okay with it after that. Once they've seen it be concrete and specific, they're okay.
00:11:49
Speaker
I kind of look at the fractional CMO title as catnip. It's irresistible. When you see it, it's different. It's new. It sparks your curiosity. But one of the things that I found in having conversations with people who are interested in my services is being abundantly clear about what kind of marketer I am. So I only work with B2B SaaS companies.
00:12:10
Speaker
I'm big into positioning and messaging and content marketing, but if you want a performance based marketer or somebody who's really heavy on the SEO SEM side, that's not me. So I think one of the things for companies to think about is that
00:12:25
Speaker
A fractional CMO is just like any other CMO. We have our strengths, our weaknesses. We're good at some things. We're not good at other things. And regardless of whether you hire a full-time CMO or a fractional CMO, you really have to hire someone who's aligned with what kind of marketing you need to do. I think that's one of the biggest things that you and I have to deal with in terms of being clear about, I can help you or I can't.
00:12:48
Speaker
Well, yeah, and you mentioned education. I think it isn't coming upon us to educate the general marketing sphere or the corporate leadership sphere in the fact that, A, this can work and work well, and B, that we're out here as a resource, that it's really not just the cost savings that are driving this. It's the extra availability of time that's one less person to manage half that time. The fact that you're getting so much more depth and they come up to speed so much faster
00:13:18
Speaker
than if you were to do a full-time hire, and there's less risk involved, realistically, because the average tenure of a full-fledged CMO is about 2.8 years. That's been getting shorter, believe it or not, over time, not longer, which is what we at all hope. By the time the guy gets up to speed at year two, you're really closing in on the sunset of his tenure anyway, so you're really not gaining anything.
00:13:40
Speaker
Doing the fractional bit gives people that endpoint we talked about and makes them comfortable with the fact that, okay, he's not just going to leave anytime he feels like it or a new challenge comes along. He's already incorporated that new challenge into the schedule. We've got him for the full year. Let's use him as best we can. There is that educational component as to how the structure of all this works that I think people need to get comfortable with. You're exactly right. All these new stripes of marketers.
00:14:05
Speaker
performance versus lead gen versus demand gen versus all the different tactical labels that have been attached to this thing. We've got the whole thing covered soup to nuts in the real top end CEO integrator type fields. We know how to do all that.
00:14:22
Speaker
but I'm not going to sit down and code you a website. I'm not going to sit down and pick out your SEO content for hours and hours on end. We hire people to do that. To that end, I can apply all the places I'm strong and beef up all the places I'm weak, all at one shot when I'm building that team and you'll never know they're there. That's the beauty part of all of this is that I make up for my deficits with your money. It's a beautiful thing.
00:14:49
Speaker
So let me ask you a black and white question, sort of a ying and yang question. What are the biggest reasons why a company would hire a fractional CMO? And then on the flip side, why shouldn't a company hire a fractional CMO? If you were talking to a company and they want to hire you, I want you to work for me as a fractional CMO and you said, no, I don't think you should do that. So let's talk about why you should hire a fractional CMO and why not.
00:15:16
Speaker
The whys are very easy and there's a number of them. I'm struggling more with the why nots because it really is a pretty good idea for most cases. Now, you mentioned that you have companies that you don't fit their keyhole quite as well because of what they need. What I'm finding here is that companies really aren't sure of what they need.
00:15:35
Speaker
Therefore, you have to be the jack of all trades in order to meet whoever comes down the pike. But that's not the best way to go about it. You're much more on the right track by niching down and being crystal clear and specific on what that value proposition for you is. You're going to have much better success that way, and so are the companies we're serving, by the way. That's the same advice I give them. Make sure that value proposition is crystal clear and that you know what it is you need to do. Now, the hiring proposition is exactly the same.
00:16:05
Speaker
The people who need us are anybody who needs depth, experience, breadth, control, and perspective, all in one individual, but doesn't necessarily want to pay for it full-time. And that runs the gamut. We're almost sector agnostic in that level. We're not size agnostic, by the way, though. Startups, very small startups, probably can't take advantage of us because there aren't enough tactics. There aren't enough budget. There's not a big enough team. We're not needed at that level just yet.
00:16:34
Speaker
you would be better off hiring us as a strategy consultant and say, okay, set up my plan and then tell me what to do. And I'll come back to you in three years when we built it into something you need to manage and go from there. So very tiny companies probably don't need a CMO, which is why they don't hire them, fractional or otherwise. Very, very large enterprise companies. Google doesn't need a fractional CMO.
00:16:56
Speaker
They're huge. They've got a real guy at the real helm who's got 50 assistants and 35 team members to do all this stuff for him. He just keeps his hand on the throttle and away they go. Big enterprise companies run that way. They don't need the savings minuscule compared to the amount of extra horsepower you get by having that guy permanently embedded and being in every meeting.
00:17:19
Speaker
and walking up and down every hallway and talking to every minion in the place to gather intelligence and information all the time.
Setting Expectations and Goals
00:17:26
Speaker
We can't do that for them, so we're not that helpful. It's the middle ground where we shine. It's the folks that are between, say, 10 and $200 million.
00:17:36
Speaker
that really can take advantage not only of the savings, but of the extra depth and breadth and the less management time and the less top end that needs to be done. And their founders often have a much slimmer C-suite to start with, and adding one more can make a huge impact. Whereas if you've got 19 vice presidents already in there,
00:17:55
Speaker
And are all trying to gather and get their face time and do this and that. Having another full time guys is gonna make the room more crowded. Having a part time guy show up one day, carry the water in his briefcase and go, okay, here's how it's gonna go.
00:18:09
Speaker
has much, much more impact for those middle market customers, regardless of the industry sector that they're in. I don't have a particular shining for SAAAS, and you do, but throw me in with any kind of membership association, any kind of professional organization, any kind of manufacturing plant, any kind of product group.
00:18:31
Speaker
and i'll be just fine because i've done those things i've seen those things and there's a logic to it there's a sense to it that that needs to be experienced but i don't have to know who the big movers and shakers are be able to pick up the phone call them i'll figure that out along the way the way that i look at it is twofold for companies that are looking to hire someone like me one is i fill a gap usually
00:18:53
Speaker
The companies that are interested in hiring a fractional CMO don't have marketing leadership. They may have a junior marketer. They're doing a little bit of marketing or they're doing no marketing at all. And they recognize that that is a gap that needs to be filled because they're on one side their opportunities and the other side their threats. So that helps them out. And the other side is risk mitigation.
00:19:15
Speaker
Hiring a full-time CMO costs you $125,000, $150,000, $200,000 plus benefits, plus options, plus perks. And it's expensive. And if you hire the wrong full-time CMO, that's a very expensive mistake. And companies that are especially earlier stage, not starters, but earlier stage, they don't want to do that. They don't know what kind of marketing they need to do.
00:19:43
Speaker
And so hiring a fractional CMO is a less risky way to go. So if you bond to the idea that, yes, I want a higher fractional CMO, I see the benefits, I understand that it fills a gap and there's less risk involved. The question is, where do they start? Like, what are some of the first steps they should take in terms of finding the right fractional CMO for what they need to do?
00:20:10
Speaker
I think they need to do several things. One, you mentioned risk. I think they need to do an internal risk assessment and see exactly what their goals are and what they're willing to pay to get there. Because one of the things you didn't mention as you were tallying up all the expenses that go into hiring a full timer is the budget he's going to spend.
00:20:27
Speaker
And he's going to ask for about three times what you're comfortable with because that's what he knows he needs to make it go. So now you've not only spent the 300 grand on his salary and Benny's and everything else, you've probably spent two or three million dollars of stuff in that year or so that he's there or two years that he's there getting the ground under him and you don't know what he's doing.
00:20:49
Speaker
plan in front of it. So that's an even bigger risk for those middle market companies is dumping that 2 or 3 million into the ad spend and the creative and all the rest of the agency work and all the rest of it that has to go with it.
00:21:01
Speaker
The fractional often brings partially his own team with him that cuts risk as well. I know I can pick up the phone and hire creatives all day long and know that they're going to perform without even blinking an eye in terms of risk and know I'm going to get what I want the first time around, cutting my cost out. So I'm going to work on the cheap for you as well as with you, which is a much better thing.
00:21:23
Speaker
Now, as far as the first steps that a company needs to think about, I would make sure that they know what it is their goals really are and make sure that they're realistic.
Managing Expectations and Scope Creep
00:21:32
Speaker
Setting expectation is our number one job. When we go in the door and they say, well, we want to triple sales in six months, you need to
00:21:40
Speaker
stone up your face and say, no, we're not going to be able to do that with the resources you've got and the time you've allocated. It's not my time, it's everyone's time. Things take a while to evolve. Unless the machine is running perfectly and all it's lacking is fuel, which is money,
00:21:58
Speaker
you're not going to be able to triple sales in six months. It's just not going to happen unless there's a whole bunch of pent-up demand that you're aware of that no one else is. If they are, they've stolen it from you. You're not going to get that from just about any company. But if they say, I want to increase by about 40%, I'm going to give it about a year to do that, and here's $3 million to do it,
00:22:18
Speaker
Then you know they've kind of embraced the thing and set their mind correctly in what the job really is. Now you have a concrete goal. You have a specific way to do it. You have a specific size and scope and budget. So those things were all decided before you walked in the door. Now you have a set of parameters to sell to that candidate. Now you can go about finding the right candidate that fits the needs you have within those parameters.
00:22:41
Speaker
That, to me, is the path that most companies need to take. Get your house in order first, then go looking for the carpenter. It's a whole bunch different than saying, well, we need another team member. Okay, who do we need? Let's go find him. You need to be a little more specific than that because we've got our finger and a lot of buys, and we're at the top end of the pyramid.
00:23:01
Speaker
We're going to interact with accounting on a very peer-to-peer level. We're going to interact with sales on a very peer-to-peer level. We're going to interact with your accounting department and your compliance department and everything else at a very peer-to-peer level. We're going to make demands and we're going to push back. You've got to be prepared for all that stuff. One of the biggest challenges that I run into when I do start working with a company is establishing the rules of engagement.
00:23:27
Speaker
and expectations. Now, some of that is around what does success look like? Being realistic and setting both sides up for success in terms of saying, yes, we can achieve 40% growth in a year. 300% growth, maybe not so much. That's one. But the second one, and I think this is sometimes more challenging, is how much are you going to get
00:23:51
Speaker
from me in terms of time and commitment because I could work for you for three hours a week I could work eight or two or three days and then
00:24:00
Speaker
How do you manage what I call service creep? I want you to do these things and then it's, I want you to do these things and these things and these things. And then also in your fractional CMO is really a full-time CMO because you're relying on them that much. So what's your experience in terms of being very clear about how we're going to work together, how much you can expect from me, how much time I'm going to commit to you and what success looks like. Cause you don't tee that up.
00:24:26
Speaker
If you don't get those all established before the engagement starts, then you're going to run into problems. At some point in time, either you or the client is going to be unhappy. And that's just a recipe for disaster. So what is your approach to setting expectations and the rules of engagement? A, you're absolutely right. B, I take it back to the
00:24:49
Speaker
the engagement contract that we set up in the beginning. That at least sets the broad strokes of what the scope of this thing looks like. You're right, scope creep is an incredible pitfall to fall into because they do start once they see some activity and see things changing and see you engaging with other people in the company and
00:25:09
Speaker
and making things happen, then the competence kind of sorts the ooze out and they go, oh, this is a guy I can trust to get stuff done. Why don't we stick this on him? And why don't we have him do this? And why don't we run with this? And that's okay. You can do that, but it's going to take away from this other thing that we've already talked about.
00:25:27
Speaker
My plate is of a limited size because that's what we've agreed on in terms of number of hours. I know my speed and my efficiency levels and my productivity levels. I'm telling you now that you've just taken away about a third of what was on that plate for the new things you just tossed on there.
00:25:42
Speaker
You have to prioritize which one of those things you want. That's a difficult conversation to have the first time. After that, they get the message really quickly because it works out well and they understand that, okay, which one would you deprioritize to get this new thing? Part of it is understanding that you do have a mind of your own and you're not shaking in your boots all the time, worried about one of these erratic CEOs is going to fire you on the spot out of peak.
00:26:06
Speaker
You've got your own standards and you're going to maintain them and hold them. That's part of setting expectation. The other is understanding that not everything happens at once. We're almost built in a day. I got to plan this first. I got to budget it first. I got to figure out what it is you need that's going to work with what you've given me.
00:26:24
Speaker
If I've only got 20 yards of concrete, I'm going to have to make a different kind of house than if you've got 50. It's just that simple. You work with what you're given. I can either turn around and say, no, that's not enough and ask you more, or I can figure out how to make what you've got work as well as it possibly can. I generally choose the latter
00:26:44
Speaker
and then show proof of concept. And then I can go back to the well and say, okay, this is how this worked the last time. If you want to up your game, we can go from 20 hours to 30, and we can triple the output budget. And here's what you're going to do now that you're comfortable with it. My goal is to build a machine that works at any level. And the more you fill it up, the faster and more quickly it scales. My advice to companies hiring a fraction of CMO, one of my pieces of advice is that
00:27:11
Speaker
In many respects, you're hiring a change agent, as you said earlier. They may see you as a consultant with a fancy title. And there are often expectations for immediate instant gratification. I hire you, you're going to do something right away. So one of the things that I
00:27:29
Speaker
highlight when I'm working with a new client is not only how we're going to work together, and ultimately what success looks like for you, but I also try to help you identify what are your biggest pains right now? Where's the house on fire? And how can I help solve that or figure out that problem? So I look for quick wins. In my case, what I'll say to a company is tell me your biggest problems, the things that you would like me to solve right now, and it could be I need an updated sales deck.
00:27:56
Speaker
Or I need a one pager. And what I find is that it does a couple things. One is it helps a fractional CMO prove their worth and demonstrate you made the right decision by hiring someone who can get stuff done. And two, it helps to make the client more confident. They're seeing marketing actually start to happen.
00:28:16
Speaker
And I think that's an important rule or important element in terms of a successful long-term engagement is that you actually start things off on the right foot. And I always look for ways that I can prove value right away.
00:28:28
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. In a full-time role or in a fractional role, early wins are key. And promoting those early wins on a broad scale only helps you gain acolytes and supporters inside. Because once everybody wants to be on the train, that's got the winner on it. So if you can show a couple of key early things that take away those pain points early on, I just started an engagement with a small company that's growing that the founder already inherently knew this.
Engagement Duration and Transitioning
00:28:57
Speaker
And i said i'm gonna help you realign your brand i'm gonna help you do this and that was multiple entities they all had to play in the same sandbox different value props for each you want to hang together as a unit it was a bunch of functional and visual problems that needed to be solved.
00:29:13
Speaker
But she said, that's fine. We're going to do that right away. But here's five things you can work on in the meantime while you're getting all that lined up. I need this. I need this. I need this. Start working on these things. And oh, by the way, sign us up for this conference, this trade show, and this. And I said, OK. And we took care of those early pain points very quickly because they were very specific. It was pick up the phone, find a creative, find a distributor, find a producer, get the thing done.
00:29:40
Speaker
And in those instances, you can find an early win. And when you show them the proof in the pudding, look, it's done here, finished. They really do start to gain a lot of confidence in the fact that the things you tell them are true, they're doable, they're real, and they help. One of the tricky questions when it comes to using a fraction of CMO is how long the engagement lasts.
00:30:03
Speaker
Ideally, a fractional CMO, in my view, needs at least three to months at least, but ideally at least six months to really start to build the engine, get established priorities, start to get stuff done. In my experience, I've been with a couple of companies for a year, and at that point in time,
00:30:21
Speaker
The relationship starts to sort of what I call engagement fatigue. You're essentially their full-time resource. I often feel in those cases they really need a full-time resource. Is there an ideal period of time in which the fractional CMO delivers magic and then it starts to fade? Or can it be something that continues for as long as they want to start working, they want to keep working together?
00:30:44
Speaker
I think there's a couple of things. One, it's determined largely by the level and depth of the problem you're trying to solve. If you've got a big company that needs rebranded and remaneuvered and goes after a slightly different market share and may be running away from a PR problem and has four or five other things that need done,
00:31:04
Speaker
I think a year minimum is pretty much where I start because it just takes time. You're busy as a one-armed paper hanger and you're also limited by the number of hours you're really committed to, so there's a constant squeeze on your time and you're trying to be as effective and efficient with it as you can, but things just take time sometimes and they take time to develop, they take time to spread internally so that you have support to do things quickly. When the accounting department takes four days to get back to your email,
00:31:30
Speaker
you know you haven't quite spread the seed as far as you need to because that check needed to be there yesterday. So what you end up with is there needs to be a time scale that's
00:31:39
Speaker
set up and built to accomplish the bulk of the work that needs done in an effective amount of time. I don't do engagements if I can help it for less than a year because you're short-cutting the process. Marketing takes time. You have to be patient with it. You're not going to eat the fruit off the apple tree you plant today. You're just going to have to wait. So given that year to take care of all the details and to get all the stories straight and to get everybody all the internal buy-in you need,
00:32:08
Speaker
This takes time, but you're right. There is some fatigue because you quit producing those magical moments. As you're going into the second year, you're looking at it going, okay, now what levers do I pull that I haven't pulled already? You start looking around for new challenges and new things to put at them, and you've built the machine well enough that realistically, your 20 hours aren't being spent as effectively and as high impact as they were in the beginning because things start to run themselves after a while.
00:32:35
Speaker
Other apartments are now busy. Sales is very busy. They've been fed. Accounting is now busy keeping track of all these massive expenses they got going. Other departments are busy making sure operations and customers are happy and all the new software is standing up and all that thing. You push the productivity down the hill and the rest of the departments start picking up on it after about a year, and suddenly you're left with a whole lot less to do that has visual and visible impact.
00:33:01
Speaker
You're still running the show and the show has many, many, many points and many, many levers, but you got them all pretty much dialed in where you want them, occasional adjustments here and there. So it doesn't look as busy. It doesn't feel as busy. And yes, they're starting to get a little fatigued with it. 18 months is a good timeframe. It depends on the industry in some cases though. I worked for a financial advisory firm, good sized one, and they started to get antsy with their results at roughly the nine to 12 month mark.
00:33:30
Speaker
but we also worked with a much, much larger firm who had made the marketing commitment a whole lot earlier in their tenure and were run by a CEO who came from another industry. He understood marketing very well. He was a consumer industry. When they went on a buying spree and bought a bunch of other companies and expanded, he gave each of those new companies that they'd purchased 28 months
00:33:53
Speaker
get their marketing house in order because he knew it took time to put all the flooring underneath all that stuff and to get them aligned properly. He had the patience to really make it work. Now, had I had an engagement as a fractional CMO for him for 28 months, they should have just hired me because ultimately it comes out cheaper that way.
00:34:11
Speaker
But there's a tipping point for everyone. It just depends on the depth of the problem as much as anything else. You know, as consultants, you know, we want to stick around as long as possible. I mean, long term customer. It's all about the follow. It's all about, you know, making sure that we've got the check comes in every month and it sort of gives us economic stability. But at some point in time, every client, well, I would say
00:34:33
Speaker
nearly every client needs to hire a VP marketing if you've got the marketing machine established, if it's rolling, you need somebody in the seat. That's at least my view is 24-7. What are the signals to you as a fractional CMO that my client is probably better off with a full-time VP marketing or CMO? And then what is the role that you as a fractional CMO play in terms of hiring your successor?
00:34:59
Speaker
There are several instances. One, if the scenario was try it before you buy it, you have to decide whether that's a company you want to be aligned with full-time and just take the full-time gig. The second alternative is, yes, it's time to turn this over to someone slightly less senior, but also considerably less expensive that can really mind the store 24-7.
00:35:20
Speaker
So when I start to look at the plan for the following year, and I'm not making massive sweeping changes in it from the prior year, that's one of the signals I use to say, okay, this thing is pretty well established now, and it doesn't need massive sweeping changes. It needs minor adjustments and incremental changes.
00:35:39
Speaker
Anyone coming in cold to that situation with that good a roadmap can make those incremental changes and those small adjustments and do well enough internally because their fingers on the pulse all the time. What they lack in depth, they'll make up for an attention.
00:35:55
Speaker
at that point. That's one of the triggers I look at is when that plan flips over and instead of being a crash and burn, it's more of a seek and destroy, then I can walk away and say, okay. Now, if you want to keep me around as an advisor on a pay-as-you-go basis, I'm very comfortable with that. That's how you do the extension at the end or at least how I do. Because then they can call you up out of the blue and go, look, you set us up with all this stuff and this guy's good at about three-quarters of it. We need the other quarter covered somehow. What do you recommend?
00:36:24
Speaker
and I can look at the situation and not come in with a pair of literally
00:36:31
Speaker
recently revealed eyes and look at it. I know the background. I can see where it went off. I can see where it's been missed, and I can make very strong and very specific recommendations to write the train again and get it going at a very minimal cost because I've done all the learning already. For them, it's really a matter, okay, write the guy a $10,000 check, have him come in and fix the other little pieces, and we're good.
00:36:54
Speaker
Most companies are very amenable to doing that. It's like hiring the sniper rather than a whole battalion.
Closing Remarks
00:37:00
Speaker
You just come in and fix the one problem. We have covered a lot of ground in the last 30, 35 minutes. I hope that we've provided companies with insight and advice on how to hire the right fractional CMO. Why to hire a fractional CMO? Final question to you is, where can people learn more about you and what you do?
00:37:22
Speaker
I certainly, LinkedIn is a great spot to do that. I'm posting on a daily basis with all sorts of learning and content that's valuable for companies in that middle market sector. You can certainly go on Amazon and purchase my book, The Marketing Doctor's Survival Notes. You can certainly go to my website, themarketingdoc.com.
00:37:43
Speaker
and find out more about our services and how we offer fractional CMO, as well as consulting services for tactical and strategic executions. Those are places you can find more about me. Dave, thanks for the amazing advice and thanks for everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media.
00:38:07
Speaker
To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.