How does a fractional CMO work with our existing marketing team?
As the leader your team reports into on strategy, not a parallel vendor competing with them.
A fractional CMO leads your existing team rather than competing with it. Your marketing staff report to them on strategy and priorities, the same way they would report to a full time CMO, and the fractional CMO is accountable to you for the result.
The reporting line
Keep it simple and explicit. The fractional CMO sets direction and priorities. Your marketing coordinator, specialist or manager keeps their job, their title and their HR reporting line, and takes strategic direction from the fractional CMO. Ambiguity here is the single most common reason these arrangements fail. Write it down in the first week.
What changes for the team
- Fewer priorities, clearly ranked. Most in house marketers are drowning in requests from every department. Someone senior saying no on their behalf is a relief.
- Decisions get made. Work that has been stuck waiting for an opinion moves.
- Their work gets measured on something real. Leads and pipeline instead of activity volume.
- Coaching. A good fractional CMO develops the people, because the endgame is usually handing the seat to one of them.
Handling an existing agency
The fractional CMO holds the incumbent agency to the strategy and the numbers. That means clearer briefs and harder questions, and good agencies welcome both. If your current agency resists being measured, that is useful information. A fractional CMO from LevelUp Digital will hold LevelUp's own execution teams to the same standard, and will say plainly when a channel should move elsewhere.
How to introduce it
Tell the team before the first meeting, not after. Say what is changing (direction and priorities) and what is not (their roles and their jobs). Frame it as buying senior leadership the company could not otherwise afford at $195 an hour for 10 to 20 hours a month, which is the truth. Teams handle a new leader fine. What they do not handle is finding out from a calendar invite.
More on the arrangement is on the fractional CMO page and the who we are page.
Related: Can a fractional CMO help build our team?, What does a fractional CMO actually do?, How many hours a month does it take?