Who is a Fractional CMO a good fit for?
Best for $2M to $20M companies needing leadership without a full-time CMO
Fractional CMO services fit companies between roughly $2M and $20M in revenue that need marketing leadership but are not ready to hire a full-time CMO. It is also a strong fit for companies in transition: post-funding, pre-exit, or rebuilding after team changes.
The signs you actually need one
- You have marketing people executing but nobody senior deciding what they should be executing.
- You are the founder and marketing strategy is still your job, on top of everything else that is your job.
- You are paying two or three agencies and vendors and nobody is holding them to a shared plan.
- Marketing reports activity, posts published, emails sent, leads generated, but cannot connect any of it to revenue.
- You tried a full-time marketing hire and it did not work, and you are not sure whether the problem was the person or the role definition.
When it is not the right fit
If you have no one to execute, a Fractional CMO gives you a strategy and nobody to run it. Leadership without hands is an expensive document. In that case you either need execution support alongside it, or you need a doer before you need a leader.
If you are under about $1M in revenue, the honest answer is usually that you need leads more than you need a marketing organization, and the money is better spent on the channel that works.
And if you are large enough to keep a senior marketing leader busy full time, hire one. We will tell you that rather than sell you fractional hours.
For context, the $2M to $20M range is the sweet spot for this service specifically, not our client range overall. We work with companies from $1M to $1B and up. See what size businesses we work with.
Related: How much does a Fractional CMO cost? | What does a Fractional CMO actually do? | Can a Fractional CMO help us build an internal marketing team?