Why is the role called “Fractional” CMO?

Fractional means that multiple non-competing companies share me as their Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Typically, this means I’m engaging with your company and marketing team once or twice per week.

A “Fractional CMO” is a way to get CMO-level involvement in your company without having to incur the costs of a full-time headcount. More important than the cost considerations, it provides broad-based and on-demand perspective around best practices in customer acquisition, sales pipeline development, and marketing execution.

What are some use cases or scenarios where a Fractional CMO makes sense?

Here are four scenarios that warrant a fractional CMO:

1. If your company has an existing marketing team that needs executive leadership and guidance.
2. You have an early-stage startup and you need to execute an aggressive go-to-market strategy to show revenue traction and early growth.
3. Your company needs a stop-gap (temporary) marketing leader while you locate and sign a permanent VP of Marketing or CMO.
4. Your company needs an experienced marketing leader to define key marketing roles and build an in-house marketing team. Or, a combo of agency partners and an in-house marketing team.

What does a Fractional CMO cost?

Since there is a range of choices in picking someone who can act as your company’s marketing executive, the trick is to align your needs, opportunities, risks and budget to the potential resource. Here are the key questions to ask yourself:

1. How important is this role? Do you need some tactical assistance or true C-level leadership to fill a gap in your leadership team?
2. What’s at stake? Are you making important, but minor adjustments to your go-to-market capabilities or seeking major growth, improvements and impact?
3. How quickly do you need results? Will you be looking for results to trickle in over some time, or do you need big things to happen, soon?

The short answer is somewhere between US$150/hour and US$1,500/hour.  Which is to say, you might find some single person Marketing companies who are interested in doing ad-hoc work on an hourly basis. Most times, however, the more established CMO’s are dedicated to their craft and this is their only income stream. Depending on their track record and who they have worked with or still work with, they have earned the right to charge more.

We work on a minimum retainer of two days a month, but in most cases, we recommend one day a week, if the goal is to ramp up quickly. Our daily rate is US$1,999.00. For clients who sign a contract for 12 months, we give the 12th month free, i.e. an effective rebate of 8.33%.

Click here to receive a draft agreement to study.