Over the past three years, I’ve served as a fractional CMO or marketing consultant to eight growth-stage startups (I define growth-stage as venture-backed, post-revenue, 50 to 300 employees). Some engagements went well and have lasted years. Twice we’ve ended our engagement after just a few months.
One irrefutable endorsement: During almost every engagement, the CEO offered me a full-time role.
The WSJ recently highlighted the rise of the fractional CMO role. But the article also noted that the CMO role has historically been difficult to outsource as it cuts across many business objectives: brand, strategy, revenue.
So if you’re a marketing consultant looking to take on a fractional CMO role, I’d like to share some advice to help you set yourself up for success.
But first…
What is a Fractional CMO?
Fractional executives (it’s not just CMOs!) are not new: They work part-time for several companies at the same time, usually on a contract basis and for a finite period. Fractional CMOs may focus on brand marketing, product marketing, or revenue growth. It can be a stepping stone to a full-time role, but it may also be a way for more seasoned executives to stay challenged while preserving flexibility.
Being a fractional CMO is incredibly tough. Joining an existing organization as an outsider can be intimidating, more so when you’re part-time. You’re an outsider trying to earn credibility, but you actually have just a fraction of the time and context of the people you work with.
It’s also hard to know your worth. I am continuously afraid that CEOs will have sticker shock. I have to constantly remind myself that now that I’ve been a fractional CMO four times, I can say that I've learned a lot from my experience (and more importantly, my mistakes). It’s not smooth sailing—but how you navigate the seas is totally within your control. Here’s how you can make sure you’ll succeed in the role.
First, Understand the Difference between Managers and Executives
To paraphrase Reid Hoffman in Blitzscaling, managers focus on making sure the work gets done, whereas executives design the team, processes, and culture to ensure the right work gets done. As a fractional CMO, you should be delivering at that executive level.
Some specific examples of how I do this:
1-on-1s
I see tons of managers who use 1-on-1s as a time to touch base on projects. That type of check-in can just as easily happen over Slack or email. The purpose of 1-on-1s is to talk about how projects lead to a person’s bigger-picture career goals, troubleshoot areas of friction with other teams, and give feedback (positive and negative).
Meetings
I’ve watched green VPs of Marketing set up bi-weekly meetings with the whole team, only to use the entire time for status updates. Executives know that’s a missed opportunity.
Instead, I prioritize smaller group meetings to create a space where a small group can go deeper, and I look for projects that can become discussion topics so the group can sharpen ideas. Next, for bigger meetings, I look for show-and-tell opportunities where we can spread best practices and where we can give shoutouts to top performers: Sapiens and Atomic Habits have both discussed how behavior is influenced by being accepted by one's tribe.
Paint a Picture of the Outcome You're Looking For
One Google spreadsheet that was likely the bane of our data science team's existence was a "mockups" sheet where I would frequently mock up the reports I wanted us to look at. In a lot of ways, I was incredibly grateful that we had a team in-house who could execute my vision. But the key for me was to show where we needed to get to from a data point of view and expect the team to get there, rather than getting into the weeds and trying to roll my own reports alone.
Leverage the CEO’s Authority to Gain Credibility Fast
Everyone knows the importance of investing in relationships. When I joined Codecademy as the head of marketing, I had the luxury of spending my first month grabbing coffees with stakeholders across the company, listening to people’s needs, and cultivating trust so I could get shit done.
When we hired a BCG consultant to join Codecademy as Chief-of-Staff, I noticed she was incredibly sharp, hit the ground running, and cleared a path for herself to get shit done without needing a month to build rapport. She’d often invoke the CEO’s name in meetings he wasn't in, using his authority to get buy-in and clear the way for projects. It was a quick way to short-circuit some trust.
This was incredibly effective: she was able to use this approach to cut through red tape and get her first few projects shipped. At that point, she’d built up some trust and credibility of her own.
Being a fractional CMO is a lot like being a management consultant: you’re expected to deliver value almost immediately, you’re coming in as an outsider, you need help from the internal team, and you may not have the luxury of spending hours cultivating relationships and establishing trust with the internal team.
So, like that Chief of Staff, I’ve learned to leverage my status as a special advisor to the CEO to get buy-in for the first few projects until I’ve built some credibility of my own.
Choose the Right North Star Metric
Identifying the right metrics at the start and focusing on them is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.
During Facebook’s early days, it decided that its key growth lever would be retention. Competitors often used monthly active users (MAU) to measure retention. This is a vanity metric: It tells you the platform is big, but they don’t tell you why it’s big—what’s driving that growth.
MAUs are also a lagging indicator: You can’t wait around 3 months to see if this cohort of users really did stick around and became “monthly actives.” You need a leading indicator with a shorter feedback loop that the team can optimize daily and weekly to know if they’re headed in the right direction.
Facebook decided their product’s “a-ha” moment came when someone had connected with at least seven friends within the first 10 days: That became the goalpost that was directionally predictive of stickiness; a leading indicator that the team could organize around, measure experiments against, and use to benchmark each weekly cohort of new signups against the previous week.
Create Tools the Rest of the Org Can Leverage
Over the past 15 years, I've developed a certain way of doing things that I like to call my "growth operating system." I have templates for job descriptions, interview case studies, reports, experiment plans, and prioritization frameworks.
I've found these handy in leveling up my teams. For example, recently we were hiring for three senior-level marketing roles. I wanted to model what a good onboarding experience should look like, so I took ownership of onboarding the first hire. I created documentation, came up with a framework for a 30/60/90 plan he'd fill in, and gave him a list of people he should speak with around the company and specific topics I wanted each of them to cover with him.
This did two things: First, it ensured he'd get to know stakeholders across the company. Second, it gave me leverage on my own time by having him learn as much from others as possible so I could focus on training him on the items that only I can speak about. This was as different as night and day from how the team had been running onboarding up to this point. Without me having to do much else to indoctrinate the team, this approach to onboarding was absorbed into the company culture, becoming the standard way we did onboarding going forward.
Cultivate Mindfulness Toward Your Emotions
Warning: personal content ahead.
When I’m running fast all day, spread thin, and trying to get the most out of many teams, I sometimes get frustrated. And it shows.
I’ve learned that I need to be mindful of my emotions: If I don’t love how something is getting done, even after providing a lot of direction or feedback, it triggers my own fear of being unheard. I have to be mindful that’s definitely not what’s happening.
I also have so little time with teams, that I can try to fix things on the spot. Obviously criticizing someone in a group setting is counter-productive. So I have to hold in check my own stress about being short on time, and proactively redirect these critiques to a private Slack or 1-on-1.
Finally, I’ve had to get better at setting boundaries. I’m eager to please. When someone puts time on my calendar, I’ve had to get better about pushing back, and I’d often respond by asking for an agenda. I also try to make sure all the right stakeholders are going to be in the room so we can get to a decision, and if not, I would push back. As a last resort, I would sometimes accept sudden meetings, but I’d tell the organizer I have a conflict and can only make the first 30 minutes.
Create Transparency Into Where Time Is Going
I’ve hired plenty of consultants in my life. And when I’ve been on the hiring end, my big concern was always “are we getting our money’s worth?”
As a result, when I began consulting myself, I made a point to create a daily hours tracker. For each day, I'm fairly specific about the meetings I attended and the projects I’ve shipped. And whenever I invoice my client, I make sure to send the hours tracker along so they have visibility into where time is going.
Google Sheets shows you a log of everyone who has viewed the document, and in the past year, virtually no one has viewed my hours tracker. But I firmly believe that the mere fact that it exists—and that anyone can look at it anytime—engenders trust.
How my hours tracker looks like
Parachute-In Experts
A younger Prasid always felt like he needed to have all the answers, and he spent years learning the craft. But as I've grown, I've realized a big part of the value of hiring seasoned execs is their ability to source outside expertise fast.
Want to know how the best startups are thinking about customer data platforms (CDPs)? I wrote the product analytics spec for Mirror (now lululemon Studio) myself. But want to know how an enterprise should think about the same problem? I could wager a guess, but I’m also friends with the VP of Marketing at Segment—perhaps we can spend 10 minutes with a Segment Solutions consultant to get some answers.
Recently, one of the VPs of Marketing that I advise was trying to think through different organizational structures as we scale from a marketing team of 15 to a team of 30. I was able to connect him to the VP of People at Figure, who shared her thinking on a traditional functional structure, a business unit structure, or a blended pod-based structure.
Deliver More Than the Hours You Bill
I've never shared this with Richard, the CEO at Coding Dojo, but during my first ~3 months, I typically worked 30% more than I billed. It was important to me that the team felt a disproportionate value relative to what it was costing them.
Now, this approach isn’t good for work-life balance. If I’m billing 40 hours, I’m probably working 55+. Furthermore, it makes time off harder. My wife, like most salaried employees, doesn’t think twice about going to the dentist in the middle of the day. For me, a 2-hour errand during the day means 2 hours more work at night or earning 5% less that week (2 hours of out a 40-hour workweek).
But it worked: Richard has shown incredible trust in me and I now consider him a trusted friend. The additional hours also gave me a clearer picture of how the company works, building my credibility and authority and making my job easier in the long run.
Got any other tips for fractional (or even full-time) CEOs? Share it below!