Tag: marketing leadership

Fractional CMO vs Full-Time CMO: Cost, Timing, and When Each Makes Sense
Companies often begin the search for a marketing leader with a simple question.
Should we hire a full-time CMO, or bring in a fractional one?
The question sounds straightforward, but it usually reflects a deeper uncertainty about what the company actually needs from marketing leadership.
The choice is rarely about part-time versus full-time work. It is about the stage of the organization and the type of leadership the marketing system requires.
What a Full-Time CMO Is Responsible For
A full-time CMO typically sits at the center of the company’s marketing organization.
They manage teams. They oversee multiple functions. They coordinate daily execution across channels, programs, and internal stakeholders.
Their work often includes:
- managing marketing staff and hiring new team members
- running regular campaign and planning cycles
- coordinating closely with sales, product, and finance
- maintaining consistent execution across multiple initiatives
A good CMO does not simply design strategy. They also ensure the marketing organization operates smoothly day to day.
That level of involvement requires presence and continuity. It is leadership embedded deeply in the daily rhythm of the company.
What a Fractional CMO Actually Does
A fractional CMO serves a different role.
Rather than managing daily operations, a fractional CMO focuses on clarifying the marketing system itself. This means aligning the company around its market, its positioning, and the sequence of investments required to grow.
The work often includes:
- clarifying the ideal customer profile
- developing product marketing and messaging
- aligning marketing, sales, and customer experience
- identifying which marketing efforts deserve investment and which should stop
In practice, this often happens during periods of transition.
A company may have strong products and capable people, but the marketing function has grown organically rather than strategically. Channels multiply. Messaging drifts. Sales and marketing begin to interpret the market differently.
A fractional CMO helps restore coherence.
Once that clarity exists, execution becomes easier for the team already in place.
The Role of Company Stage
In many cases, the decision between fractional and full-time leadership reflects the stage of the organization.
Early-stage companies often do not need a full-time CMO. They need senior marketing leadership applied strategically while the company determines where to focus its energy.
At this stage, the marketing team may still be small. The organization is learning quickly. Strategy matters more than daily management.
As the company grows, the equation begins to change.
A larger marketing team requires consistent oversight. Campaign cycles multiply. The organization needs someone present each day to manage people, priorities, and execution.
This is the point where full-time leadership often becomes the better fit.
Fractional CMO vs Full-Time CMO: The Cost Question
Cost is frequently the first factor companies consider when comparing fractional and full-time leadership.
A full-time CMO represents a significant investment. In addition to salary, companies typically absorb recruiting costs, benefits, and long-term equity considerations.
A fractional CMO changes the structure of that investment. Companies gain access to senior marketing leadership without committing to a full executive hire.
However, cost alone should not drive the decision.
The more useful question is what type of leadership the company actually needs at its current stage. A fractional CMO can provide clarity and direction quickly, but a growing marketing organization eventually benefits from a full-time leader who can guide the team daily.
When a Full-Time CMO Makes Sense
At a certain point, the marketing organization simply becomes too complex to operate without full-time leadership.
This often happens when:
- the marketing team has grown significantly
- multiple channels and programs require daily coordination
- leadership presence is needed to guide the team continuously
In these situations, companies benefit from a CMO who can dedicate their full attention to the organization.
In some engagements, I have even helped leadership teams hire their first full-time CMO. Occasionally I remain involved at a lower level afterward, providing continuity and historical perspective as the new leader takes ownership of the role.
Fractional leadership can help build the foundation, but long-term organizations often benefit from a permanent marketing leader.
When Fractional Leadership Works Best
Fractional leadership tends to work best when companies are navigating change.
This might include:
- stalled growth that requires strategic realignment
- founders transitioning marketing responsibility to a team
- a sales organization that needs stronger marketing systems
In these moments, the organization does not necessarily need more marketing activity. It needs someone who can step back, see the system clearly, and guide the next stage of development.
That perspective can often be applied effectively without the structure of a full-time executive role.
A More Useful Way to Think About the Choice
The decision between fractional and full-time leadership is not a permanent one.
Many companies move through both stages as they grow.
Fractional leadership helps clarify direction, align the organization, and establish marketing systems that work. Over time, as the company expands, a full-time CMO may step in to guide the organization day to day.
Seen this way, the two roles are not alternatives. They are different phases in the evolution of a healthy marketing organization.
The real question is simply this.
What kind of leadership does the company need right now?
2026-01-15
Signals Hiding in Plain Sight
For years, I’ve watched a quiet pattern play out across teams of every size. There’s the story an organization tells itself about who its audience is. And then there’s the evidence the actual audience leaves behind. Those two things rarely match cleanly, and the gap between them is where most of the real strategic work sits.
You see this most clearly in digital marketing and analytics. Tools change (just look at the “maps“). Dashboards get shinier. But the signals from real people landing on your site, trying to find something, hesitating, searching, furiously clicking, backing up, trying again? Those signals barely drift at all.
It’s part of why I keep returning to search behavior as one of the most honest sources of truth you can access for free. Web search (from Google or Bing) shows what people hope you offer. Internal site search shows what they couldn’t find. And the trails they leave afterward show how they recover when the path isn’t clear.
I’ve been lucky to trade notes about this with Alan Etkin at BCIT, who thinks about analytics with a level of care most of us only aspire to. He has this habit of watching long-term patterns instead of chasing short-term novelty that frustrates sales but thrills marketers. One of his recent observations surprised me. Even with question-answer LLMs everywhere, he hasn’t seen a meaningful shift toward long-form questions in on-site search analytics. Humans are still typing the same short, intent-heavy bursts we’ve used for years. Familiar. Direct. A little stubborn.
Meanwhile, the analytics landscape is becoming stranger and more interesting. Plenty of traffic is now coming from Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, or some hybrid of traditional search and LLMs, and it’s increasingly difficult to tell which is which in dashboards. Yet the numbers coming directly from LLMs still seems fairly small, and the number using conversational search on site? Vanishingly smaller. While search engines are re-writing the top of the funnel with conversational search, the people who do reach your site still behave like… normal people. They search in the quickest way they know. They try to solve their problem with as few keystrokes as possible. They abandon quickly if they can’t.
This is why internal search data is such a goldmine. In a 2022 study across hundreds of websites, internal search users were found to be 2.6 times more likely to convert than non-search users. Alan has found the same. They’re your most motivated visitors. If a significant chunk of their searches end with “no results,” that’s not a failure of marketing. It’s a failure of clarity. Roughly 20-30% of site visitors use internal search on content-heavy sites like universities, governments, business services and many nonprofits. And that’s a data set most teams aren’t even looking at.
Pair that with the behavioral evidence and the story gets even sharper. A 2023 Microsoft Clarity analysis found that 57 percent of user sessions include rapid page backtracking, a signal of what they call “dead-end frustration” (and if you’re not using Clarity, you should!). People land on a page, don’t see what they expected, backtrack, search, and sometimes leave for good. If you’ve ever watched Clarity session maps on a high-traffic site, you’ve seen this dance clear as day.
Then there’s the frontier. Alan has been experimenting with using the Model Context Protocol to query Google Analytics in plain language. It’s still early, but it hints at a future where analysts stop wrangling interfaces and start asking real, historically difficult-to-surface questions like which user journeys correlate with revenue. It’s slowly giving better access to the truth already in front of you.
But even in this emerging world, human behavior remains steady. A 2024 study of user search habits found that keyword-style searches still outnumber natural-language queries by more than 6 to 1 in on-site search boxes (Baymard Institute, 2024 Ecommerce UX findings). People haven’t suddenly started talking to websites the way they talk to ChatGPT. They’re still using the patterns years of search engines have trained into them.
That’s the digital layer. It’s where Alan lives most of the time, though he ties everything back to the institution’s financial picture. He can tell you what the BCIT site earns, where enrollment interest surges or softens, and which journeys correlate with successful applications. That kind of thinking is the real model for modern marketing leadership. Digital analytics aren’t the whole picture, but they are the clearest early signals of what’s shifting.
Senior marketers crave the kind of data one level up. Alongside digital behavior, we (should) track things like:
- pipeline velocity
- qualified-to-opportunity conversion
- CAC and payback periods
- contribution to revenue
- sales cycle length
- retention patterns
- competitive share of voice and content velocity
Those metrics matter because they measure the health of the system. Digital analytics matter because they measure the movement within it. When you stitch them together, you get a view that’s wide enough for strategy and sharp enough for action.
This is where dashboards can be powerful if done with discipline. Not as a wall of charts, but as a single narrative surface. A place where search behavior, traffic intent, enrollment / pipeline lifts, and revenue contribution all sit side by side. A dashboard should work the way a good story works. It should show you where attention is going, where friction is growing, and where the next question lives.
I keep returning to this because I’ve seen it save organizations years of drift. The truth is usually already available. Not in a forecast or a slide (sorry Deloitte), but in what people actually try to do on your site. In the words they type when they’re searching for something you promised but didn’t make obvious. In the friction they hit when the path doesn’t match their expectation.
You can learn a lot from big models and long dashboards. But if you want to understand your audience in the present tense, digital search behavior will tell you. It will tell you what they care about. It will tell you where you’re strong or weak. It will tell you whether the story you’re telling is the story they’re hearing. It will tell you long before anything else does. And often, it will tell you for free.
If you look closely, the truth is leaving breadcrumbs. The work is learning to see them.
2025-11-20
Billboards in Minnesota, or How Scrappy ABM Drove Global Growth
Industry: SaaS search solutions
Role: Director of Marketing (foundation for fractional CMO work)
Duration: 2017–2021
Director of Marketing — in Australian usage, the senior marketing seat. The CEO’s title was Managing Director, not CEO, which is the usual source of the confusion.
The Challenge
When I joined Funnelback, marketing barely existed. A partner had once helped to craft a core brand and some collateral, but the effort was brief and dated. Sales carried most of the weight. A talented salesperson moonlighted as a copywriter, but without design or marketing support her work had no chance to scale.
Leadership was skeptical that marketing could drive revenue. In fact, it was seen as a cost center or a nice-to-have. Yet the mandate was clear: Australia was increasingly saturated, the UK team was faltering, and North America was the big bet. Success meant proving that marketing could create focus, credibility, and growth. This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.
The Approach
I stepped into a hybrid role: strategist, operator, and team builder. I was the first US-based marketing hire, joining a tiny Seattle office filled with brilliant but mismatched ideas shipped over from Australia. The product positioning, sales collateral, and partner approach all needed rethinking for a very different market.
Key moves:
- North America first: Emphasized higher ed as the breakout vertical. We pitched the product team in Canberra on creating a higher ed “template,” cutting implementation time and giving sales a head start.
- Scrappy ABM: Built targeted campaigns that made Funnelback look far bigger than it was. One sales engineer returned from a prospect meeting convinced we had “billboards in Minnesota.” In reality, the account was being hyper-targeted with ads, email, and content everywhere they turned.
- Community-first credibility: Instead of spending heavily, Funnelback invested in trust with higher ed associations like HighEdWeb. Showing up every year, even on small budgets, earned the credibility to outlast better-funded competitors.
- Right-sized systems: Migrated from clunky SugarCRM + Mailchimp + spreadsheets to Salesforce + Marketo, unlocking visibility for both sales and marketing. No more blind spots heading into prospect calls.
- Team building: Hired generalists who could execute across strategy and tactics, then added specialists only when needed. Built a culture of shared ownership where designers, copywriters, and even martech staff learned from, and covered for, one another.
- Pandemic pivot: Positioned our technology as a crisis communication channel. Helped customers shift to all-digital, supported industry partners, and doubled down on community even as others pulled back.
The Results
By combining strategy with hands-on execution, I turned Funnelback’s marketing from an afterthought into a growth lever.
Key outcomes:
- 150% year-over-year attributable growth, driven largely by North America.
- Higher ed template became the repeatable engine for new wins.
- ABM campaigns gave a small company outsized visibility and credibility.
- Customers and partners remained loyal through pandemic turbulence.
- Led marketing through acquisition/merger with Squiz, carrying Funnelback’s practices and product into the larger company.
The Merger Reality
The merger with Squiz was both validation and trial. It proved Funnelback’s value, but it also meant colliding with a very different culture and system. Teammates were anxious, leaders were stretched, and pandemic uncertainty made everything harder.
As de facto senior leader during the transition, I kept communication open, steadied morale, and ensured that Funnelback’s DNA carried into Squiz. Best practices in marketing and product enriched Squiz’s North American success, even as the integration was messy.
Lessons for SaaS Leaders
- Scrappy ABM works: Smart targeting can make a small brand look much larger.
- Right-size systems: Avoid tool sprawl. Build stacks that scale with you.
- Balance leadership with ground game: Credibility comes from steering strategy and joining prospects on the conference floor.
- Invest in community: Customers and partners remember who shows up when resources are thin.
- Stability first, then growth: In crisis or inflection, retention and credibility buy you time.
Fractional CMO Relevance
Funnelback was my training ground for what I now bring to Cedar Collaborative clients: the ability to create marketing where none exists, build nimble systems under pressure, craft ABM that punches above its weight, and guide both leaders and teams through turbulence.
2024-02-08