Jonny Gilbey BA(Hons)Full time chief marketing officer, marketing agency, or a fractional (outbound) chief marketing officer. Which is right for you?
When looking at who is best equipped to fix your problem, you first need to define what the problem is. Taking a step back from this, you need to define what marketing is and, critically, what marketing means to you.
My understanding of marketing, and the one I teach in my lectures, breaks the word down into its noun ‘Market’ - more commonly referred to as Marketplace. In the course of ‘marketing’ something we are simply developing its go-to-market strategy. How we plan on bringing it to the marketplace, representing it while it's at the marketplace, and ensuring it is memorable enough that when we next visit the marketplace we already have an audience there.
If you're running a somewhat successful business, you will already have a go-to-market strategy. What you need to identify is how strong your go-to-market strategy is compared to your competitors.
If you know your product is technically superior, but a competitor with a worse offering is eating your market share, the messaging your potential customers receive from them is simply better.
The correct instinct here is to hire someone that can look at your problem, correctly diagnose the issues you are facing then action the outcomes.
These are your options:
The Marketing Agency: Your Stop-Gap
Agencies have their place. If you hand them a flawless, battle-tested strategy and say "build exactly this," they will. But if you are asking them to invent the strategy, you stand to lose more than you gain.
The harsh reality of the traditional agency model is the bait and switch. The founder pitches you, before handing off the workload to a 23-year-old junior account manager, often juggling other clients, including those you might consider competitors. The goal of an agency is good enough to keep the payments coming in. Nothing they create for you will ever be best-in-class.
The exception to this is small specialist agencies, such as an SEO agency, a web design agency or a social media agency. The operating model here works more like a pool of freelancers, combining their marketing budget to get you in the door and distributing the work fairly. If you are clear on what is broken in your business, where your customers should be coming from and the changes that are needed, a specialist agency could be right for you.
That said, they are still a stop-gap. Eventually you will be in a position where you need in-house strategy, and the longer you leave it the harder taking that leap will be. Something like a CMO, or freelance marketing leadership, will beat an agency in every situation on a long enough time scale.
The real question isn't Agency vs. Internal Marketing, in which an agency will always lose. It's Internal vs. External marketing leadership.
Internal Leadership: Chief Marketing Officer
An internal CMO is a brilliant asset. If the math actually works.
As a founding director, you will have found yourself wearing two hats. Working in the business; be it Finance (CFO), Marketing/Sales (CMO), Operations (COO), or, working on the business; Executive function as CEO. In order to work on the business more, you will need to outsource the ‘on the business’ jobs. An accountant is a safe solution for finance, operations requires a subject matter expert so is often the last to go, which leaves marketing and sales. You need to find someone as good as you, that can expand at 15% higher than your current growth rate. Those individuals are expensive. To justify their £100,000 to £200,000 executive bill, you need proof that a 15% gross expansion will increase the bottom line by more than £100,000 in the financial year after they join, and every year after. Just to cover their seat at the table.
If it doesn't, you are subsidising a very expensive manager while they learn on the job.
If you are a large business, this is definitely the way you need to go, however, most medium-sized B2B businesses simply do not have forty hours of C-suite strategic work a week.
You need executive function, in a part time package.
The Fractional (External) CMO
Medium sized business is where the external, fractional model wins.
You are busy enough to buy your time back, but serious work still needs doing. You are buying pure, concentrated strategic firepower to outperform competitors and accelerate your expansion. They set the go-to-market strategy, align the resources, hold the executioners accountable, but in a capacity that allows them the freedom to work with other non-competing clients.
You get the 20% of the CMO's brain that drives 80% of the revenue, without the £150k of payroll bloat. It's a surgical fix.
Long term, you can either fold that individual into your organisation, increasing their retainer, moving over to a PAYE model or offering them an ownership stake in the company, or you can part ways when the job is done without complaint from either party. Crucially, it is also a two-way solution. The yearly salary of a fractional CMO at full capacity exceeds that of an internal CMO, with everyone involved receiving a better deal.
How to decide: the decision matrix
| What position are you in | The solution | The why |
|---|---|---|
| I have a flawless strategy and know what to do, I just need hands on deck | Agency | Good for pure execution. High risk of junior staff management if unclear on KPIs and specific goals |
| 15% gross annual growth equates to a £100,000+ net profit boost | Full-Time CMO | You have the scale, complexity, and margin to justify the fixed C-suite cost, along with an adequate workload for them to take off your plate |
| I need time back and require senior leadership to reach the next stage | Fractional CMO | You need board-level direction and accountability without high overheads |
Take a hard look at your P&L and your current go-to-market execution. If the math points to a full-time hire, start headhunting.