Fractional CMO services, bought on evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to scope and hire a fractional CMO

1. Decide whether you need a leader or a doer. A fractional CMO sets strategy, owns the budget, picks the channels and manages the people doing the work. If what you actually need is someone to run campaigns, you need a specialist or an agency, and hiring a leader for execution wastes the most expensive hours in the room.
2. Define the mandate in writing before the first day. Name what the person owns: budget authority, hiring authority, which teams and agencies report in, and which decisions still need you. Fractional leadership fails on ambiguity far more often than on capability, and ambiguity is cheapest to fix before day one.
3. Buy days, and know what the days contain. Most engagements are priced as a number of days per month. Ask what proportion goes to meetings, to management, to analysis and to actually building the plan, and ask who covers the role when the person is on holiday or between clients.
4. Check the operating experience matches your stage. Scaling a company from two million to ten is a different job from repositioning a mature brand or building a first marketing function. Ask which of those a candidate has done, at what companies, and speak to a founder or chief executive they worked with.
5. Agree the exit and the handover at the start. A fractional CMO engagement should have an intended end: a full time hire, an internal promotion, or a stable team running an agreed plan. Write down what has to be true for the engagement to conclude successfully and what documentation transfers.

What the role actually owns

The core deliverables are a positioning and messaging position the business can stand behind, a channel plan with a budget attached, a measurement framework that connects marketing activity to revenue, and the team or supplier set that can execute it. In most engagements the second half of that list is where the value is: choosing, managing and, when necessary, replacing the agencies and specialists doing the work.

The role is also a translation layer. A good fractional CMO makes marketing legible to a board and makes commercial priorities legible to the marketing team, and businesses that have run without a senior marketer often underestimate how much value sits in that alone.

How the engagements are priced

Pricing is normally a monthly retainer tied to a number of days, occasionally a day rate with a minimum commitment, and sometimes a fixed fee for a defined ninety day mandate such as building a plan and hiring a team. Equity components appear in early stage engagements and complicate the incentive picture, so treat them as a separate negotiation from the cash fee.

The comparison that matters is against a full time senior hire, all in, including recruitment cost and the ramp period, versus the reduced days you are buying. Ask candidates to be explicit about days, availability windows and response expectations, because a two day per month engagement and a two day per week engagement are different products at overlapping prices.

Proof to demand before signing

Ask for two references who are chief executives or founders, not marketing managers, and ask each what the business could do at the end of the engagement that it could not at the start. Ask for a redacted example of a plan the candidate produced and, more usefully, for evidence of what happened after it was delivered.

Be sceptical of any promise about revenue outcomes. A fractional CMO influences results through people, budget and choices, all of which run through your operational reality. What a credible candidate commits to is a mandate, a cadence, a plan on an agreed date and honest reporting against it, including when the plan is not working.

Questions people actually ask

What does a fractional CMO do that an agency does not?

A fractional CMO sits on your side of the table: owns the strategy and budget, selects and manages agencies, and is accountable to your leadership. An agency executes a scope. Hiring one to do the other's job is the most common and most expensive mistake here.

How many days a month should we buy?

Enough for the mandate. Building a marketing function and hiring a team needs materially more time than steering an established one. Ask candidates to map the mandate to days rather than picking a number first and asking what fits inside it.

How much do fractional CMO services cost?

Usually a monthly retainer tied to days, sometimes a day rate with a minimum, occasionally a fixed fee for a defined mandate. Compare against a full time senior hire including recruitment and ramp, and ask what availability the fee actually buys.

How long should the engagement last?

Long enough to build something that outlasts it, and with an intended end written down at the start: a full time hire, an internal promotion, or a stable team running an agreed plan. Open ended fractional leadership tends to drift into expensive advice.

Browse agencies by specialty

• SEO agencies with verified facts
• PPC agencies with verified facts
• Social media agencies with verified facts
• Content marketing agencies with verified facts
• Email marketing agencies with verified facts
• Performance marketing agencies with verified facts