When marketing isn't working, most B2B founders end up choosing between three options. They can hire a full-time CMO, hire an agency, or hire a fractional CMO for a few days a month.
All three can work, but they solve different problems, and picking the wrong one is expensive. I've seen companies hire an agency when they needed a strategy, and I've seen companies hire a senior executive when they needed someone to write the website. Here's how I explain the difference to founders.
The short answer
Hire a full-time CMO when you have the revenue, a marketing team to manage and a plan that needs a leader. Hire an agency when you already know what to do and need hands to do it. Hire a fractional CMO when you know marketing isn't working and need someone senior to figure out why, fix the plan and then run it or hand it over.
How they compare
| Full-time CMO | Agency | Fractional CMO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay | A senior salary, bonus and often equity, plus months of recruiting | A monthly retainer, usually tied to the channels they run | A project fee or a monthly retainer for a set number of days |
| Who decides the strategy | They do, once they learn the business | Usually you. They carry out what you ask for | They do, with you, based on research |
| What they work on | Everything, full time | The channels they sell, like ads, SEO or social | The plan, the budget, the vendors and the reporting |
| How fast they start | Three to six months to hire, then time to ramp up | A few weeks | Usually within a couple of weeks |
| Best when | You have the revenue and a team to manage | You know what to do and need execution | You need senior judgment before you commit to a hire or a big budget |
When a full-time CMO makes sense
A full-time CMO is the right call when marketing is a real department, with people to lead, a budget worth managing and a pipeline target the board cares about. At that point you want someone in the building every day who owns the number.
The catch is timing, since recruiting a senior marketing leader takes months, and it can take months more before you know whether you hired the right person. If your positioning is still fuzzy, a new CMO spends their first year working that out on a full-time salary, and that's a slow and costly way to answer a question a fractional CMO can answer in a quarter.
When an agency makes sense
Agencies are good at execution. If you know who you sell to, what you want to say and which channels work, an agency can build the campaigns faster and cheaper than an in-house team.
The problem is that most agencies sell a channel. An SEO agency will recommend SEO. A paid media agency will recommend ads. That's just what they do. But if the real issue is that buyers don't understand why they should pick you, more traffic sends more people to a page that doesn't convince them.
So before you hire an agency, ask yourself whether you could brief them clearly in one page. If you can't, you're not ready for an agency yet. My guide to hiring an agency or consultant covers how to pick one when you are.
When a fractional CMO makes sense
A fractional CMO is a senior marketer who works with you part time. You get the judgment of someone who has done this at many companies, without the cost and commitment of a full-time executive.
It tends to fit founder-led B2B companies that are growing but stuck. Sales come mostly from the founder's network, the website looks fine but doesn't bring in leads, and money is going into marketing but nobody can say what's working. There may be a junior marketer or a couple of freelancers, but no one senior to set direction.
In that situation, the first job is to find out what's going on and decide what to say and to whom. Then the fractional CMO builds a plan and a budget, and either runs it with specialists or hands it to your team. The difference between a fractional CMO and a strategic advisor is worth reading if you aren't sure how hands-on you need someone to be.
It also gives you flexibility, since you aren't locked into a six-figure hire. You can engage someone for three months, six months or a year, depending on what needs to get done.
What each option really costs
The fee is the easy part to compare, and the harder part is everything around it.
A full-time CMO costs a senior salary, a bonus and often equity. On top of that there's the recruiter's fee, the months the role sits empty while you search, and the months after they start while they learn your market. If the hire doesn't work out, you pay most of that again.
An agency costs a monthly retainer, and the retainer is usually built around the channels they run. Ad spend is extra. So is anything outside their specialty, which means a founder who hires an SEO agency, a paid media agency and a web shop ends up managing three vendors with no one senior tying the work together.
A fractional CMO usually costs a project fee to build the plan, then a monthly retainer for a set number of days if they stay on to run it. Ad spend, website builds and specialists are paid separately, the same as with a full-time hire. With my clients, the roadmap is a fixed fee we agree on before we start, and the plan says up front what the rest will cost.
Whichever you pick, budget for the work as well as the person. A great strategy with no money behind it just sits in a folder.
What a fractional CMO does in the first three months
If you've never worked with one, it helps to know what you should have at the end of the first quarter. When I start with a client, the first three months produce a written roadmap with five parts:
- Target buyers and story. Who the ideal customer is, the positioning, the value proposition and the messages that go with it.
- Channel priorities. The channels ranked, the reasons for each, and the tests worth running first.
- Marketing materials. What to fix on the website, in content and in the sales materials, in order.
- An action plan. The work in sequence, with owners, dependencies and the budget it needs.
- Measurement. The lead and sales numbers to track and how often to review them.
Getting there means talking to the founder, the sales team and a handful of customers, and going through the website, sales deck, competitors and every channel you're paying for. If a fractional CMO skips the customer conversations and goes straight to tactics, that's a warning sign.
Fractional, part-time or interim?
The titles get used loosely, so here's how I'd separate them. Fractional and part-time CMO mean the same thing: a senior marketer who works with you some days of the month, often for a year or more. An interim CMO is usually full time for a few months, filling a gap while you hire a permanent leader. A strategic advisor gives you senior judgment but doesn't run the work.
If you aren't sure how long a fractional engagement should last, I talked it through with David Poulos on the podcast in why, how and when to hire a fractional CMO, and with Malcolm Lewis in what a fractional CMO does and how they deliver.
How to tell if it's working
Whoever you hire, you should be able to answer a few questions after one quarter. Do you know where your leads come from and what each one costs? Can your sales team explain who you're for and why buyers pick you, in the same words? Is there a written plan someone else could pick up and run?
After six months, the questions get harder. Are there more qualified conversations? Are fewer good-fit deals going quiet? Is the founder pulled into fewer sales calls just to explain what the company does? If the answer to all of those is still no, the hire isn't working, whatever the activity reports say.
What I've seen from the inside
I've been on both sides of this. Before running Marketing Spark, I led marketing at four venture-backed companies, including b5media and, more recently, Nue. From the inside, you see how fragile growth can be. Marketing produces activity, sales pushes deals forward and leadership wants answers, while buyers make decisions the team can't always see.
That's why I push founders to define the problem before choosing the hire. A full-time CMO, an agency and a fractional CMO can all produce activity. Only one of them is set up to answer the question that matters at your stage.
The mistake I see most
Founders often hire for the title before they've defined the problem, so they hire a CMO because it feels like the grown-up move, or an agency because a competitor did. Six months later there's a lot of activity and not much change in the pipeline.
The fix is to start with the problem. Are buyers confused about what you do? Are you reaching the wrong people? Is the right message there, but nobody is seeing it? Each of those points to a different hire.
Questions to ask before you decide
- Can we explain who we sell to and why they pick us in two sentences?
- Do we have a marketing team someone needs to manage?
- Do we know which channels bring in our best customers?
- Do we have a budget to act on a plan once we have one?
- Do we need someone on site every day, or someone senior a few days a month?
If the first answer is no, start with positioning, whoever you hire. A free marketing audit of your homepage is a quick way to see how clear your story is today. If you want to talk it through, see how my fractional CMO services work or get in touch.