Fractional CMO

A fractional CMO is a senior marketing person who works for your firm part time, on an ongoing basis, answering to the managing partner or to the partner who holds the marketing brief.

I do this for accountancy and law firms across Ireland, the UK and the US. Usually a half day or a day a week.

I was Head of Marketing inside two top twenty Irish firms before setting up Marketing Clever, and became that firm’s external adviser the month I went out on my own for one of them. I have seen the job from both sides of the table.

What does a fractional CMO actually do?

The job is holding the direction while everyone else is billing.

Deciding what the firm wants to be known for and in which market. Agreeing what each partner who wants to grow is actually going to do. Making sure the content, the events, the award entries and the conversations all point at the same place. Then chairing the meeting every month that checks whether any of it happened.

It is not running campaigns. A firm can buy campaign delivery from plenty of places. What is harder to buy is somebody senior who understands a partnership and is in the building often enough to keep things moving.

When does a firm suit this model?

Marketing people who understand professional services are scarce, and they are in demand. A firm that wants one has to compete for them.

A mid-sized firm also tends to look at the salary and decide there is not a full year’s work in it. That is often a fair reading. What usually happens next is nothing, because the choice on the table was all or nothing.

Fractional sits between the two. You get somebody who already knows how a partnership works, for the amount of time the work actually takes.

It also suits a firm that already has a marketing manager or executive doing good work with nobody senior above them. In that case I work alongside them and the role stays theirs.

What about hiring somebody instead?

Hire, if you can find the right person and afford them. A good in-house marketing director is worth more to a firm than I am.

Plenty of firms bring me in to hold things together while they look. That is a perfectly good reason to start. One firm brought me in on that basis and I was still there over ten years later.

If you are deciding what to hire for, that conversation is worth having before the advertisement goes out rather than after.

How does it work in practice?

I come and talk to the firm first, and what the work looks like depends on what the firm is trying to do. There is no standard package.

I start with whoever holds the brief. That is often the managing partner and sometimes the partner who looks after marketing. The first conversation is about the firm rather than about marketing. Where is it going over the next few years. Whether there is a hope of being bought. What growth actually means here.

Then I meet the partners who want to grow. Not every partner does, and that is worth knowing early.

What the work becomes follows from those conversations. A half day or a day a week is the usual shape.

What happens in the first month?

Things get finished.

Content moving, LinkedIn posts going out, an award entry submitted. Partners believe this is real when they watch it happen, and the first month is where that belief is either earned or lost.

What commitment does it involve?

Nothing long. Work is agreed in half days and days, and either of us can stop.

Firms tend to stay. My longest client relationship ran for over ten years. Others have run seven, five and four. Several are still going today. Marketing Clever is in its twelfth year and I have worked with nine of Ireland’s top twenty accountancy firms.

The value builds as it goes. A partner’s profile, a position in a sector and a set of referral relationships are all slow to establish and hard to undo once they are there.

How is it priced?

In half days and days, quoted before anything starts. No retainer you cannot see the bottom of.

Talking it through

Half an hour, no deck. If you are weighing up what senior marketing would look like in your firm, send me a note.

The full picture of the retained work is on the Marketing Leadership page.