You have a product market fit. You’re now ready to scale your marketing but don’t have time to look into the strategy or operations full-time. So you do the next best thing everyone has been talking about – hire the best fractional CMO for your startup. 

But this is where most founders go wrong. 

Instead of choosing the best fractional CMO for their company, they actually end up hiring marketers with different skills to manage social media, growth, performance marketing, SEO, etc either on a contractual basis or freelance. But those are tactics; what about the overarching strategy that guides each of them in the right direction? 

No, hiring the best of folks across tactics does not takeaway the need for a marketing leader. 

That’s why leading (and fast-moving) companies are now seen hiring the best fractional CMO to guide their growth. 

After a decade plus in this ecosystem and having worked with some of these fractional CMOs, here’s how to pick the right person for your startup. 

How to pick the best fractional CMO for your startup 

This list is purely based on my experience of working as a fractional CMO and having worked with a few on the client side. You do what’s best suited for your startup, but don’t skip on these: 

1. Look for stage relevance, not just pedigree 

There, I said it. 

Most founders are seen obsessing over hiring from the best management schools or from big names in the corporate/ startup world. No shade to the folks with experience here, but it’s not necessary that they are best suited for your startup. 

You need to work with someone who has operated at your current growth stage. Do they have experience working with 0 → 1, 1→ 10, etc? Do they have theoretical knowledge more than on-ground experience? Have they just scaled mature companies? 

These are important questions you need to ask. It doesn’t just impact your strategy but the mindset with which they bring in. 

2. Prioritize operator experience over advisory fluff 

If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I have spoken extensively about ‘more talk, less work’ becoming a trend today. There are several people out there that post content which feels ‘intelligent’; I’ve had my fair share of having to hire and fire or collaborate with them, only to be disappointed in just a few months. 

That’s why I recommend that you don’t look for someone who just talks to talk. They should have sometime in life rolled up their sleeves and actually done the work. The best fractional CMO isn’t the one who is an expert at reviewing dashboards or slave drivery. 

3. Check if they can diagnose before prescribing 

I know you’re looking for someone who can just ‘jump in’ and get things going. But that’s not how things work anymore – have you seen the number of core updates Google has been making lately or the marketing/ advertising policy changes from Meta? 

If you’re hiring a fractional CMO, you’re either getting started or you have been doing a bit of marketing and getting no results so far. You don’t need another person who comes in and encourages everyone to ‘do more’. 

The best fractional CMO will ask better questions, audit current strategies and how they tie to business objectives before suggestions channels or tactics. Yes, it takes a week or two but it’s a step that helps build a strong foundation. 

4. Evaluate their ability to connect marketing to revenue 

Yes, tying marketing to revenue directly is tricky. The journeys across channels – unless paid campaigns, are very rarely linear. And that’s exactly why most marketing leaders would shy away from tying strategies to revenue. 

I’m going to go deep into the topic of attributing revenue to marketing vs sales in a separate post (going to be long). But what I want to say here is that a strong fractional CMO will help you see the bigger picture of how building the brand, ties to traffic, then leads and then your revenue. 

They’re not looking for ‘growth hacks’ that will bring you quick wins. They’re looking for sustainable marketing growth. 

5. Look for someone who understands your business model 

You can cancel me for this one, but what the hell? 

Imagine someone who has been working with D2C brands for years and has scaled businesses to millions of dollars. Now impressed by their growth at the company, you hire them as a fractional CMO to scale your AI-powered HRTech solution. 

First, you’re talking about two different business models. Second, you’re looking at entirely different ecosystems – one is eCommerce and the other is HR/ B2B. Third, you’re expecting D2C-like results in SaaS. I don’t know what more could go wrong. 

You should not be looking for ‘marketing in general’. They’re good, yes. But are they good in your ecosystem? That’s an important question to answer. 

For example, if someone has worked with Shopify or Shopify app partners, hiring them as a fractional CMO for your eCommerce SaaS solution makes logical sense. As compared to hiring someone who has worked in HRTech to suddenly step into an entirely different ecosystem to build marketing – not the right step to enter for them, and you. 

6. Assess whether they can build systems 

Most fractional CMOs want to step in and give a quick win to the company to secure their position. Nothing wrong with that; everyone’s winning. 

But the question is, winning for how long exactly? 

As a startup, you should be looking for someone who can come and build systems, not just campaigns. You want compounding growth, not one-off wins that end with you having to look for another fractional CMO just 60 days down the line. 

7. See if they bring a clear POV on modern growth 

With years of experience, you become partial towards a few strategies and or ways of working. I have my own vices too – like font sizes, formatting, an obsession with the pillar-cluster model and how I can adapt it to new requirements. 

But being so rigid and bringing outdated playbooks to your startup can do you more harm than good. Yes, you hired them to come and implement the same ‘growth strategy’ as they did for the previous company they were aligned with. But no, growth does not work that way. 

If the same playbook worked for everyone, we’d all be unicorns. 

8. Ask how they approach resource constraints 

I have seen fractional CMOs (or even full-time ones) come in and change the entire tech stack a company is making use of, causing thousands of dollars in just system upgrades before even a strategy is rolled out. 

As a startup, you need to find someone who knows how to prioritize when time, budget and team are limited. You don’t want someone who knows how to ‘get the most done out of whatever you have’, because that will lead to scattered efforts, working with low-quality output, lots of anxiety in the team and mass resignations you don’t want to deal with. 

9. Ensure they can work with your team 

Every CMO – fractional or not, will have a bunch of favorites they would like to work with repeatedly. These favorites could be based on their prior experience, the collaboration-sync between them or sometimes, just bias. 

You can spot these CMOs or marketing leaders pretty easily. They step in and somehow everyone in your existing team – in-house or outsourced, starts to get replaced. 

Please don’t do that to yourself. I don’t encourage retaining resources that are no good of course, but I do recommend having a team that has grown with you, on your side. Look for someone who can collaborate with your existing team, not look for ways to replace or override them from the day they step in. 

10. Look for evidence of decision-making 

Startups don’t operate with perfect data, market size or even resource availability. And that’s exactly why the best fractional CMO are those that come with a strong background in decision-making under uncertainty. 

No, I don’t mean the ones who will tell you to cut budgets immediately or fire the entire team to ‘recover’ some resources for the downtime. Look for what they did to keep both their team and your business going, whether they nodded their way through decisions thrown at them or took a call of their own. 

11. Evaluate how they measure success 

Most CMOs would boast about the number of campaigns or marketing experiments they ran during their stint as a head of growth/ marketing or a similar role. Don’t just look for vanity metrics because there was a whole team executing this with them. 

Ask them about the business outcomes those experiments resulted in, what the investment and ROI was, and what they feel could have been better. 

12. Check how they communicate with the team 

Whether it is translating a strategy into execution clarity for the team or prioritizing what matters the most for business growth, communication lies at the core of everything. A good fractional CMO is not just good at ‘delegation’; they’re good at how they communicate what really needs to be done. 

This is also important for when there is a downturn in the business. It is important for marketing leaders – fractional or not, to be able to handle how the news is communicated to the team that reports to them. 

13. Ask for examples of what didn’t work 

Everyone talks about what they did right. While sharing successes is obvious and you do want to take a look at those cases, I do recommend also asking about failures and learnings along the way. 

This helps you evaluate the depth of the successes they achieved, what it took to get there and whether it was a one-off win or something they can pull off again. 

Conclusion 

What am I trying to say? 

Please don’t seek fractional CMOs purely based on which company they worked with last. That decision should come from a lot of research (and referrals if you may) because the impact of it lasts for a much longer time than you think. 

Looking for a fractional CMO who fits the bill? Let’s connect!