Are You Ready to Be a Fractional CMO?

John Jantsch (00:00): Brand has always been important. I believe it’s going to become more important the next decade or so. Companies that develop a strong brand, a brand that helps connect with their buyer, helps build trust with their prospect, those are going to be the brands that I think Excel.

(00:15): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show today. Here’s the topic. So are you ready to be a fractional CMO? Are you ready to put that title on your LinkedIn profile? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. There’s a lot of noise around this idea, maybe some misconceptions. I want to talk about how I view this idea and whether or not the positioning makes sense for you. And I want to key in on that word positioning because to a large degree, that is one of the benefits of positioning yourself as a fractional.

(00:55): CMO should help you attract a client who is looking for strategy that wants something more than just. It also is a way for you to develop relationships with clients as a trusted advisor. So there’s a lot of benefits for it. I think that there certainly are some misconceptions. The traditional role that’s, frankly, it’s been around 10 years, it’s certainly gotten very hot and trendy right now, but the traditional role was somebody would have the experience and hang out a shingle, call themselves a fractional CMO, and they would work with maybe four clients, a fourth of their time to four different clients. Now, they might be paid really well for their time, but a pretty tough model to scale. So what we’ve been working on is helping agency owners, consultants, strategists, figure out a way to actually use the benefits of this model, but also to do it in a way that is scalable.

(01:50): But first, I want to talk a little bit about the skills and what I think the role is supposed to look like because what we are trying to do is I think every business, every size of business today, fractional, everything means something to them. They have hired people fractionally for a number of roles now, and so the concept of getting marketing leadership in a fractional way I think is very compelling. But I think now maybe it was companies that were over $30 million, they were maybe on the verge of hiring a CMO period and saw fractional as a way to save money. But I think the real market today is in that maybe, I don’t know, three to $30 million business that was probably not going to hire a CMO at all, but realizes they have a real gap in marketing leadership. So that’s really the model that we are addressing, or at least the democratization of the term, if you will, for how I view it.

(02:50): So let’s talk a little bit about what I think this role involves. So in terms of skills, certainly strategic thinking. I mean, it has to be strategy first. You have to lead with that as any way somebody is going to engage you. You’re not going to go in and just start diagnosing and saying, oh, you need this and this. There is going to be a period of developing strategy. I’ve said this word a couple of times and I think it’s really key leadership. Most of the folks that I’ve talked about in that range of three to $30 million do not have any strategic marketing or marketing leadership period. Typically, they’re very founder-driven organizations still, maybe they have a sales head of sales, but they really don’t have anybody that is advocating for marketing or frankly advocating for the customer. And that’s a big part of the leadership role.

(03:38): Technical skills are going to be important. Obviously, you’re going to encounter firms that need a lot of things fixed that need to start adding MarTech to the current stack of technology. So somebody who can actually come in and advise on what that should look like, how to automate things, how to stop doing things manually. That to me is going to be a big part of this role. Now, there’s also going to be a need for industry knowledge. Now, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to niche to be the fractional CMO for a certain industry, but I think that a broad range of industry knowledge, and maybe another way to say that also is marketing experience. You’ve just seen a lot of things. I think that’s probably key as well. I did a survey with databox and the fractional CMOs that we surveyed had, I think the greatest number was over 10 years of marketing experience.

(04:32): Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean CMO roles, but marketing experience. And I think that while I don’t think that’s necessary, that level is necessary for every client that you might serve, there’s certainly a need for some level of breadth of experience I think. So according to LinkedIn, 2022, emerging jobs report, demand and skills in data analysis, AI and strategy development are the three growing roles. So I think there are three growing needs in emerging jobs. So I think that’s going to run true of this role as well. So the role itself, strategy development, creating long-term marketing plans that aligned with business goals. That’s a key point here because I think there are a lot of marketers that can develop a brilliant strategy and a list of tactics and channels and campaigns that go along with it, but then somebody turns around and says, well, how does this help the business go where it wants to go?

(05:29): And so I think that’s certainly an element that a fractional CMO is going to bring is let me first understand your business goals and objectives, and then I can actually develop a marketing strategy to support those and not the other way around. I believe that brand, well, brand has always been important. I believe it’s going to become more important the next decade or so. The last decade, marketers got a bit lazy, frankly, because SEO, once you figured out how to make that work, it was a pretty easy way to generate leads. The social platforms were willing to sell you all the data on their users, and so consequently, you could really target with effective advertising. Both of those things are going to gradually go away or get much harder. And I think this idea of the companies that develop a strong brand, a brand that helps connect with their buyer, helps build trust with their prospect, those are going to be the brands that I think Excel.

(06:23): And that’s really how we’re going to have to stand out today. Most of the firms that hire you are going to want market expansion. They’re going to want to grow. So having a very strong background in how to actually, and I don’t know if it’s so much create demand. I know a lot of people will call it create demand, but I think organized behavior, organized customer journeys that people want to go down, that to me is how we’re going to expand market and then just optimizing performance. Certainly if you’re going to have a seat at the C-suite table, you are going to be talking about metrics. You’re going to be talking about the things that you can impact, the things that you can measure, and I think that’s really going to be a key role. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast.

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(09:12): But if we’re going to add this level of marketing leadership now, I think we’re talking about vision and direction setting, long-term marketing goals aligned with the business objectives, certainly focusing on competitive positioning, differentiating the brand, and what’s probably going to be crowded marketplace because every marketplace is crowded According to Deloitte, only 19% of companies align their operating model with their strategy. That’s going to be a big part of your job. Brand strategy is going to go beyond brand identity. It’s sad, but most marketers know this, but we still talk to a lot of folks that brand is logo. It’s your personality, it’s your message strategy that is really going to allow you to not only differentiate, but have a prospective client say, wait a minute, you’re talking about me. Why isn’t anybody else addressing the problem that you’re promising to solve? That goes a long way towards brand strategy and then obviously how you carry that out, how you act, how the company or how the prospect or client experiences you is all part of brand strategy.

(10:18): Harvard’s business review study found that consistent brand messaging can increase revenue by up to 23%. No shocker there. Alright, optimizing growth. I mean a lot of that’s going to be around channel selection, integrating campaigns, performance tracking, but let’s not forget good old customer journey. I think that is a great element of this idea of optimizing growth. And it goes hand in hand I think with a brand strategy. Another stat for you pulled a whole bunch of stats together to drive home these points. Forrester reports that companies using advanced analytics to optimize marketing channels see a 15 to 20% increase in marketing. ROI. No surprise there at all. It’s the hardest thing to do. It’s the hardest thing to get a business excited about doing, but it might just be the difference. Data-driven, you are going to be data-driven, KPI setting teaching actually, I mean a lot of the folks that you end up working with in this role are going to be looking for somebody to come in and say, you know what?

(11:22): We need to be, we need to be tracking these things. Here are the analytics tools that we need to put in place. Here is how I can teach everyone about the marketing p and l. And that’s really the way for continuous improvement. And that’s a big part I think of this role or at least. And now people may not actually be out there asking for that role, but it is the role that they need. And I think somebody who can position themselves as very data-driven along with very strategic and along with bringing leadership is going to have the package. Gardner found 74% of high performing marketing teams used data analytics to make informed decisions. Alright, acquisition and retention. I think that one way that somebody is a fractional CMO is really going to set themselves apart is to not just think about lead generation. So many marketers are hyper-focused on lead generation.

(12:17): Frankly, so many business owners, I just need more leads. Well, somebody who can actually help them get more business out of their existing clientele, how to retain and get repeat business and understand how to create a better customer experience that turns into referrals. That is going to be definitely an element of how to differentiate yourself as a fractional CMO. Alright, your road to success if you will. It’s going to take a very holistic view, and by that I mean we have to go beyond maybe what we think of as traditional marketing tactics and elements. We have to get into sales, we have to get into customer service. Again, if you would think about what a traditional CMO would do, they would sit in the csuite and they a meeting about what needs to happen to make marketing grow and they would be talking about all the elements across many aspects of the business, how the phone is answered.

(13:18): If we want to get completely granular. Those are things that somebody who is taking a holistic view is going to be very focused on because it all adds up to marketing. You are going to have to be able to prove your impact. My hope is that you are going to be charging much more maybe than you are today, but certainly more than somebody who’s just selling packages of tactics. However, that’s going to come with the price tag of being able to show measurable impact. So make sure that you are going in from the get-go saying, how do we map this to a business objectives? How do we set up the KPIs? How do I get access to the p and l so that I can understand what our cost to acquire a customer actually is? Those are things that if you’re going to take this role, you have to boldly demand that you gain access to those things because it’s going to be the only way for you to show measurable results and impact.

(14:19): And then lastly, you have to commit to continuous learning. One of the things that you will definitely do if you want to add value is that you will become the r and d department. Every new thing that comes along that maybe they’re reading about or maybe they’re hearing about in their industry meetings and things, that you’re the one that is going to be the voice of reason for it. No, we don’t need to follow that. Here’s how we can use that. This isn’t ready, this is ready. We need to go all in on this. You need to be the R department as well. And that’s just going to involve a commitment to continuous learning. I’ll leave you with one last statistic. Fractional CMO report in 2024 indicates that businesses with fractional CMOs are 36% more likely to achieve their long-term strategic goals that might be reason enough to pursue this avenue.

(15:16): Alright, hopefully that’s given you some food for thought, would love to visit with you. We actually have a program where we teach folks who maybe are not yet calling themselves fractional CMOs, or maybe they are calling themselves factual CMOs, but they’ve decided they want to find a way to scale this business. We actually give them a tool called Strategy first, which is a very scripted way to create a marketing strategy that has scope. I think one of the challenges a lot of folks have is they walk into a business. The business says, I need you to be my fractional cmo. Nobody defines what that role actually involves. We are trying to define it to package it, to make it something that somebody can scale. So just go to DTM world slash growth. We’ve got an ebook there on what we believe is the model of the future for being a fractional CMO. Lots of other resources. You can also find out about our certification program. All right, that’s it for now. Take care.

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John Jantsch (16:41): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.