Signs You Might Need An Outsourced, Part-Time, or Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

Signs You Might Need An Outsourced, Part-Time, or Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

Are you trying to oversee your company's marketing efforts along with all your other priorities and responsibilities? If marketing is starting to feel a lot more like a chore, it might be time to hire a marketing leader. But that doesn't mean you need to hire someone full-time. In this episode, I'm going to break down some of the signs indicating it's time to hire a marketing leader for your business. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today. Super excited to dig into this.

I know how difficult it is when you need someone to lead or guide your marketing efforts to drive results. You're trying to do it yourself. It can be really frustrating. And the last thing that you want to do is hire a full-time, expensive marketing executive before you need to. The last time I looked, the average salary of a CMO was well over $200,000 a year, $250,000 to $300,000 a year. If you're spending less than 200 on a CMO, you are probably not getting a very seasoned, experienced CMO. That's why hiring an outsourced, part time or fractional chief marketing officer makes a lot of sense for many businesses. It helps bridge that gap so you have the marketing leadership and guidance that you need until you reach that point where it makes sense to hire someone full-time. So if you're leading your marketing efforts, I'm going to share some signs with you today that it might be time to look at hiring a fractional CMO. I talked to a lot of business owners that are trying to lead their marketing efforts, but it's not their full-time thing. They're spending five plates and it is really, really difficult to gain traction and give marketing the attention it deserves when you're in that situation. So I'm going to share, I think I have eight different signs that I want to share with you today. So hopefully you find this helpful.

8 Signs You Might Need A Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

First sign, you are having difficulty troubleshooting why your marketing isn't working. You're investing in marketing, but dang, things aren't working. It's you're not generating the leads that you need. You're not converting. You're investing, but you're not getting that return and you're not sure why. A chief marketing officer can help troubleshoot this and put a plan together so that you can get out of the situation and start seeing more consistent, repeatable results with your marketing.

Second sign, you do not have a well defined marketing plan. In one of my favorite quotes, I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, if you fail the plan, you are planning to fail. We've got to have a marketing plan. It's not going to be perfect, but we have to have a plan that outlines what our priorities are and what we're going to focus on. And as we implement, we measure, we learn, and then we make adjustments and course corrections. And that's what needs to happen. If you do not have a marketing plan, you're just throwing spaghetti up against the wall, hoping something is going to stick.

Number three, you don't have the time, desire, or expertise to manage your marketing effectively. Look, as business owners, we cannot be great at everything that is required to run a successful business. If marketing is just not your thing and you don't have the time, the desire, or the expertise, it's totally okay. You are not alone and you shouldn't feel like you have to do it because there are plenty of people out there like me that can take the reins and drive your marketing efforts. One of my mentors talked about when you need a skill within your business, you don't have to be the one to acquire the skill. You can. And if you have the desire to do it, you can acquire the skill. But the other thing you can do is you can hire for it. So you don't have to have the skill. You can hire for it. And that's why fractional or part time marketing leaders, and frankly, there are fractional chief financial officers, chief operations officers, sales directors. You can hire part time for these executive people when you just need somebody part time and it doesn't make sense to hire full-time. So it's totally okay if you're in this boat.

Sign number 4, knowing that your marketing could be doing more for your business but not knowing what you need to fix. You're investing but you know you could be getting better results but you're not sure where you need to invest to get the results that are going to help you reach your goals. A chief marketing officer can help diagnose that, figure out where things are at, what's working, what's not, and create a plan of what needs to be done to move forward and reach your goals.

Number five, your revenue has plateaued or it's declined. You've hit a ceiling and you're not sure how to reverse that trend. You're not sure how to push through that roadblock and get where you want to go. A strategic marketing leader will be able to help you push through this.

Number six, you lack the executive level marketing insights you need to drive results. In order to drive results, we've got to track the right metrics that are going to help inform and empower the marketing decisions we make so that when we get out there and we test, we measure by tracking the right metrics. And then based on what we measure, we get data back that's going to help determine what's working, what's not, and where we need to make those course corrections. But if you don't have that executive level experience with marketing, it's going to be really hard to gain those insights so that you can make those incremental improvements that over time make all the difference in the world in your long term results.

Number seven, you're having difficulty leading, guiding, and managing your inhouse or outsourced marketing team. If it is really difficult to manage marketing people when you don't at least have a high level understanding of what they're doing. You're never going to know. You can't be great at everything in marketing. I am good at strategy planning and leadership and making sure that the strategy is in place, the plan is there, and then making sure that plan gets implemented, executed, and optimized. I don't know everything. It's impossible. So we've got to hire people that are great at the specific marketing vehicles that you're going to use. But I don't know exactly what they're doing each and every day, but I know enough to ask the right questions, give them the fuel that's going to help make those marketing vehicles they're implementing for you work. But you have to have a general idea of what those people should be doing so that you can ask the right questions, so that you can guide them effectively, so that they can do the best job possible. And if you don't understand marketing at a higher level, it's really difficult to do that. Really difficult. And it's not your fault. Again, if marketing is not your thing, it's pretty unrealistic to think that you're going to be able to manage people effectively long term if you don't have that skill set.

Sign number eight, your marketing efforts and initiatives are scattered and inconsistent. You're doing some things pretty well, but other areas just... You've got ideas, but things just aren't getting implemented, or you start to do it and then you stop, an executive level marketing leader can eliminate those problems for you.

Those are the eight signs. There are certainly others, but these are the most common signs that I see that may signify that it's time to hire a marketing leader. And in general, this is a moving target, but typically, those businesses that are in that 2 to 10 million dollars a year range that are in growth mode, you want to grow. If you do not have a marketing leader on staff and you are investing in marketing, or you're thinking about starting to invest in marketing, you're really at a place where it may make some sense to look at hiring an outsourced or fractional chief marketing officer who can put that strategy in place, create your plan, and then oversee the implementation and execution of it.

Conclusion

So I hope you found this helpful. The fractional executive leaders are becoming more and more prevalent. I think it makes a ton of sense because I see all kinds of businesses hiring full-time executives when they really don't have the demand for it to make sense for somebody to have that job part time. What ends up happening a lot of times is they hire this executive level person and they end up paying that person to do lower level stuff. They hire somebody for well over $100 an hour and they're paying that person half the time to do things that are $25, $40, $50 an hour work. And that just doesn't make sense. It's not an efficient use of their time. It's not an efficient use of your resources. Oftentimes, when you hire a fractional executive leader, they can help you get up to speed much faster, put the systems, the processes in place that are going to help you be successful. And then as your business grows and as it evolves, they'll know enough to be able to guide you to say, You know what? It's time for you to hire somebody full-time. Or you're not there yet, and it doesn't make sense. So I think hiring fractional people helps you bridge that gap. And I think it makes a lot more sense. It's that next baby step rather than just trying to leap over the entire river at the same time, it makes a ton of sense. I, of course, for this episode focused on fractional chief marketing officers, but this can go for all kinds of other areas of your business. Fractional people are out there. I hope you found this helpful.

One of the things we do when we work with clients is help them remove their revenue roadblocks. We focus on nine critical areas of marketing. Remove those roadblocks so you can accelerate growth. If you want to find out which of the nine roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can also always connect with us over at rialtomarketing.com. That's RIALTOmarketing.com. Feel free to book a discovery call. I'd be happy to chat with you. Hope to give you some outside eyes on your marketing roadblocks and where you should be focusing right now based on where you're at and where you want to get to. So thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I appreciate you. Until next time, take care.