If you've ever watched a prospect's eyes glaze over halfway through your pitch, this one's for you.
Every guide on this topic says the same thing. The fractional CMO owns strategy, the agency executes, and lots of companies need both. This sometimes is true, but it skips the question that matters when what you offer is not so straightforward. Who can explain what you sell well enough to market it? An agency does the work you can describe, and a fractional CMO works out what to describe. If your offer takes a sales call to explain, fix your messaging first, and make sure whoever you hire can also get it out the door.
The call and the website
Imagine you're a 25-person business and you're the founder who still closes most of the deals. Revenue is good, but maybe growth is flat.
You get on a 45-minute call with a prospect. The finance director asks how you'll keep the project on budget. The IT lead asks, "Have you done this type of work before? What's your IT services plan like?" The CEO wants to know what happens if it goes wrong. You answer every question brilliantly.
Then they go and look at your website, and it tells a completely different story. It says something like "Your digital transformation partner." 🙃
That gap between the call and the website is what this whole decision is about.
Where both models fall short
When buyers need a few answers before they trust you, your marketing has to do some of the explaining you do so well on the call.
Buyers do most of their research alone
Gartner found that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their buying time meeting potential suppliers (Gartner, September 2020). The rest goes on researching independently online (27%) and offline (18%), meeting with their own buying group (22%) and other activities (16%) (Gartner, Win More B2B Sales Deals).
And they're not one person. Gartner's B2B Buying Report puts a typical buying group at five to 11 people. On your call that was the finance director, the IT lead and the CEO, and each of them reads your website later with a different worry.
The same report says buyers are 2.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when the supplier's website and its salespeople tell a consistent story. So if you give sharp, specific answers on the call and your website says "transformation partner," you're telling two stories.
Agencies lose clients they don't understand
Setup, which matches companies with agencies, has asked clients why they end agency relationships for eight years. In its look back at those surveys, 2022 stands out. Dissatisfaction with the agency's approach to strategy was the top reason clients gave, at 43%. Agencies still thought budget cuts were the main cause, while clients ranked budget cuts eighth. Clients that year also complained about agency staff turnover, which meant constantly re-educating new people about their business.
Picture that with your agency. Every new account manager needs the answers you give so well on calls explained from scratch. By the time they get it, they've moved on.
Plans stall without anyone to execute
Now flip it. You hire a fractional CMO who writes a sharp positioning document, a 90-day plan and a lovely slide on buyer personas. Then the CMO's hours run out, and the plan sits in a shared drive because nobody has time to write the case studies.
A strategy that nobody executes is just a very well-formatted wish.
What a fractional CMO owns
A fractional CMO is a senior marketer who works with you part time. They own the marketing plan and answer for whether it works.
The plan and the message
For you, the first job is the message. A good fractional CMO would sit in on your sales calls, note the questions every buyer asks, and rebuild the website and sales deck around your answers. They'd also pick which customers to go after first, set the budget and decide which numbers to watch.
The people doing the work
Most fractional CMOs then direct whoever does the execution. That might be an agency, freelancers or one in-house marketer. They write the briefs, review the work and decide when something isn't pulling its weight.
Sometimes the work itself
Most comparison articles say a fractional CMO doesn't execute. Plenty of them don't. But some lead a small team that writes the case studies, builds the emails and runs the ads too. If you can only afford one hire, that difference matters a lot.
What a good agency does
An agency gives you specialists and production capacity. Depending on the agency, that means ads, SEO, content, design, video, email or a new website.
Channels at volume
Good agencies are excellent at this. You could hire one tomorrow to run LinkedIn ads, and the campaigns would be set up properly, tested and reported on every month.
Work to the brief it's given
Here's the catch. An agency optimizes the brief it's handed. If your brief says "digital transformation partner," the agency will run beautifully targeted ads that say "digital transformation partner." The finance director who wanted to know about budgets scrolls straight past them.
That's not the agency's fault. Working out what to say about what you sell usually sits outside the scope they were hired for.
Fractional CMO vs marketing consultant
A marketing consultant usually diagnoses and recommends, then leaves. A fractional CMO stays, owns the plan and answers for the results quarter after quarter. Hire a consultant and you'd get a good report about your messaging. A fractional CMO would get the website rewritten and check whether proposals got signed.
Four tests to find your gap
Work through these in order. The first one you fail usually points at your gap.
The homepage stranger test
Ask someone outside your industry to read your homepage for 60 seconds and explain it back. If they can't, you have a message problem, and that's fractional CMO territory. Plenty of founders fail this one. Our CBKD framework is a good place to start rewriting it.
One owner for the number
If marketing performance is shared between you, a coordinator and two vendors, nobody owns it. That's a leadership gap. You probably own it by default, between sales calls, which means nobody does.
A clear priority channel
If you already know that, say, LinkedIn and referral partners bring your best deals, and you just need more output there, an agency can do that well. If you're guessing, sort the direction out first. It helps to start collecting sales and marketing data before anyone spends more.
Direction or hands
If you have a clear plan and a backlog of work nobody has time for, hire hands. If people are busy but nothing adds up, hire direction.
When one budget covers both
Most comparison articles end with "hire a fractional CMO and an agency together." Lovely advice if you have budget for both. At 25 people, you may not stretch to both. Plenty of companies your size can't.
Hire for the gap you can't fill
If you or an in-house marketer can already explain the offer in plain language, the missing piece is probably execution, so an agency or freelancers make sense. If nobody can explain it simply (not even you, without a whiteboard), hire for the message first. Execution without a message is just expensive noise.
One team for strategy and execution
Some firms put strategy and delivery under one lead, so the person who rewrites your message also oversees the case studies, emails and ads that carry it. You get one point of accountability instead of a CMO and an agency pointing at each other. It's how we work at Growth Experts. You can see the setup in growth strategy, and we wrote about why one reliable marketing partner beats a pile of vendors.
The trade-off is depth in any single channel. A team that does everything won't run paid search like a specialist paid search agency. For most B2B companies with one budget, that's a trade worth making, because the message is doing more work than the ads.
Questions to ask before signing
Whoever you're talking to, ask these on the first call.
- Ask them to explain your offer back to you after 20 minutes. Can they?
- Ask who writes the first case study.
- Ask what they'd stop doing in your current marketing.
- Ask how they'd report to you, in pipeline terms rather than clicks.
If you asked an agency the first question and got "transformation partner" back, that's the answer.
A fractional CMO can manage your agency
If you already have an agency and like it, keep it. This is one of the most common reasons to bring in a fractional CMO. They review what the agency is measured on, rewrite the brief around the real message and judge the work against pipeline, not impressions. Often the agency improves a lot once it's handed a clear brief. Agencies love a clear brief.
Side by side comparison
| What you need | Fractional CMO | Marketing agency |
|---|---|---|
| A clear message for what you sell | Owns it | Works from what you give them |
| A marketing plan and budget | Owns it | Plans within their channel |
| Someone who answers for pipeline | Yes | Usually reports channel results |
| Ads, SEO, content and design | Directs it, and some also deliver it | Delivers it |
| Managing vendors | Yes | No |
| Sales and marketing working together | Usually | Rarely in scope |
| Depth in one channel | Limited | Strong |
Common questions
Can a fractional CMO manage my agency?
Yes, and it's one of the most common reasons to hire one. They set the brief, decide what the agency is measured on and review the work against pipeline. If you win deals on calls, the brief is where most of the value is.
Do fractional CMOs do hands-on work?
Some of them do. Many stay at the level of strategy and management, while others write, build and run campaigns or lead a small team that does. Ask exactly who does the work before you sign.
Why do agencies struggle to market what we sell?
Because they work from your brief, and when deals are won on calls, someone has to turn your answers into that brief first. Add staff turnover, and the explaining starts again with every new account manager.
Can I use a fractional CMO and an agency together?
Yes, and it works well when you can afford both. The fractional CMO sets the message and plan, and the agency executes against it.
The bottom line
If your offer is simple and your plan is clear, an agency is a great way to get more done. If it takes a whiteboard to explain what you sell, start with someone who can make your website sound the way you do on a call, and make sure they can ship it too.
Get that right and your sales calls get shorter, your proposals get signed, and your mom finally stops telling her friends you "do something with computers." 🙂
Jason Bagley
Founder, Growth Experts
I'm a business builder, the founder of Growth Experts, sometimes public speaker, and a member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. Mostly though, I'm just a dad to Eva & Cruz and a husband to Karina.
