Today in Digital Marketing - How to Become a Fractional CMO

Episode Date: November 13, 2021

What is a Fractional CMO?In this special weekend edition, Tod speaks with Casey Stanton of CMOx on the topic of how you can transition or bolster your career to becoming a fractional CMO.Casey spent almost a decade agency-side, then had stint as a professor of marketing at Tulane University. Today, he runs the premiere fractional CMO education and support company, CMOx. You can learn more at BecomeCMO.com This episode is a paid partnership with CMOx.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello and welcome to a special weekend edition. I'm Todd Maffin. Marketing is one of those careers that takes a lifetime to get really good at. You've got to go through years of shifting consumer behavior and oversee many campaigns before you really feel like you've got a handle on it all. For some people, going agency side is their path in later years. Others get lucky and end up as chief marketing officers. But some people do both, serving as CMO and working on many different brands at the same time. They do this by becoming fractional CMOs. What is a fractional CMO? Today, in this special paid partnership with CMOX, I'm joined by Casey Stanton. Casey spent almost a decade agency side

and had a stint as a professor of marketing at Tulane University. Today, he runs the premier fractional CMO education and support company, CMOX, which you can learn more about at becomecmo.com. Hello, Casey. Hey, Todd. Excited to be here. So I want to pick your brains about sort of the base work of a CMO, things like winning new business as we get closer to Q1 in a moment. But first, what is a fractional CMO in the first place? Yeah, great question. So for all intents and purposes, a fractional CMO is seen on the client side as the CMO.

That's it. You're the CMO. You're just the CMO for a couple companies. And that's important because the CMO is the shortest-lived C-suite role. The COO, the CEO, the CFO, those roles tend to have much more longevity than the CMO. So by elevating yourself to the CMO role, you're going to find yourself in a position of authority, but in leverage and ability to create some really great outcomes. And then to kind of bolster your potential downsides of that short-term role, you have multiple clients that you serve as the CMO for. You know, back in the day, they used to call these parachute executives, where they would

kind of parachute into a company, and they weren't always seen positively. Is there something about the role that's changed in the last few years that has made it stronger or more beneficial for brands? Yeah, great question. I mean, no one wants a consultant, right? Any company, when you see the staff and they hear from their CEO or an executive that they have a consultant coming in, everyone collectively rolls their eyes and sighs. They know there's going to be some long meetings. They know it's going to waste a lot of time. So a consultant is an outsider. And the difference between an outsider and a CMO is the CMO really is positioned to be the insider.

They're the person who's inside the organization, who's championing for the growth of the organization. They take on a leadership position, but they don't do it necessarily to fill their own pockets, right? A consultant's job is to stay relevant. This is a problem with consulting is it's like this revolving door where you're always prospecting, you're always selling, you're always servicing, and then you're always spinning down these 30 or 90 day client engagements. So the fractional CMO, when they come in, they come in with this ethos of

supporting the organization. One thing that I have all of our fractional CMO say when they step into an organization is, hey, listen, I'm here not to make your life harder. I'm not here to waste your time. I'm not here to take your job. I'm here to make you better. I'm here to remove roadblocks. I'm here to satisfy the CEO's desires for certain outcomes in the business, and I need your help and buy-in for it. And being able to get that significant buy-in is really wonderful because you can transform these organizations in a way that no one else really can. You can go into a marketing department and someone who's been roadblocked because the CEO changes their mind every six weeks, and then this marketing director has to shift focus all

the time and add new campaigns and can never complete something. You can come in and simplify their life. They really see that as a welcome guest. Yeah, it would strike me that someone in this role would have to be particularly good at reading the nuance of culture. Right. I think for the larger organization with a lot of direct reports. Absolutely. That's important. There are also some other organizations that have grown through direct sales. And they need marketing strategy. And they don't have anyone in the marketing role. So my recommendation is always, if you're the fractional CMO, you have to have some direct report.

And that needs to be a marketing technician. And a marketing technician is, you know, it's the role where someone just kind of like does the work. They're the person who's setting up the emails. They're reporting on the stats. They're communicating with the sales team. They're joining certain meetings. They're the person who's like really boots on the ground doing the labor. But that person needs to be guided.

And if you have an organization that can support a marketing technician and yourself as the fractional CMO, you can be very successful. And then you're right. As you move into larger organizations with a bigger marketing department, it does require a certain amount of emotional intelligence. Yeah, I would think so. And that's not always easy to come by in a lot of people. The CMOs, fractional CMOs in your program, how many clients do they take on? Are they like doing this for one or two brands or are they doing it like they get half a morning every client and so they're doing 10 different client brands?

The mix that I found kind of through the labor of working and building a business out as a fractional CMO is that you want a couple clients where you really dig in deep. Maybe one, maybe two, maybe three. So you're working about 10 hours a week in those companies that could look like daily standups, that's leading a weekly marketing all hands meeting, and you're really acting as the CMO. Everyone kind of sees you as the CMO. You know, a lot of times, if they had to guess kind of the team members, if they had to guess, they might think that you're doing about 30 hours a week of work or something, right? Like you look like you're making a lot of times if they had to guess, the team members, if they had to guess, they might think that you're doing about 30 hours a week of work or something. You look like you're making a lot of impact because you're just focusing on the most important stuff, but you've got a lot of coverage.

A daily stand-up can be really effective at covering a lot inside the organization for growth. That's great, but you obviously can't have six, seven, eight of those clients if you're doing about 10 hours a week and if you want to have a lifestyle. You also need to have, I think on top of that, a mix of other clients that you're advising at a more high level. These might be clients that you had a deeper commitment with for a while and then that eased off because you got them to a place of self-sustainability and now they just need you to advise and guide them. Or they're just organizations that have a strong team that just need a leader to step in a couple times a month just to point them in the right direction, just to support them, answer questions, ensure that they're not building unnecessary roadblocks in the organization. So all in that mix, that mix is somewhere between, I'd say, three, five, six clients.

That's kind of a good range. Going too much beyond that, and I think that your effective hourly rate gets decreased because you're just adding in too many clients. You're not having the leverage. And then if you have too few, that puts you into that dangerous position of being on a bar stool with one leg. You don't want to lose your big client that's paying you 80% of your income because that's devastating. What's your story on becoming a fractional CMO? So I was a marketing consultant and I was working inside of a, I was just like a lowly marketer trying to figure out what to do with myself and met a guy at a bar

and I started working with him in a marketing agency. And I was just like a lowly marketer trying to figure out what to do with myself and met a guy at a bar and I started working with him in a marketing agency, product launches, launched Jordan Belfort's Wolf of Wall Street website. But the issue was, is that that was just for one month. Or I'd have two clients like that. And that would just be for one month at a time. And while the revenue was good, it was

short lived. And it felt like I was feeling really stretched to come up with new stuff to do. Because as a consultant, like I had a small toolbox, and I didn't know what to do ongoing. But I knew I was onto something. So I left that organization, I actually took up a role at Tulane University as a professor. So I was an adjunct professor for a couple years there really loved it, but knew that I wanted more, I wanted to get deeper with a couple clients. So I started just doing marketing consulting, but I wanted to stick around longer. Come to find out, you know, the lawyers and the CFOs of the world have kind of had already started building this fractional service offering. And I fell into that as kind of satisfying some specific outcomes I wanted. So let me tell you what I meant by what I mean by

the lawyers and the CFOs. 20 years ago, it wouldn't be uncommon to have an in-house counsel. I mean, larger organizations have that. But now, you've got like outside general counsel. That means there's like a law firm down the street, and you've got 20 hours a month with them. You have a fractional lawyer that protects you. You can also have a full-time CFO, or you can have a fractional CFO. And for most organizations, they need a 10-hour-a-month CFO and then a bookkeeper. So I saw that happening, and I was like, I want to do that for marketing. And I put myself in a position where I could start serving clients as the fractional CMO. And honestly, everything changed the moment that I declared that. My contracts de facto got longer. The leverage that I had, how welcomed I was in an

organization, it was just a radical change over being a four-letter word, which is a consultant. No one wanted me. It was just the rebranding of the role. It's the rebranding, but also the authority that it provides, and then the responsibility that you're forced to take on. If I'm the CMO, that's very different than being an outside guy that I'm going to say to do something, and then I can get roadblocked by a gal who's been with the organization for longer than me. She can say, no, I don't like Casey's ideas.

That's tough. But when I'm the CMO, I get that authority to actually make change. And as long as I'm aligned with the CEO, that change is welcomed in the business. What kind of brands use fractional CMOs? I know you're going to say everyone can use fractional CMOs, but I mean, what are the brands that I guess benefit the best? Are we talking agencies, e-commerce, DTC, B2B?

Is there like a group where you have found fractional CMOs to be particularly helpful versus other industries? Sure. Yeah. So I think that there's a price point, right? There's like a revenue level that makes sense for an organization to bring on a fractional CMO. If they're doing north of a million and under 20 million, typically they could do well to have a CMO. Now, do they need a full time CMO or do they need a fractional CMO? You know, that's kind of unique to the organization. There are a lot of companies that are doing north of a million a year, south of 20 million a year, where the CEO is also the CMO.

And they know in order to actually grow beyond where they are, they need someone else in the role of marketing leader. They don't need direct reports as much as they need someone else in the role of marketing leader. They don't need direct reports as much as they need someone to be the strategist, someone to come up with the right strategy and see that it gets executed. So it's unique to the organization. And I've met, and I've helped CMOs or marketers become fractional CMOs in this, like, I want to be in the startup space. The startup space can be a great place to be, but it can also be kind of hairy. You know, do you really want to work for a couple points in the business? If you look at the FICO FAST agreement, anyone here can go to fi.co slash FAST

and read the agreement for the percentage of equity that you give to an organization when you're like a seed stage startup. And you're going to max out at like two points in the business. So if you're going to not take cash, but instead take points in the business, is two points interesting? Do you really bet on the company that it's going to be successful? You know, as you talk, it strikes me that what we're talking here are about sort of having a role in helping solve sort of the larger issues at play.

And then I was on your website and I see the slogan that says, solve bigger problems, which kind of seems in line with what I was seeing there. What does that mean? What does solve bigger problems mean to you? Yeah, so the premise here is that we all have the same amount of time in the workday, same amount of days in a week. And you can focus on small problems or you can focus on big problems. If you focus on small problems, it makes sense that you deserve a small reward and you'll make a small amount of impact. But if instead you focus

on big problems and you're actually able to solve them, you put yourself in a position where you're more valuable to the organization, where you could create more impact in the organization, more impact in their customers. And as a result, you can get a lot of things. You can get paid more for that same amount of time, which is really helpful if you've been stuck in a time for money role and you want to, you know, I'm not going to say escape it because ultimately, as a fractional CMO, you are working for a monthly fee, right? So it is a little time for money, but it's the highest ascension you can be in that time for money. It's the most valuable role in the organization as a marketer to be the strategist, to lead the strategy. So solving bigger problems is about taking this conscious effort to ascend yourself in your thinking to the biggest problems, not the finite like, oh, it looks like our SSL is

going to expire. Let's make sure that we have like a system for that. But instead, think through the bigger problem. What is all the tech that can expire? Who's going to be the person that owns that? How do you make sure that they're on track for that every single month or quarter? And when you solve those bigger problems, you make that bigger impact, you have more freedom, and you also build notoriety for who you are. People want someone who's a big problem solver. They don't just need a technician. Because technicians, I can go find a technician all across the world on Upwork. And I can run a post right now, and I can pull in all sorts.

I can find WordPress technicians. I can find designers. I can find developers. I can find anything I want on Upwork, and I can pay a range between what $5 an hour and 50 bucks an hour. And there I have like all the talent in the world. What I can't find is a is a is a marketing strategist that will build and lead the team and make my company better than they found it. I want something that wakes up every day that says how do I help the company grow? Not how do I fill my pockets? How do I get more hours?

How do I make sure that my agency gets enough billables this month? The fractional CMO is just focused on something much bigger. I'm speaking with Casey Stanton. He runs the premier fractional CMO education and support company, CMOX. This episode is a paid partnership with this company. You can learn more at becomecmo.com. So what about marketing directors and sort of in between those, like a VP of marketing role? I assume there are a lot of folks in that space who are itching to break off on their own.

What are the risks and upsides for them? Yeah, so I would almost guarantee anyone that's listening right now that's in that more senior marketing role, they find themselves, if they look through their text messages, they see friends saying, hey, I'm thinking of starting a business. Can I take you to coffee to ask you some questions? Like you, you are the right, you're the marketing person already in the lives of a lot of people that you know. I don't think you need to give up your current job. I think you can moonlight and add in a fractional CMO role. If you live on the East Coast, can you find a company on the West Coast that you can pick up as a fractional CMO and charge $3,000, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month? If you bring in one

of those clients and you really get to exercise and be this authoritative person, you're limiting the hours you can work because you're already full up on your traditional nine to five, let's say. So you want to bring an additional client and you're not going to do it for free. You're limiting the hours you can work because you're already full up on your traditional nine to five, let's say. So you want to bring an additional client and you're not going to do it for free. You're going to get paid what you're worth. So you're going to work and charge between, let's say, three and $15,000 a month, kind of depending on how deep you get with them. How many of those clients do you need to have in order to have your attention in order for that to feel like the next move for you? Can you then start squeezing down the work that you're doing with your current client? Let's say you're a full-time employer.

Can you squeeze that down and act more as the fractional CMO? Can you find a way to do that ethically? Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Maybe at some point you need to find yourself an exit out of that organization. Let me pick your brain a bit. Where do you see marketing jobs or digital marketing jobs in like five or 10 years? I think it's a great question and I think it's really important. I think everyone here should be considering where they're going to be in the next five or 10 years. And without getting all sci-fi here, we're moving towards a time when computers are smarter than they've ever been before. By the way, Casey, I swear to God, if you say the word metaverse, I'm dropping this.

I will not. All right, continue. Continue. Maybe for an equal buzzword is the singularity event, right? We're just chasing towards this thing that's inevitable, where computers are just going to be so powerful. And we're also seeing the democratization of talent. Talent that only used to be available for people that went to Harvard is now available for people who just go online and watch a YouTube video. And so, we're seeing the democratization of content. We're seeing more people than ever before be able to put themselves into the workforce. We're seeing countries that the United States, let's say, has a lot of buying power in. We can go buy really great talent there.

So I think we're going to see a lot of talent move offshore, even more than it already is. I think that is just inevitable. I think that's inevitable across the board. And we saw with manufacturing to China and India and everywhere. So what is going to be the future that you want to kind of like find yourself in? And I'll say, Todd, the future that I see for myself that I want for myself is every year, I want bigger and better opportunities presented to me, where I have the opportunity to say yes or no. I mean, that's a beautiful and bright future. I really respect a guy in business named Dan Sullivan, and he always says,

always make your future bigger than your past. So how do you do that? You have to put yourself in a position where you become authoritative and known for a thing so well that people come to you with opportunities. And then you can either say, no, thank you. Or you can say, yeah, absolutely. I'd love this one. Or what's really fun is I'd love this one, but I'd like to structure it this way. So I get a symmetric upside so I can get a piece of the pie so I can, you know, get my cut on it if we're really successful. And also, you know, in my business experience, I find the more sort of, uh of or the less availability you have and that you communicate to clients and other people, the more kind of the forbidden fruit you are perceived to be and the more people want you. And I learned that when I had a career keynote speaking. I did probably 40 or 50 speeches a year all over the world. And as my calendar got booked up more and more,

my agent would just raise the fee higher and higher, and that created more demand, oddly enough. It was peculiar, but it's interesting to see it work that way. Yeah, absolutely. And there really is nothing like having potential clients fight to pay you really great wages. Yes, exactly. So we're in the middle of Q4. January 1st

typically signals a fresh budget for companies to hire. What is the best way that a marketer who might be listening to this can position themselves to win new business? Yeah, such an important question. I think, I mean, more than that, I think we're in the greatest hiring boom for fractional CMOs. Why? I think that COVID has created an environment where organizations that never had remote workers have experienced a remote workforce for 12 or 18 months. Organizations that never traditionally sold online realized that their face-to-face sales declined rapidly and that they had to get online and they had a little bit of success. And now their nephew can't run their marketing anymore and they need to take it really seriously as they move into the next year. I think there's the confluence of that plus Q1 budgets or fiscal year budgets make this

such an important time for marketers to position themselves and then get in front of as many prospects as possible. And the first thing is, is that the marketer has a lot of opportunities to potentially win businesses of fractional CMO. They can do it with connections that they already have. They can take relationships that they already have, maybe that they're already working in, and they can pivot those relationships to be a fractional CMO relationship, where they're only in the CMO position and they're not the doer. They're not the marketing team of one, but instead they're the head. And then there's a bunch of muscle that's under them that they can delegate to. And then that muscle can output all those marketing campaigns. So I think the most important thing for a marketer to do right now, who's

considering getting in front of organizations is just to clarify who you want to work with. Niche is super important. And at the end of the day who you want to work with. Niche is super important. And at the end of the day, organizations want to work with a company that understands the niche. Like they want to work with, if you have CPG experience, you want to work with, if you have CPG experience, you should go target CPG companies. If you have Shopify experience, target cpg companies um if you have shopify experience maybe it's d2c brands that are on shopify how do you take what you know and position in such a way that you become not like an interesting person to consider but a hell

yes we need not like an interesting person to consider but but a hell yes, we need person. Like how do you become the woman that is, is such a person? Like how do you become the woman that is, is such a fit organizations for you? Not a million, not 50 million, right? Not all fit organizations for you. Not a million, not 50 million, right? Not all fit organizations for you. Not a million, not 50 million, right? Not all SMBs, but a certain subset.

And then just how do you get in front of them? Maybe say, I'd be thrilled if I brought an extra three grand a month on top of my current business. Cool. Go get that one client. Maybe you say, I want to be a one percenter and you want to go hit that half million dollar a year income. I mean, you certainly can do it as a fractional CMO, but you have to set your sights to it first before you attempt to do the work. Otherwise you're just going to take on any work that shows up and that work might pull you down. I think everyone here listening should think of this as you want to be ascended and you're going to get, someone's going to grab like your shoes and like pull you back down to earth and say, no, I want you to be the implementer too. You have to be able to have enough confidence in

yourself and your ability to create strategy that you can stay ascended. How often does it happen when people who are fractional CMOs, people in your program, for instance, are doing that role for a company and then are hired as the main CMO? It certainly happens. Some organizations need a CMO ultimately. And the fractional CMO is more of a interim CMO. That could be a great opportunity too if you've never been CMO before and you want to become CMO. You can become CMO by getting into an organization, being there 10 hours a week. They love you. You love them.

You've built the team up, and then you want to hop in full time. That's great. I mean, that's a great exit out of the fractional CMO role. But also, there's many organizations that will never need a full-time CMO. For example, franchises. A franchise may not need a full-time CMO. They might be satisfied with a fractional CMO because they have kind of a business-in-a-box strategy, and they need someone to be kind of looking out to ensure that they're staying on the cutting edge. But it's not like rapid A-B testing, testing new traffic sources all the time.

It's not the same as like a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business. And sometimes a CMO needs to be the person who shakes hands. They need to go and glad hand a little bit for the business. That can happen. You don't have to work with those clients though. You can work with clients that want you as a fractional CMO for just a couple hours a week or just a couple hours a month. that can happen. You don't have to work with those clients, though. You can work with clients that want you as a fractional CMO for just a couple hours a week or just a couple hours a month and be satisfied working with you for a long time because you're offering them asymmetric value to what they're paying. Well, super interesting. And it certainly, I think a role in the career line or the career ladder that people just don't even think of that

kind of a, and in fact, you know, as you say, it could be part of the way toward that. It certainly would look good on a resume if you're trying to transition from a sort of junior VP of marketing into the CMO role. It's probably a really good stopping point on your LinkedIn sheet. Thank you, Casey, so much for this. This is super helpful. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a couple things to really consider about your future as you think about where you want to be. And as marketers, agency owners specifically, they've kind of had to reinvent themselves so many times. As a fractional CMO, I think we can all sit here and say, the role of the CMO will exist in 10 years. It'll exist in 20 years. It'll exist in 50 years. It's one of those few roles. I mean, you could say traffic strategist is a role. That's a great role. That's a fast

moving role. That's a role of someone that has to be on the cutting edge of what's happening right now on all the different traffic platforms, et cetera. What I like about the fractional CMO role is it's slow to change. It's like a first principle it's um it's foundational if you become great at being cmo you can be relevant for a very long time i can't think in my life that i will not be relevant as a cmo i might have to choose different um uh you know laborers different people to come in different tacticians to do the work maybe different platforms to be on that kind of stuff but the general notion of being ascended to the highest role in the company as the top marketer, I think will persist.

So for anyone who's kind of sick and tired of reinventing themselves or saying, oh, maybe I'm going to go for a PPC CPL model, selling leads out to folks. If you're sick of doing that kind of stuff or saying, I'm an SEO company. No, I'm a PPC company. No, I'm a PPC company. No, I'm a web building company. If you're sick of reinventing yourself, just pick a great niche and just dig deep. It's a blue ocean right now like it's never been before. There's no one saying I'm the fractional CMO for women-led Shopify businesses. No one's saying that. Can you say that? You can declare that right now. If you say, I'm the number one SEO agency for HVAC and plumbing, it's like, actually, you have a lot of competition. It's going to be really hard to beat the incumbents in the space. But as a fractional CMO, you have this really great opportunity. Moreover, you have the

opportunity to bring in an assistant to support yourself. So you're only working in your area of genius, where you're doing just the fun stuff, which is for a lot of us marketing strategy. You're not doing the follow up. You're not doing the proposals. You're not doing the note taking. You can hire someone else to do that. You can put yourself in a position where you're loving the work that you're doing and you're creating a bigger and bigger impact. And you can leave the role of doer and step into this kind of perennial role of leader. And I just think it's just an incredible time to be a fractional CMO. And anyone who's curious, I really encourage you to kind of spend the time to consider what it would look like for you,

what the money math would be, knowing that you can charge between $3,000 and $15,000 a month cash, you know, without upside for the different engagements. Casey Stanton, he runs the premier fractional CMO education and support company, CMOX. And you can learn more by going to becomecmo.com. Casey, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Todd. This has been a paid partnership with CMOX. I'm back Monday with a regular episode.

Talk to you then.