Home · Fractional CMO

Fractional CMO, or outsourced marketing director

The marketing director seat, held from the outside, without a full-time salary and without six months of hiring.

The problem it solves

Most companies selling online end up in the same spot. They have a media buyer, an editor, a copywriter, sometimes an agency. Everyone is competent at their own job. And revenue still flatlines.

The reason is almost always the same: nobody's job is to make the call. Nobody to decide that this month you stop producing creative and go fix the promise instead, or that you cut a channel costing more than it returns. Every vendor optimises their own box, and the whole thing stalls.

That gap is what a marketing director fills. Hiring one in-house is expensive, takes months, and assumes you already know what you are looking for. Bringing one in fractionally puts someone in the seat now.

What I take on

• The strategy call. Where this month's bottleneck sits, and the single decision that clears it. One, not ten.
• Channel selection and pacing. What we open, what we close, what we idle, and at what budget.
• Leading the doers. Media buyers, creative, copy, developers, agencies. Give them a readable direction and judge the work on the right criteria.
• The numbers. Build the dashboard that tells the truth rather than the one that reassures. Then read it weekly with the team.
• Sales funnels. Opt-in page, VSL, sales page, email sequence, booking, and the seam between marketing and sales.
• Building and managing the marketing team. Define the roles in the right order, write the briefs, hire, sit in on interviews, then hold the line day to day. A badly sequenced team costs more than an incomplete one.
• Opening new markets. Analyse what a segment actually needs before building the offer, so you enter with the right promise instead of the product you happened to have.

When it makes sense

• You already sell, but growth has plateaued and you cannot name the reason.
• You have competent vendors and nobody to arbitrate between them.
• You are preparing a launch or a step change in volume and nobody on the team has done it before.
• You want to hire a CMO in-house and need someone in the seat meanwhile, including to define the role.

When it does not

Worth saying plainly, because this is where both sides lose the most money.

• You do not have a product that sells yet. A marketing director amplifies what works, they do not manufacture demand that does not exist. Before the first signal of traction you need a founder selling in person, not a CMO.
• You are looking for execution. If the need is to ship campaigns and edit videos, hire a media buyer and an editor. Cheaper and more effective.
• You do not want to delegate decisions. A CMO who does not arbitrate is a consultant in disguise. Hire a consultant instead, it is more honest and it costs less.

How we start

Always with a 45-minute working session. It establishes three things: where the bottleneck actually sits, whether there is a case for ongoing work, and whether we get along.

Plenty of people leave that session with what they came for and need nothing else. That is a good outcome. Ongoing work only makes sense if there is genuinely a seat to fill.

What I bring to it

I was CMO on the Yomi Denzel launches, where I ran the generation of 240,000 leads. I host the Marketing & Chill podcast, where I sit down with people who actually post the numbers they claim, including media buyers with 20 M$ of cumulative ad spend and the copywriters behind the biggest French-language launches. All 18 episodes are fully transcribed on this site, in French, so you can judge how I think before you talk to me.

Frequently asked questions