Ep #141: The 5-Part Marketing Team All Fractional CMOs Must Build

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m gonna walk you through the five resource allocation framework, so you know what talent to bring in to support your clients to help them scale so you don’t have to work more hours and more gets done. Let’s get into it.

00:00:16 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up. And companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact.

00:00:48 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show, and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:12 Casey: Hey, it’s Casey. Welcome back. I’m excited to share this big idea with you to help kind of arm you with the tools that you need to know—how to look at talent when you bring it into an organization to get work done. And… ultimately, you’re the fractional CMO, and therefore you shouldn’t be the person doing everything. So you wanna have a team that surrounds you. Let’s talk about how you source that team, the different types of engagements you would have with folks, and then ultimately, what’s best for your client.

00:01:43 Casey: Alright, so the first one is easy—it’s just full-time folks. So you might need to bring in full-time people. When does it make sense to bring in someone full-time? I love the idea of a marketing technician, which is someone that’s gonna work 40 hours in the business. If I start working with a client and I’m limited in my engagement to 10 hours a week, I can get a lot done in 10 hours a week if I’m leveraging my time to get other work done. So for every one hour of my time, can I get 4, 8, 10, 15, 20, 30 hours of work done? If I can, then I’m a really great lever for the business.

00:02:19 Casey: So a full-time person first comes with a bunch of extra time, right? Like if you get a full-time person, you get them… presumably for 40 hours a week. So if you’re working 10 hours a week, and they’re working 40, your 10 hours kind of focuses their 40 hours. That’s not bad. Every one hour you work, you get four hours of someone else’s output. It’s okay. I want to see that number get bigger and bigger. So you wanna come in as the fractional CMO. And a full time person is really a lovely thing to have.

00:02:46 Casey: If you’re talking to a company that’s a startup that doesn’t have a team and you’re building the team, consider getting your quarter back. You kind of want someone in the company that you’re building up. If it is the first hire, you really have two choices: do you want to get someone who’s really experienced? Or do you want to get someone who’s really coachable? One or the other. Sometimes you want to move quickly and you need the experienced person. Other times you don’t really want the experienced person ‘cause they’re expensive, and instead you want someone a little bit more junior. And it really is a case-by-case basis.

00:03:20 Casey: So for some companies, they’re gonna want the cheaper version just because that’s what the budget will allow. So they might need someone that’s a little more entry-level. On the other side, though, they might say, “No, we’re like, well-funded, we’re ready to go. We’re finally taking this seriously. Let’s go hard. I wanna get someone who’s a real player who’s been there, done that.” Right, so you’re gonna look for those people as full-time employees. These full-time employees, you never hire. And also legally, you don’t manage. It’s kind of a weird thing, but it’s something that you should work with your clients, HR about.

00:03:48 Casey: They can be on calls with you every day, and you can talk about the work. But ultimately, there’s a reporting structure, likely through the COO, that has to happen for, like, paid time off and mat and pat leave and sick days and PIPs, all that kind of stuff. You can’t shoulder that responsibility as a contractor. But again, talk to your clients, let them know that, make sure that there’s a support structure so that you’re not the person who’s, like, taking the responsibility of these things.

00:04:14 Casey: You can suggest and say, “Hey, I’ve been working with this person, and they should get a raise, they should be fired, they should be put on a performance improvement plan,” whatever, but you can’t go and fire them or put them on a PIP or give them a raise. Does that make sense? Like, it’s gonna have to get approved by someone who’s an employee of the company. All right, so I like a full-time person, and if I can, my first hire, if I’m starting a team from scratch, is a full-time marketing technician, and this person is willing to do things for me. That’s what I want from them.

00:04:42 Casey: I like them to be a good communicator. I like them to be conscientious. I like them to finish what they start. And I like them to say please and thank you. I like them to smile. These are some of the basic things that I want from the person, but they don’t have to be an expert of, like, the HubSpot or Meta ads or creating ads or AI or whatever. They don’t have to be an expert, but they have to be coachable and eager to learn. In this way, I kind of see us, professional CMOs, as king and queen makers.

00:05:12 Casey: We find these great, smart people that aren’t very experienced, and we focus them and tell them exactly what to do and what success looks like and give them all the tools and let them go, and then they learn and they grow, and their career grows so quickly because of you. So, the full-time folks are awesome. I love having at least one full-time person on the team. This person is also going to do the meetings that need to happen with marketing that you don’t want to be in.

00:05:37 Casey: So sometimes marketing has to be on a sales meeting to make sure that the salespeople are, like, doing the stuff, like calling the leads. Well, you could be there as a CMO, but then you’re not really CMOing. You’re kind of, like, babysitting the salespeople. Your full-time marketing person could peel off an hour or two a week to be on those meetings instead and report what happened in them and anything that you should know in a two-minute conversation. So, a full-time person has that ability to get in the organization and kind of create change in a way that you don’t really want to take the time to do.

00:06:07 Casey: So, I love a full-time person. Also, I see that person come in as a marketing technician. And over time, they can become the marketing director. Maybe in a couple years, they can become the CMO and push me out. And maybe I’m just advising the company on a high level a couple hours a month. But it’s a company that I can, like, build the marketing department for, right? Do you see how that’s, like, kind of a fundamental shift of how we find these people? Okay, so full-time folks, great. And then you’ve got contractors. Contractors is, like, obviously the easy one.

00:06:37 Casey: What’s a contractor? What I think of a contractor is I work on a project and I need a web guy. We had a website built. So we contracted it out to a single guy. He built up the website. And then the website needs updates. So, we have a contract with him every Monday and Thursday, he checks the document to see if his website edit requests, and then he executes them. He’s a contractor, he builds us hourly. I love contractors. You can find a contractor that you like and continue to use them on different projects.

00:07:04 Casey: Again, as a fractional CMO, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to take a percentage of that pay. Like the client doesn’t pay me and then I pay the contractor. No, the client pays the contractor and I’m there to kind of manage the relationship and make sure that they’re doing the right stuff. But they don’t pay me and I don’t take a percentage.

00:07:19 Casey: Okay. Contractors. Where do you find them? I find them on Upwork. That’s it. Like that’s my whole secret is Upwork. I love Upwork. I find really great talent on Upwork. You can find cheap talent, you can find expensive talent, you can find everything in between. It is nice to be able to see on Upwork how much someone charges, what their ratings are, and what they recently charged someone who gave them a rating. So, someone might pitch you and say, “I’m $20 an hour.” But if you look at their work history, all the jobs they took on before your pitch were at $8 an hour.

00:07:56 Casey: Well, they’re just doubling their price when they’re talking to you. And they might be workable on their price. On the other side, you can see some things that say like this person is not responsive, or they’re really slow or whatever. It’s helpful to see that I like Upwork for those reasons. Contractors come in on a project basis, or a contractor could be there long term.

00:08:15 Casey: You know, I think media buying is becoming less of a complex thing. And more of a just pull a couple levers maybe once a day. And it’s not really that hard to do media buying. I think creative generation. That’s hard. I think messaging. That’s hard. I think media buying isn’t hard. So, they can go to Upwork and find someone to do the media buying. And it doesn’t matter where they are in the world. And again, English as a language doesn’t matter as a primary language, they can have English as a second language. It just doesn’t matter when it comes to media buying.

00:08:46 Casey: Same with graphic design. If I need graphics design, maybe a one shot it through ChatGPT and you get like a Dall-E thing that comes out or maybe you go to Nano Bananas or whatever, and you get an AI graphic, that’s fine. But I find that if I want any fine tuning, I just need to give it to a graphic designer. So, you might as well. Contractors are great for that. I think that it’s totally possible to have a contractor that works for the company for 10 years straight. Now, they’re not going to work full time, but they can be a contractor. So, you’ve got full time folks, we’ve got contractors, what else do you have? Then you got agencies. Agencies are cool. Agencies have good, they have a bad side. Let’s talk about what that is.

00:09:30 Casey: I think if an agency has been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and they’re going to come and do it for you and your client. So, if you’re launching Google ads for the first time for your client, and your client is in the law space, well, why wouldn’t you go to an agency that does this professionally that has 1000 clients and they’re really good at it and they know exactly what to do, pay them a premium, they build it all out, let them run it for two or three months and then you can take it over if you wanted to write if that was like written into the agreement.

00:09:59 Casey: Agencies hate that I get it. But again, we’re looking out for what’s best for our clients. So that’s one route that you can go with agencies. Other times, there’s agencies that are totally worth it. um I contract with an agency at CMOX. And they consistently have new innovative ideas that my team isn’t thinking of, and they’re able to execute it on our behalf. And it just feels like a really good partnership. So I can’t take over the way that they think they’re very innovative and smart. I love the way they think.

00:10:27 Casey: So I like to keep working with that agency. Agencies tend to be expensive. Any decent agency has a 30 or 40 % profit margin. So that’s a lot of money that you’re kind of wasting away on an agency, if they’re only doing the same thing again and again and again. So if the agency just kind of executes the same damn thing every week or every month for you, why not get a contractor, pay the contractor directly, save 30,40 % or more on it and reallocate that budget somewhere else in the business.

00:10:58 Casey: Agencies also tend to take systems that work and sell it to your competitors. That’s a fact of how agencies work. um You know, you either don’t hate the player, hate the game. That’s kind of how I feel about it. I’m not upset with the agency for doing it, but it is a reality. And if I’m building something that’s really intellectual property, I don’t want an agency to take a great idea that I had that they built out and then sell it to my competition rather keep that intellectual property a little tight.

00:11:28 Casey: So those are your agencies, agencies are great. I think of them as mercenaries, come in, do the thing, train the locals and then leave. That’s how I like to use an agency the most generally speaking. Alright, and then we’ve got fractional folks. Fractional folks, could say, yeah, Casey, those are like contractors. They are but there’s a different feeling to it. So who do I like fractionally? I really like fractional CFOs.

00:11:52 Casey: That’s a great one. If there’s no finance person that’s leading like there’s a bookkeeper in the business. That’s like providing strategy and the strategy is like half baked because they’ve never been trained to think strategy level. You don’t really want a bookkeeper giving you CFO level strategy, get a fractional CFO. That would do a lot to help the business. Like that’s your number one fractional CFO. Maybe there’s a fractional COO that could come in though I kind of feel like If you’re gonna run ops, gotta be full in on a business to run ops.

00:12:26 Casey: But you know, there are people that sell fractional COO services. So maybe that’s worthy of consideration. But I really think that the fractional CFO is a strong one. And obviously the fractional CMO is strong. Also, sometimes you can bring in a sales leader that comes in and is like the big closer. So they might work with two or three other companies.

00:12:49 Casey: They only do sales calls, they just do the big closing calls. They’re like really good at it very experienced. um You don’t want them full time, maybe you don’t need them full time. So you can bring in kind of a stud that does that stuff. I like to see that like bringing great talent for the thing that actually generates revenue, um or finance stuff. So I’d like the fractional and then obviously fractional see mo is which is you.

00:13:11 Casey: Another fifth one. What’s the fifth one is Casey actually going to have a whole episode of this podcast without talking about AI? No. The fifth one is agents. The fifth talent for your resource allocation framework is agents. Think about it. You have marketing agents. What does an agent do? An agent reviews posts on LinkedIn and sees if there is, if it evaluates posts on LinkedIn for confidence to say that this is a good fit or not a good fit. It evaluates, it’s a person like thing that evaluates the quality of something. And LLM can evaluate.

00:13:45 Casey: It’s not an automation because that’s like Zapier or n8n or make or whatever. It’s not an automation that just does something. It like does something and then thinks on it and then makes a decision based on that. That’s what we can do with agents. And agents are…agents are where we’re moving that need a technical understanding of technical tools, like how to like kind of work with a server and deploy code and that kind of stuff. You need someone that can do that.

00:14:15 Casey: Maybe you can, but I really think you shouldn’t spend your time on that. And you should spend your time being the CMO. It’s not about being the tech person that can also do CMO stuff. It’s about being the CMO who understands tech that leverages tech appropriately but really brings in the techs. Like brings in the technologists to do the work.

00:14:34 Casey: So, the agents are things that kind of think on your behalf. So, why couldn’t an agent review your client’s ads every day and send you a notice and say, Hey, boss, I reviewed the ads and here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what’s working. Here’s what’s not. Here’s what I think we should do. That’s pretty exciting.

00:14:50 Casey: What else could an agent do for the business? An agent could review competitors and say, oh, this competitor’s updated their website, or they a new service, or they changed the price, or they’re offering a new workshop or class or whatever. That is useful information that you would otherwise have a full-time person just kind of like combing the internet for. Maybe it’s a Google alert, but they still have to read it and see what’s useful and then have a sense of discernment around it.

00:15:17 Casey: You can kind of code in some discernment into an LLM to review stuff and say this is good or this isn’t good. So, when… you know, who do you hire and when do you hire is kind of the ultimate question here. And I think that you need to absolutely not be the CMO that says, look at me, and all the bells and whistles hanging from me that are all built by AI. No, you got to come in and say, we’re going to build a marketing department, that marketing department is going to have a full time hire to get started.

00:15:44 Casey: And then we’re going to add in contractors, agencies, fractional folks, and agents as needed… To build out the whole department. And your job is to choose what’s right for the business. Your full-time people, they’re, they tend to be solid workers. I think there’s a benefit to a full-time person. You know, they’re going to show up maybe a little bit differently than a contractor who’s only there for two hours a week or something, right? I like a full-time person for the steadiness. I really want to build a base of that and then we add the rest on.

00:16:15 Casey: I also think that you shouldn’t just come in willy nilly and say, let’s build agents. I think you should say, let’s put people in place. Let’s have those people work for like a week or a month or six months. And let’s replace that work with agents. So, my people can move on to the next thing and move on to the next thing and move on to the next thing. So, it’s not an anti-people approach with AI. It’s a identify the problem, solve the problem with the human, replace the human with automations and AI where possible, and then move the human to the next layer of tasks, projects, you know, whatever they have to do.

00:16:47 Casey: This is going to allow you to get a bigger outcome faster for your clients. And probably less money. I don’t know. I feel kind of edgy about this. I don’t want to be the low-cost guy. I don’t want to say hire me because I’m cheaper. Because I make everything cheaper. No, I’m faster.

00:17:07 Casey: So, happens that by leveraging AI and using a hiring model like this, things can be less expensive. But I’m still expensive. And the clients, okay paying that fee because they see the speed that I bring the focus that I bring the ability to solve problems. And I’m not special, you can do the same thing too, right? They want to hire you for your intellect, for your ability to solve problems. And that problem is, oh, this should be an agent, this should be a full-time hire, this should be a contractor, this should be a guy in Serbia, this should be a woman in Philippines.

00:17:36 Casey: Right? Like you lay out that structure to get the best outcome for your clients. So, if you do this correctly, you build a marketing team out correctly, you’re going to win. And it’s easy to say, you know, started zero, you’re the first hire, you bring in a full-time person, and then you grow from there. Like that’s kind of an easier approach. Some of you have the inverse problem, which is you step into an organization that’s busy, that’s full of a team. And so, your job is to kind of unwind what they’re doing, figure out is it even worth doing?

00:18:06 Casey: Then get them to do the stuff that’s worth doing, not do the other stuff at AI to support them. It’s a little different. That’s a lot more complex. And sometimes that just needs a little bit more support. One of the things I provide inside the CMO accelerator, say walk our CMO through how to kind of unwind a marketing department back to its basics to the basics exceedingly well add on the other stuff add on agents, AI contractors, agencies, whatever, to really build a robust marketing department. And that’s what’s important. So

00:18:35 Casey: No matter what, if you’re joining a team, immediately get access to all the terms around contractors and agencies, know what your renewal timeline is, know if you’ve got a renewal coming up. I’ll work with an agency like if I come into an organization, they’re like, Hey, and we work with ACME agency. I’m like, cool, just send me over their contract. I’d like to see it. I read the contract, I realized that, you know, we’re two weeks away from a renewal. And I’ll just write in and say, Hey, I’m going to just extend our contract for just 30 days, without us being forced into a six month renewal.

00:19:07 Casey: I just need some time to get my feet under me and I don’t want to get caught up in a six month renewal term on this. The client’s like a great idea. That message gets sent out. I might have a little bit of a, em you know, battle with the agency. We don’t do that, whatever. And I’m just like, well, I’m not going to sign a six month. I just stepped in here. I need 30 days to evaluate. So we could pause for 30 or you could give me a 30 day window to be able to exit.

00:19:32 Casey: And then you’re gonna go from there and you’re build out that relationship. This puts you in the driver’s seat so that you really own the marketing department and you’re not caught in the minutia of doing the stuff. Do not be the implementer. Do not be the person that can do it all because you’re the AI person now. It’s a dangerous place to be. Be the CMO, unless you’re a technologist. And if you are, quit listening to me and go listen to my colleagues, Lior and Marisa on the CTOX podcast, where they talk about CTO stuff.

00:20:01 Casey: If that’s not you, and you’re a marketer, stay in your lane as a marketer. Understand AI understand what agents do, but don’t like, think that AI is going to solve all of your problems. Okay. All right. If you want my help, if you want to join the accelerator, if you even want to see if you’re even qualified with your experience to join the accelerator, I’d love to hear from you. So book a call with my team at cmo x.co slash call. Just do it right now. cmo x.co slash call. And you’ll schedule a short call. We’ll ask you a couple questions, see if we think that you have the experience to be a successful Fractional CMO. All right. Can’t wait to hear from you. Take care. See you soon.

00:20:39 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit FractionalCMOShow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode,

00:20:55 Casey: You can share your question at FractionalCMOShow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. Alright, go get ’em!