Ep #155: Calling Yourself a Fractional CMO Is Stupid?

Transcript

In this episode, I’m gonna go off on a little rant because somebody tagged me in a blog post and I think they got it all wrong.

Hey, it’s Casey. Welcome back. And here’s something I read. It’s funny, I found this because someone came into our funnels and they had a lead source that looked funny, so I checked it out and it was this blog post. So someone wrote this kind of a scathing long blog post about the the role of the fractional CMO.

And enough people thought enough about it that they wanted to click through and see what CMoX was about. Thought that was funny. So let me tell you like the arc of this, which is th- the author effectively states that being a fractional CMO is pricing yourself out of the market.

He states that like nobody with messed up socials wakes up and says, “I need a fractional CMO.” They say, “I need a social media person.” And I think that’s true. The other thing he said is like nobody wakes up with a bad website and says, “Man, I need a fractional CMO.” They don’t say that, right?

They say, “I need web design.” So the kind of the, the thesis of this author is that you can call yourself a fractional CMO if you want. I’m gonna call myself the guy that gets stuff done, right? I’m just gonna solve problems for them. I’m not gonna price myself out of the room with the title of fractional CMO.

And I think it’s- A very fair position, and I think he’s got it all wrong and all right at the same time. So where has he got it all right? It’s true that smaller companies absolutely require a web designer, a web developer, an AI person a woman that can fix their Google Ads. They just need that talent, sure.

But then on the opposite side of this, I think of, like, where I came from, and I grew up in the school of Dan Kennedy. If Dan Kennedy, he’s a kind of a classic direct response marketer from that epicenter of direct response thought Ohio, right? Ohio is like mailing houses in Ohio.

You’ve got Ohio and Connecticut, and to me they feel like those are the heavy places where direct response really was. You’ve got Ben Suarez and those guys, even Dan Sullivan, who’s not direct response but I think just a great mind, is from Ohio. And then on the other side in, in Connecticut, you’ve got everyone that was at Bottom Line Health.

That’s like your Gary Bencivangas, Paris Lampropoulos, all those great copywriters. I think of this Dan Kennedy line. He says that there is no strategic advantage to being the second cheapest option, but there’s ign- enormous advantage to being the most expensive, right? To be the second most expensive, no real benefit.

To be the most expensive, true benefit. And you know this to be true, right? If you’re the most expensive, couple things happen. It’s not for the sake of being expensive, it’s for the sake of finding a way to be the most effective, and through your efficacy, you solve bigger problems, and then you’re rewarded with bigger paychecks.

That’s the math. It’s not like I should just be the most expensive and do the work of cheap people. It’s I wanna charge the most, and therefore I have to solve the biggest problems, and therefore the outcome of my labor is the most valuable, and I should charge the most for it. That is where we wanna be.

So this guy who wrote this post says, That effectively that fractional CMOs are pricing themselves out because nobody wants a fractional CMO. So let me tell you about when someone wants a fractional CMO. It’s it’s a pretty simple thing. A company wants a fractional CMO when they need a CMO and they’re stuck with a like a, there’s a duality, right?

There’s a binary option in their mind. They say, “I can hire a full-time CMO,” but they haven’t done it before. And I’m sure I can find someone smart, but like they don’t have the specific experience that I require. But I could hire them and have them full-time, like 40, 60 hours a week, right?

I could make them like bleed at their desk. I could have that person. Or I could hire someone who’s done it before, who’s well-connected, who has the network, but they’re way too expensive. So I could hire them for less time. That’s what I could afford. So full-time, cheaper, less experienced, or l- far less than full-time, less money, surprisingly, than that cheaper option, but much more experienced.

That’s part of the dynamic. And then the second part of the dynamic, and I’ve shared this before, is that the business owner is most apt to hire a fractional CMO when they need to have somebody be the owner of the marketing department. That is a nuance that so many people forget. If there’s a hair salon down the street and they’ve got four gals, four chairs, they’re cutting on average five, six, seven heads each a day, do they need a fractional CMO?

No. No way. If that location is part of a franchise and that franchise has 25 locations and they have 15 more in development and they wanna sell another 25 next year, does that company need a fractional CMO? Absolutely. Like the the need is there at a certain size, at a certain, it’s like revenue but also responsibility level.

There are plenty of companies that are small, that’s like 1B, 1C, 1… Excuse me 1P, 1B. One person, $1 billion a year company. Like that’s gonna exist soon, right? One person is gonna have a billion dollar a year company. They’re gonna have all these agents, whatever. It’s gonna just like work for them with AI magic.

That person doesn’t need a fractional CMO, right? They probably have an agent for that. But there are companies that require it. So it’s not about revenue, it’s not about industry. It’s a little bit softer. It’s about desire for growth, but need for responsibility ownership. That is such a requirement.

Let me give you an example. I worked with a, a private equity commercial real estate sponsor, and they had a marketing department of a handful of folks, and they were spending a lot of money every single day on ads. They had an agency running it. They did it in-house. They had SEO, a podcast, all sorts of stuff.

We would shoot drone videos of our properties to sell them to investors. It was a big operation. They needed one person that they could talk to that would be the spokesperson for the marketing department, that would defend the marketing department’s decisions, that was responsible and fireable in case we got it wrong that could go fight for marketing over on the sales team and say “Hey, sales team, you’re not calling the leads fast enough or hard enough,” or, “Your notes in the CRM suck and we don’t know if you’re doing it right,” or…

they needed someone there. Do you understand the difference of like they needed the role filled? A marketing director wasn’t the role ’cause that marketing director was marketing directing. They were directing marketing stuff. They had their own direct reports. But that person had to roll up to somebody, and he wasn’t rolling up to the co-founders of the business.

He just didn’t have a seat at that table. They wanted somebody else that came in from a higher perspective, who like, yeah, managed the marketing department, but really was that connective tissue through the whole company with how marketing worked. There was a point when we had a bunch of properties and we needed to lease them out, and we have a great le- had a great leasing team, and they needed marketing help.

So every time we bought property, we’d take the boxes that weren’t leased out and we’d have to print the big signs that say “For lease,” with a QR code and a landing page and a website, and reaching out to business owners like, “Oh, there used to be a hair salon here. Let’s reach out to all the other hair salons and tell them that they’ll get three months of free rent if they sign for a two-year commitment with us.”

And we needed marketing to do that. It was sales plus marketing. When that happened, like I had to come up with a strategy for it and lead it, but I just hired someone and that’s her full-time job. She was just the full-time person doing leasing marketing. The marketing director couldn’t do it ’cause he was directing the other stuff of marketing that already existed.

He was at capacity. So do you see that the requirement was that I came in and that I became the top level marketing leader? So in this idea of like nobody wakes up with a bad website and says, “We need our website fixed, therefore we should hire a fractional CMO,” is accurate, but it misses the point of where the demand lives When there’s a executive leadership team and there needs to be marketing at the table, you need a CMO.

When there’s a board of directors and they wanna know how marketing’s doing, they need a CMO. They can’t pull in the media buyer to defend their decisions for media buying. They need that person, that savant, to be translated to business talk by the CMO. There is a requirement ultimately for the CMO, and you have to find the companies that have that.

So this, this guy, this author, he just misses the context. This h- the title of his piece is “Calling Yourself a Fractional CMO is Stupid.” And if you wanna play with small fish and you wanna stay making your $500 to $2,000 a month, contract hourly rate, project-based work, whatever, fine by me. The world will always need that work.

That’s kind of the good news. But on the other side, if you’re willing to focus on big problems and solve big problems and make a meaningful difference in an organization that affects more lives I wouldn’t say that the work is better. There’s nothing morally different about it. If I help a hair salon that has five chairs and I help one that has 50 locations, is one morally better?

It’s that’s not a question. The question is, like, where do you wanna focus? The one that solves, that’s, that serves a few people or the one that serves more people? And don’t you think that if you find yourself at the intersection of pains and marketing and resolution can’t you find a way for you to be rewarded well for that labor?

I think the answer is yes. It’s proven yes again and again. I see it every week inside the accelerator. I see a member who is up working with a prospect and showing them, like, why they’re the right person, and the person’s like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” Just a member just a couple days ago pitched a client at a rate that was a high rate, $15,000 a month. And the feedback they told me was that the client said, ” Yeah, that makes sense.” “Yeah, that rate makes sense based on who you are.” They saw the value of that for that person. 15 grand? That’s incredible, right? It’s a lot of money. But it’s possible if you solve big problems. If you stay stuck in small problems, you will make small money.

Or you’ll make big money, and then they’ll figure out that you’re not solving big enough problems, and then they’ll say, “Where are the results?” And you’re like I’m working on branding.” And they’re like, “All right, see you later.” That’s gonna happen. So your job is maybe to notice this noise in the market But I think of Brandolini’s law, which is it takes an order of magnitude more effort to dismantle and refute bullshit than it does to create it.

Someone could just write a piece that says, ” Calling yourself a fractional CMO is stupid.” Doesn’t take a lot of effort. And then I gotta spend all this time telling you, “Actually, I disagree.” It’s like there’s an effort of it. So you can tune that stuff out if you want, or you can go through the effort of coming up with your own opinion and refuting it and understanding why and your positioning.

You can do that if you want. At the end of the day, here’s the most important thing: shut up, focus, work, win clients, serve clients, make good money, take care of your family, do the things you love, take time off work, solve big problems, be valued, be valuable be appreciated in the businesses that you work in.

That’s it. I’ll tell you one other quick thing. I’ve got a couple newer members in the accelerator that are specifically a couple older guys that are senior in their career Smart guys, experienced, know their industry very, like exceedingly well, and the AI stuff has thrown them.

They’re like, “Ah, I don’t know how this AI stuff works.” Like they’re using AI, but they’re using it like Google. I had one member shoot me a email yesterday, and he told me about this whole app that he made, and it’s really cool. It’s for a personal kind of hobby thing for him, and he’s just learning.

And it’s these CMOs that wanna like not just solve big problems for the client, but like also be relevant and learn new tools and play and have fun. And what he’s doing has nothing to do with his clients. He’s, he developed something that is probably strictly for him, nothing to do with his clients. But on the other side, his client will– A client in the future will appear and they’ll have a problem and he’ll be like, “Oh, remember that app I built?

I can apply that same understanding,” boom, to them, and now he gets them to their result faster. That’s solving a big problem, and part of it is playing. So the work here isn’t just like a grinding, it’s playing, it’s dancing, it’s having fun, it’s staying relevant, it’s asking big questions, it’s solving big problems.

And if you do it enough, you’re going to be identified as the person who does it. You’re gonna be the person who’s shared with word of mouth. You’re gonna get the referrals. You’re gonna be able to be successful and have this really be a tangible thing for you. Your choice who you wanna listen to someone who says that being a fractional CMO is stupid, or someone who says that being a fractional CMO is the ticket to freedom great income meaning, right?

Like all of those things. Impact. Tell me another role that has more impact than a fractional CMO. Really. Like maybe the head of like a major foundation who’s like bequesting money. But like outside of that, your inside of business is changing the lives of the entrepreneur, their staff, and their clients, their customers.

It’s an amazing thing, and you do it for multiple companies. It’s so cool. All right. If you want my help, if you wanna hop into one of these calls with me live and jam on your business, I’m with our CMOX members every single week. I work with them. And I’d love to help you. Just book in a call, cmox.co/show.

Just book in a call right now, 15 minutes, that’s it, and we’ll just see if you’ve got what it takes to be a successful in-demand fractional CMO. And if you do, we’ll invite you in and we’ll share what that looks like. All right? All right. I hope you’re well. Take care. See ya.