Fractional Futures

What Does A Fractional CMO Actually DO?

• Paul Mills • Season 5 • Episode 4

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Fractional Futures is the essential podcast for CEOs, investors, and senior marketing executives looking to unlock the power of fractional marketing leadership.
 
Hosted by Paul Mills, Founder at VCMO, and with special guests, we'll share expert insights, provide actionable strategies and explore real-world success stories to help you leverage fractional marketing leadership for maximum impact.

In this episode

In this episode of Fractional Futures, Paul Mills and Rachel Wheatley delve into the role of a fractional CMO, emphasizing the importance of strategic marketing leadership in transforming organizations. They discuss building marketing capability at three levels, aligning organizational culture with customer centricity, and the significance of customer journey mapping. The conversation highlights the need for marketing to be viewed as an investment rather than a cost center, and the use of strategic tools to guide effective marketing practices. Ultimately, they stress the importance of understanding customer needs and positioning to drive business success.

Special Guest

Rachael Wheatley, Fractional CMO

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Learn more in our article: What Does a Fractional CMO Do? 

Key Takeaways

  • A fractional CMO transforms reactive marketing into strategic growth.
  • Marketing capability works at team, cross-functional, and organizational levels.
  • Organizational culture must align with customer needs for success.
  • Workshops can help align different functions around the customer journey.
  • Mapping the customer journey is essential for improving customer experience.
  • Marketing should be seen as an investment, not a cost center.
  • SWOT analysis is often misused; it should include external factors.
  • Customer journey mapping is frequently overlooked in organizations.
  • Understanding customer needs is crucial for effective positioning.
  • Strategic tools can help break bad marketing habits.

Sound Bites
 
"What does a fractional CMO actually do?"
"Workshops can align different functions."
"SWOT is often used badly."

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Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!

Fractional Marketing Leadership | Marketing Transformed.

Paul Mills (00:09)
Hello and welcome back to Fractional Futures, the show for CEOs, founders and investors who want clarity on modern marketing leadership. I'm Paul Mills, founder of VCMO and today we're tackling a question that catches businesses out far too late. When does a business actually need a fractional CMO? Across scale ups, mid-market firms and even large enterprises, the early warning signs are almost identical.

And spotting these indicators early protects growth, it avoids wasted budget, and stops marketing becoming noise instead of impact. In this episode, we'll be exploring those triggers in more detail, and we'll be discussing how they can be acted on. Joining me today is someone who's seen these signs in the real world, the brilliant Rachael Wheatley, a Chartered Marketer, a SOSTAC Certified Planner,

who works with organizations navigating these challenges every day. Hi, Rachael. Great to have you here. Before we jump in, can you give our listeners a quick glimpse into your marketing background?

Rachael (01:07)
Yes, thank you, Paul. And thank you very much for inviting me on this podcast. I've been in marketing a long time, so I kind of spent quite a spell in-house before setting up my own business. And I've done that for the last 15 or so years and now operating as a fractional CMO for companies like professional financial services, tech, education. So where...

Long-term relationships are really important and building long-term relationships with prospects as well as clients is important and typically for sizes anywhere upwards of about 2 million pounds to 25 35 million pound turnover

Paul Mills (01:44)
So Rachael, let's start with the biggest and often the most damaging sign. And that is the absence of genuine strategic marketing capability at the leadership level. Can you unpack what a business might experience when key marketing decisions are made by non-marketers or perhaps juniors at the early stage of their career?

Rachael (02:03)
Yeah, I think it's interesting. I've seen that a lot. I mean, I think where I've seen it most frequently is where a non marketing leader is essentially running the marketing and it might be the MD, it might be the CEO, it might even be a kind of different, senior person. And they don't have a marketing background. I think part of this links, doesn't it, to the fact that

marketing is perceived as easy and so you know anyone can do it but actually what we've what I found over the years is that actually marketing even if you're not from a marketing background and you're you're leading it you do need to know enough about marketing to do it properly to not

not just run the marketing team properly, but actually for it to be effective. I guess what you might see is, marketing is very, very much treated as executional rather than strategic. It's, it's kind of on the periphery rather than at the center. It's, you know, not in board conversations, for instance.

And the tactics are done in isolation so they might seem to the outside world and maybe to us marketers as little bit scattergun.

Paul Mills (03:08)
That's right. I like the point there, particularly organizations that are led by non-marketers. I've seen this in the legal sector and accountancy where you might have a partner of the organization who is basically the person making all the key decisions or suggesting what marketing activities should be done. And I had one of my clients who, one of the founders was using AI.

to build the marketing strategy, which is fine if you know what prompts to give AI in the first place. And what the output was, was about 30 or 35 pages of stuff, which from a marketing implementation perspective was pretty much nigh on impossible to implement, let alone manage and measure. And I think this is, the point that we're trying to make here, isn't it? Is if you don't have that...

strategic grounding in marketing. If you don't know where to point, you're just doing stuff rather than activities that move the needle forward. And I think the other thing to think about is, the difference between marketing strategy and tactics. And the vernacular of strategy is often heard, isn't it, in the boardroom or in the workplace.

We've got a strategy for that. We've got a strategy for this. And often that strategy is nothing more than a list of things to do. So how do we overcome that barrier of the difference between strategy and tactics?

Rachael (04:30)
When the penny really dropped for me many years ago when I was head of marketing for an organization and I was asked to work with the business unit directors to help them develop business plans because they haven't got any. And so I did that and I did some research about what best practice was and I developed a template and in that template included things like,

What was our revenue last year? What are our ambitions for next year? But also in there was the, you know, what are we selling to whom? So who's our audience? What are the products and services that we're selling? What are the features? What are their benefits? What is our value proposition? And I realised that they were all strategic marketing issues. And so,

my view was, and I kind of explained this to the business unit directors, was that if you've got a good business plan and it's well thought through, then you've already done about 70 % of your marketing strategy, maybe more. And that was neat because it kind of linked to the

where the business wanted to go to directly with marketing. This is how we're going to actually reach those particular goals. So I think for me, look to the business, what does the business want to do? And in within that, you will find your marketing strategy, you know, whether that's we want more of the same or actually we want to diversify a bit and go into a new market or we want to develop new products and services. That all informs the marketing activities that you then do.

Paul Mills (06:00)
Absolutely. And I think a sign of when you're lacking that leadership is if you're in an organization and the people making the decisions are making those decisions on gut instinct, you might have an owner manager saying, I know the market really well, and this is what I think the market needs, or this is the innovation I think we should invest in because people want this or that or whatever.

And that's really quite dangerous because if you're trying to second guess the market, which as we know is constantly evolving, not just buyers and their buyer journey, but also shifts in technology, shifts in policy, all those macro forces that are changing. And if you don't keep track of those, if you're just guessing or using gut instinct, you're going to fall behind very quickly. So how do you...

help organizations overcome this bad marketing habit of just making decisions off gut instinct or gut feel.

Rachael (06:58)
I think it's an interesting one because I think if you know your market, I think there's something in that gut feel. That said, I think it's very, very difficult to argue the toss at a board meeting if it's only based on gut feel. So I think any gut feel that you have, I think needs to then be...

validated in some way, shape or form. And I think there are a number of things that companies can put in place to guard against that. So it might be a regular look at the market landscape, for instance, and any new competitors and just having a sense of other people out there and what they're doing and how they might be affecting your position and positioning. So kind of regular

market research, I guess you call it. I think the other thing is, which is really important, is regular client research. So it might be on a kind of, you know, the regular satisfaction level. But more than that, it might just be kind of meetings with clients regularly. So you get a sense of them and their marketplace and what's happening for them and their business plan. Because

you can reflect that back internally and say, well, I've talked to a few clients and this is what they're saying. And this is what they're saying about their marketplace and dovetail that with desk research that you might've already done. So I think there are some kind of things that you can put in place that I would consider best practice so that you can kind of keep a handle on that and justify, validate your gut feelings.

Paul Mills (08:27)
Absolutely. think it's important. I was only having a prospect call last week with an organization. The organization has been around for a long, long time, probably around about 30 people. So quite a small business, but doing about £4 million revenue a year. they're a B2B organization. And the owner I was speaking to was saying,

We're doing lots of marketing stuff. The marketing team are really busy. The sales team are busy, but it feels like they're pulling in different directions. And I asked him about, know, what, what about your, business clients? Do you do any account based marketing? And he said, no. And it was like, wow. So how do you know what your clients want? How do you know how well you're performing? How do you know if you're going to do some innovation, what innovation to focus on?

And the sales team went in one direction. The marketing team are going in a completely different direction and it's just chaos. And I think that's another warning sign of when you lack that strategic marketing capability in the business. If marketing aren't talking to sales, if sales aren't aligned to customer services, if you're working off plans that aren't aligned to the commercial objectives,

Then you're in trouble, aren't you?

Rachael (09:39)
Yeah,

you really are. I think, think marketing has a key facilitative role there to bring together kind of marketing, sales, service, customer service, you know, even product teams because it's one customer journey after all. And so I think we can have a role as lead marketing leaders to actually bring them together and actually talk the same language. And you can kind of bring different perspectives in. And I think when you get people

you know, all members of those teams in a room, then things really start to cook, really start to work well.

Paul Mills (10:09)
Absolutely. And I think this is really where certainly a fractional CMO adds real value. It's by bringing that missing strategic capability into the leadership conversation by aligning teams, aligning functions, and aligning members of the SLT, the senior leadership team, in terms of everyone really focusing on those activities that are going to move the needle forward. I think another

telltale sign when a company might need a fractional CMO is when the perception of marketing within the business is seen as a cost center rather than a growth engine. And certainly during times at the moment, which is quite a tough economy out there, marketing is usually the first function to see cuts in a bid to minimize operational costs. So Rachael, for the listeners,

what are the signals they might recognize within their organizations when marketing is seen as a cost center?

Rachael (11:00)
think leaders might see things like marketing may be struggling to demonstrate commercial value and maybe they don't have the language of finance so they're not kind of talking, you know, cost of acquisition, for instance, for a customer or customer lifetime value. So it may be that you've got some inexperienced marketers. It may be that you haven't put any metrics in place, or you can't say this bit of marketing has helped us.

actually generate this much demand or this many leads and they don't see marketing looking at either the volume of stuff coming in things you can count or prospects progressing through that customer journey I think

unless you can tie marketing activities and say this is the job it's doing and this is why we have it in place. If you can't explain it in those terms then of course people are going to see it like a cost, not an investment. And I think the other challenge is that marketing is often seen as short term the things in marketing that

generate awareness are usually the most expensive. If you think of kind of ads, pay-per-click ads, exhibitions, you know, kind of big things, they usually cost most money. And so if marketing is asked to generate lots of leads or lots of demand, that necessarily involves activities that cost more money than if you were doing,

a key account program, for instance. ⁓ And so it's a kind of vicious circle. You know, you're being asked to do stuff that actually costs more money and therefore they see it as a cost, not an investment over time.

Paul Mills (12:37)
Yeah, I think you're right. I think there's a massive difference between product marketing and services marketing. If you're an organization that makes stuff, objects that you can hold, touch, feel, taste, drink, marketing is, in my opinion, a much easier process compared to services marketing. Because I think the product, if it's a good product,

you can mostly focus on advertising and price. Those are the two big levers you can pull to reasonably manage what the impact of marketing is. There is more, of course, but I those are the two main levers you can pull. Whereas in services marketing, there is often a much longer buying cycle. There's more complexity because it's an intangible thing that you're offering. The buyers will look at more solutions. And because of those buying journeys,

particularly in complex, services, where there's a lot of things to consider, and especially if there's high risk of making the wrong choice, which is a high cost, it's so fragmented across many elements of the marketing mix. It becomes harder to manage. And I think your point about linking activity to revenue is really critical for the marketing

person or team to win credibility with the board or the senior team. And I think that this is where lot of marketers are falling down at the moment. And I guess marketers who are early in their career, who might be presenting dashboards to their boss or the board, which might be vanity metrics like followers or the growth in communities.

Maybe you're demonstrating we've got more reach, but is that reach converting into a purchase? Probably not. And I think really that connecting those dots is really important for marketers to be able to do. And if you don't have that capability in the business, maybe you need to get that capability in to make that happen.

Rachael (14:23)
Capability in. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting because obviously kind of attribution of marketing activities has long been a thorn in our side, hasn't it?

In terms of attribution, think a couple of things are going on. One is a last touch bias. So the salesperson might say, ⁓ that person's bought from us because of that conversation that I had with him last week. But what that person is forgetting is all of the good stuff that marketing's done. You know, the event that they came to, the emails that they sent to Nurture, the blog that they sent because they thought it would be of interest. They've kind of forgotten all about that.

So I think sometimes marketing attribution and kind of saying that this marketing has led to this revenue, you're looking over a longer time scale. But I think if you if you can plot the journey and say we've done this marketing and we put in front of the prospect this next step and they've taken this next step and we know they have because they've turned up to this event or they've downloaded these things, then you can show progress.

So although it might be indirect, can say having these marketing activities in place has cumulatively led to this sales conversation and conversion to this amount of revenue. So I think if you can view it like that, that makes marketing look much more like an investment and not a cost.

Paul Mills (15:50)
Yeah, I think you touched on it a little bit earlier, the language gap, we call it that, the marketer is not speaking finance. And I think if you can't translate that work into commercial impacts, then you're kind of, you know, behind the curve already. And I think really, that language gap is really important to close, because there's often a misconception by marketers that the CFO or whoever's in charge of the revenue

Rachael (16:03)
stock right on it.

Paul Mills (16:18)
They are always looking to save. That's not the case. The CFO is quite happy to invest. They're quite happy to give you the money, as long as you can demonstrate that there is, an investment case rather than a case of creating more noise and making your marketing team look busy.

Rachael (16:27)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And I've always found that, you know, certainly with the clients that I've worked with and the jobs that I've had, that having conversations with the CFO is really helpful. And I think if you can kind of talk to them and say, this is my plan, this is why I'm doing these kind of marketing activities, this is what I think success would look like. Can you give me the data that will help me prove that? And I think if you have that kind of conversation and discussion, you're getting them on board, you're helping them to understand what your plan is. You're not just presenting

them with a budget with absolutely no context or validation or justification. I think most good CFOs would really warm to that and I think that's good way of getting more knowledgeable about that financial language. So I think one thing for marketers is really as early as possible on in your career is kind of get

comfortable with financial language and what the CFOs talk about and the reports that you might get.

and work out, say, how can what we do in marketing and sales and customer service contribute to that income, that revenue? What does success look like?

Paul Mills (17:44)
Absolutely. if you're a marketer in a portfolio company, that's private equity backed.

You've got to learn the language of the investor as well. And again, you're going to have even more scrutiny and spotlight on you working with investors. And again, that commerciality in language and profitability in talking EBITDA and net margins and all that kind of good stuff is really where you'll differentiate yourself you can't necessarily expect your...

fresh from university graduate who's just come in as a social media person to know all that and I think expecting someone who's early in their career doesn't have the strategic knowledge expecting them to speak this kind of language it's never going to work and that's really when you know a classic sign of when you need to get a fractional cmo in or someone external to to show the way I

Rachael (18:24)
Yeah.

Yeah absolutely.

Paul Mills (18:34)
Rachael, I want to segue into the final topic for this episode.

One of the classic signals and the only way to bring a strategic marketing leader in is when the business drowns in tactical activity, but is lacking direction. The analogy I like to use is there's no point rowing harder if you're rowing in the wrong direction. And this is exactly what we see in businesses time and time again. The marketing team look and sound and feel busy, but I'm not seeing any impact.

So Rachael, from your perspective, what are the warning signs you might see in businesses when they adopt a tactics first approach?

Rachael (19:13)
I think what you might see is that marketing feels a bit fragmented, bit scattergun. So you've just got a few activities that you're doing, but there's no real cohesion to it. And they're not prioritized. And when somebody comes to you, if you're on the marketing team, says, can you just do this? You OK, I'll just do that.

there's no reason behind it, there's no context, you don't know what that's trying to achieve. So I think that's a definite warning sign. And I'm sure you, Paul, like me have seen that a lot. I think another sign might be that, as you alluded to, marketing's busy, but they can't necessarily explain why they're doing what they're doing. And I think the other thing that we see is that...

there might be several suppliers who are being used for certain activities, more specialists perhaps, but they're not kind of brought together as a plan and they're not necessarily briefed in the context of this is overall what we want to achieve and this is how the marketing plan connects to the business plan.

So I think those are some of the signs that I see where they've actually not really thought about the strategy and they're just starting with the tactics first and thinking that we'll do lots of activity and that will get us where we want to get to.

Paul Mills (20:27)
Yeah. And I remember I'm just reflecting back to my early marketing career when I was in-house in corporates. whenever the organization was struggling, they might've had, you know, one or two bad quarters, sales were flatlining or maybe losing sales to competitors. But there would often be a process which should invariably be a morning or a day workshop.

where a select bunch of people for multiple functions in your organization were brought into a room, And the session would be led by a member of the senior leadership team. And it'd often look like, guys, we're not doing particularly well. Today's all about coming up some new ideas of how to turn things around and what these workshops invariably were.

was just a brainstorm session of let's do more stuff. And I remember back to these cause I used to, they used to really infuriate me because I would always be the one that said, look, what is the root cause? What's the data here? Why we come up with ideas, you know, what's the root cause for the sales? You know, is there a conversion issue? You know, are the sales team converting? Have the sales team been trained properly?

Have marketing got the message right? Are we focusing on the right features and benefits and value? Our customer services, have they got the right scripts for customer care, so on and so forth? All of that root cause was completely ignored. The strategic unpicking of the problem. And the workshop, there'd be loads of ideas and you'd always have someone saying, no idea is a bad idea and all this kind of good stuff. You'd have people rolling their eyes, we did that 10 years ago, it didn't work.

Often, for me, when I'm speaking to prospects and they said, you we recently had on a way day, we had some ideas and we were looking to implement them. It's like, again, why row hard if you're in the wrong direction? Don't cover, don't mask the issue. Get to the root cause. And it's probably a strategic problem that's causing the issue. It might be a pricing problem. It might be a positioning problem. It might be a communication problem. It might be all these different things. Don't jump in at the deep end.

with more stuff to do because you're not going to get anywhere.

Rachael (22:40)
Now, it's a really important point, I think it is to kind of do the analysis first diagnosis. I mean, it's like, you know, if you went to a doctor and they, you know, you just explained a few symptoms and they kind of without any question at all said, right, OK, what you need to do is X, Y and Z. You'd be appalled, wouldn't you? You kind of think they haven't really, really delved any deeper and got to know me at all. And I think it's the, you know, the same true here. You need to ask lots of questions. And I think this is where a good measurement framework and good metrics

come in place because if you look at those metrics and you can say, well, is this a volume thing? Do we actually need more leads, which is what I hear a lot? is it a conversion problem? Or actually our customer churn is a lot higher than we thought it was. And so actually we should start there. That's the priority, not bringing in more leads. That would immediately make us more profitable. So I think this idea of kind of

know, researching, diagnosing, really understanding what's going on is really, really important and something that people probably don't do enough. You know, they don't take that pause and step back and say, let's really understand what's happening here and what the real problem

Paul Mills (23:55)
Yeah. And I think that's again, a classic sign of when you need a fractional CMO or, a marketing leader in place, whether it's fractional or full time. you and I, Rachael, we're both SOSTAC certified planners. So we use the SOSTAC framework to help guide that diagnosis piece. You know, we look at the, what is the situation? We look at evidence, we look at data. We look at what the objectives might need to be to overcome the issue and then the tactics. So it's always strategy first.

tactics second. And I think particularly in a challenging economic environment like we have at the moment, business leaders are under time pressure and they might be under pressure from the board or investors or other stakeholders. And so that sort of time bound pressure pushes you into that bad habit of jumping straight into tactics. It's the easy thing to do. Well, let's just do some, some new things. And it's a really bad habit to get into.

Rachael (24:48)
Yeah, and it doesn't, I mean, if you jump in with a few, activities, it doesn't serve you very well. It doesn't serve the business very well either. So I think that's where that kind of senior input is really helpful is to say, actually, I've seen this before and actually, you know, you really do need to pause and step back before you dive into doing more marketing.

Paul Mills (25:08)
Yeah. And that's probably a good place actually to wrap up. the signs we've spoken about today, they show up in businesses of every size. It's not just early stage businesses and startups. It can also be mid-tier businesses and large enterprises.

Next time we'll be tackling the big question that everyone has, what does a fractional CMO actually do? We'll be breaking down the role, the value they offer and how fractional CMOs work in practice. If any of today's signs feel familiar, take a moment to reflect on your own organization and maybe what you need to do differently to make some of these triggers disappear.

If your organization operates without a senior marketing person, if you'd like to benchmark your own marketing performance, we've linked our free marketing capability audit in the show notes. It's a free online audit, it takes less than five minutes to complete, and you get a tailored report highlighting your strengths, your marketing gaps, and things you can prioritize. It also comes with a complimentary review with one of VCMO's chartered marketers.

Thanks for streaming or viewing this episode. I hope you found it useful. Rachael, thank you for joining us and sharing your expertise and your stories. I look forward to showing more insights on fractional leadership in the next episode.

Rachael (26:22)
Thank you very much.


Head Shot

Paul Mills

Host
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Rachael Wheatley

Guest