Short answer: hire a fractional CMO when you have a product and a sales team, you need more leads or more awareness than founder-led marketing can produce, and you aren’t ready to pay for a full-time CMO. To find a good one, check three things: how well they understand your sector, their track record, and their reputation among the people you sell to.
That’s the version for people in a hurry. Here’s the longer one.
What does a fractional CMO actually do?
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who works for you part-time, usually a set number of days a week. They own the marketing direction: positioning, the plan, the budget and the results. Depending on who you hire, they also do a lot of the work themselves.
The appeal is simple. You get someone who has done this before, for a fraction of what a full-time executive costs, without the hiring risk. (I break down the numbers in how much a fractional CMO costs in Singapore.)
When should you hire a fractional CMO?
When HR tech founders get on a call with me, the ask is almost always the same. They want more leads. If they’re new to a market, they want awareness first, because nobody buys from a vendor they’ve never heard of.
That ask usually comes with a few other signals:
Your founder or sales leader is doing the marketing. It started as a side job and now eats every Friday afternoon. The founder is writing LinkedIn posts at 11pm and the campaign calendar lives in their head.
You have a product and a sales motion, but the pipeline is thin. Sales can close when they get in front of the right people. The problem is getting in front of them.
You’re entering a new market. A vendor that’s well known in Europe or Australia can be invisible in Singapore or Jakarta. HR leaders here buy from vendors they’ve seen around: in their feed, at events, in their peers’ recommendations.
You’re spending on marketing without a process. There are posts, a webinar here, an event there, maybe an agency doing ads. Nobody can tell you which of it produces meetings.
If two or more of these sound familiar, it’s worth a conversation.
When is a fractional CMO the wrong move?
A fractional CMO makes sense once you have something to sell and someone to sell it. Before that, you need customer conversations more than you need a marketing plan.
It’s also the wrong hire if what you really want is volume: a cheap content factory, a social media posting schedule or a large agency team to run every channel at once. A fractional CMO sets direction and builds the engine. If you just need more hands, hire the hands.
And if you’ve grown to the point where marketing needs a full-time leader managing a team every day, it’s time to hire one. A good fractional CMO will tell you when you’ve reached that point, and help you hire their replacement.
How do you find a good fractional CMO?
Start where your buyers are. The best people for an HR tech company are usually visible in the HR community already: writing, speaking at HR events, hosting podcasts, showing up in the conversations your buyers have. Ask your investors, your board and other founders in your space who they’d recommend. A name that keeps coming up is a good sign.
Then check three things.
Sector understanding. Do they know how your buyers buy? In HR tech, that means knowing how a CHRO evaluates software, who else sits on the buying committee and what a typical sales cycle looks like. You shouldn’t have to explain your market from scratch.
Track record. What have they done for companies like yours? Look past the client logos and ask what changed: what they built, what happened to the pipeline, how long they stayed.
Reputation in your space. Would your buyers recognise their name? This matters more than people expect. A fractional CMO with an existing reputation among HR leaders can open doors that a stranger can’t, and the opposite is also true.
What should you ask before you hire one?
A few questions that separate the people who’ll move your numbers from the people who’ll send you a strategy deck:
- Which companies in our category have you worked with, and what changed while you were there?
- Who will actually do the work? You, or a team behind you?
- What will we have at the end of the first 90 days?
- How do you measure whether this is working?
- Who do you know among our target buyers?
Listen for specifics. “We’ll build a full-funnel strategy” is a deck. “In the first month I’ll audit your funnel and fix the handover between marketing and sales” is a plan.
What should you have after the first 90 days?
This is the question I’d push hardest on, because it tells you what you’re actually buying.
When I start with a client, the first 90 days usually produce four things:
- An audit of how marketing works today. What’s happening, what’s producing results and what’s just activity.
- A new process across digital and offline. Content, campaigns, events and how leads get handed to sales, set up so it keeps running.
- A game plan. What to do next quarter, in what order, and how we’ll know it’s working.
- Interest from accounts that are hard to reach. For HR tech, the hardest doors to open belong to senior HR leaders who ignore cold outreach. I use my personal network of CHROs to start those conversations. (I wrote about why the direct ask doesn’t work in want a sales meeting? Stop asking for one.)
Whoever you hire, ask them to put their 90-day version in writing before you sign.
How much does it cost?
In Singapore, published guides put a fractional CMO at roughly S$8,000 to S$15,000 a month for about two days a week. A full-time CMO costs several times that once you add salary, bonus and benefits. The full breakdown, including what’s usually extra, is in how much a fractional CMO costs in Singapore.
The bottom line
Hire a fractional CMO when the pipeline problem is bigger than the time your founder can give it, and before you’re ready for a full-time executive. Hire one who already knows your buyers, can show you what they did for companies like yours, and will tell you in writing what you’ll have in 90 days.
If you sell HR tech in Singapore or Asia, this is what I do. I take on one new client a quarter, and the first call is free.