Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

The CMO role spans strategy (positioning, market selection, pricing input), demand (pipeline targets and the channel mix to hit them), and operations (team, agencies, stack, and measurement). The common thread is accountability for marketing’s revenue contribution.

Most companies under roughly $50M in revenue cannot justify or attract a full-time CMO: the work needed is a fraction of a full-time executive’s capacity, but the judgment needed is exactly executive-grade. That gap created the fractional CMOFractional CMOAn experienced marketing executive hired on a part-time retainer. model.

Whether full-time or fractional, the role’s leading indicator of success is the same: a written strategy the rest of the company can execute against, with KPIs the CEO actually reviews.