Hiring a fractional chief marketing officer (FCMO or fractional FCMO) is a leadership decision as much as it is a marketing decision. When a company reaches the point where fragmented tactics, inconsistent messaging, and unclear ROI begin to stall growth, a fractional CMO can provide the strategic clarity and executive direction the organization has been missing.
What most people don’t realize is that the success of a fractional CMO engagement depends not only on the CMO you hire but also on how you collaborate.
To help businesses make the most of their FCMO partnerships, we asked a few of our senior fractional CMOs what makes an engagement effective in the first 30, 60, and 90 days and beyond. Their advice comes from working with hundreds of organizations across SaaS, healthcare, finance, e-commerce, home services, and more.
Their insights surfaced a clear narrative about what successful FCMO partnerships do, what struggling ones overlook, and how to get meaningful ROI from a fractional CMO relationship.
Start With Alignment: What the First 30 Days Should Look Like
When a fractional CMO first joins your organization, the goal isn’t to immediately “fix your marketing.” Instead, it’s to build the foundation for decisions that move the business forward.
Align on Business Outcomes First
According to Mike Riley, the first 30 days must be anchored in business-wide clarity:
Too often, businesses jump straight into campaigns without ever aligning on broader organizational strategy, revenue goals, pipeline targets, sales cycles, margins, or capacity realities. Without these, marketing becomes disconnected from business outcomes (and eventually, from trust).
Build a Written Strategy to Focus Your Efforts
Kyle Shurtz takes it one step further, advising:
This is where a fractional CMO brings immediate executive value. Their job is not just to develop the marketing strategy but to ensure the entire leadership team is aligned behind a shared roadmap that won’t be tossed away the moment someone has a new idea.
Invest in Thorough Onboarding for Faster Impact
Julia Olson emphasizes onboarding as the highest-leverage activity in the early days:
This includes access to past performance, current tools, customer data, stakeholder expectations, and the full sales cycle.
Fix Data Tracking Early or Strategy Won’t Stick
Beau Graves adds one more foundational element that often gets overlooked:
Without trustworthy data, even the strongest strategy becomes guesswork.
In other words, the first month is about clarity, consistency, and building a data-backed foundation a fractional CMO can trust — not speed.
Turning Goals Into Direction: How Strategy Actually Takes Shape
Once goals are aligned and onboarding is complete, the relationship naturally shifts into strategic translation. The role of a fractional CMO is to connect business objectives to clear marketing outcomes, a bridge many companies are missing.
A strong fractional CMO will:
- Diagnose what’s working and what’s not
- Prioritize the initiatives with the highest business impact
- Identify quick wins to build early momentum
- Build longer-term strategies tied to measurable KPIs
Mike explains why quick wins matter:
These early wins are never about vanity metrics. They’re about tightening targeting, cleaning up wasted ad spend, fixing attribution gaps, strengthening messaging, and smoothing the handoff between sales and marketing. These small shifts create immediate momentum.
This is where many companies begin to feel the fractional CMO’s impact in their campaigns and in how decisions are made.
How a Fractional CMO and Leadership Team Stay in Sync
The next phase of a healthy fractional CMO engagement is about cadence. In our experience, the companies that get the highest ROI from their FCMO are the ones that create strong communication habits early.
Every FCMO had a slightly different perspective, but they all pointed to one shared truth:
Weekly communication is non-negotiable.
- “Weekly touchpoints are essential,” says Mike.
- “Weekly check-ins plus structured monthly and quarterly reviews,” adds Kyle.
- “At minimum, there should be a weekly executive standup,” emphasizes Beau.
- “Many of my clients talk with me daily — texts, Slacks, quick calls. That’s where trust is built,” Julia says.
Communicating frequently and at agreed-upon intervals is an effective way to ensure accountability in your FCMO relationship. How often you choose to communicate can vary, but we find the following to be an effective place to start:
Communication maintains alignment, prevents misunderstandings, clarifies priorities, accelerates execution, and keeps strategy connected to real-time business needs.
And when misalignment does happen (because it will), the solution is simple:
- Pause.
- Realign.
- Use data, not opinions.
Our fractional CMOs provided the following explanation and advice for when conflict and misalignment arise:
- “Most misalignment comes from assumptions never clarified upfront.” — Julia
- “Healthy conflict is a sign of a strong executive team.” — Beau
- “Address misalignment quickly and directly. Go back to the goals and let the metrics guide the conversation.” — Mike
- “Everything returns to the company’s North Star.” — Kyle
This is the invisible work that makes fractional leadership successful.
What a Healthy Fractional CMO Relationship Looks Like After 3–6 Months
By the time you reach the three- to six-month mark, the relationship should feel very different from how it did on day one. You should begin seeing signs that your fractional CMO is no longer a contractor but a strategic part of your leadership fabric.
Across our team, the same indicators consistently appear:
1. Marketing becomes a driver of growth.
Executives understand not just what marketing is doing, but why.
2. The FCMO feels like part of the company culture.
They’re included in discussions, trusted with decisions, and expected to lead.
3. The leadership team gains more confidence and clarity.
Decision-making becomes faster with less friction.
4. Collaboration becomes natural and frequent.
Brainstorming happens inside and outside meetings.
5. Strategy and execution move in sync.
Marketing initiatives finally have structure, prioritization, and momentum.
As Julia puts it:
Avoiding the Missteps: What Derails Fractional CMO Engagements
Even with a highly skilled fractional CMO, certain patterns can quietly undermine progress and stall results. After working with hundreds of organizations, our FCMOs shared the advice they wish every business knew.
Mistake #1: Treating the FCMO like a vendor
A fractional CMO isn’t there to take orders. They’re there to lead, make decisions, challenge assumptions, and guide the organization toward measurable outcomes.
When companies treat marketing as an outsourced task list rather than strategic leadership, the partnership stays surface-level — and the results stay surface-level, too.
What to do instead
- Invite the FCMO into executive meetings and strategic planning sessions.
- Give them visibility into business constraints, not just marketing tasks.
- Empower them to influence budgets, priorities, and timelines.
When they have a seat at the table, the work transforms from reactive execution to proactive growth.
Mistake #2: Expecting a quick fix
A great fractional CMO will find early traction by fixing tracking issues, simplifying priorities, or stopping wasted spend. But transformational growth (lower acquisition costs, higher lifetime value, revenue alignment) requires time, systems, and cultural adoption.
Companies that expect overnight change quickly lose patience and abandon strategies before they have time to work.
What to do instead
- Expect quick wins, but measure success over quarters.
- Give your FCMO space to build the foundation — data, messaging, planning, and alignment.
- Stay committed to the roadmap you agreed on.
Your marketing can’t become strategic if you’re changing direction every 10 days.
Mistake #3: Keeping marketing siloed
No marketing strategy succeeds in a vacuum. If sales is targeting a different audience, or operations can’t support the promised experience, the entire funnel breaks.
When marketing sits in its own corner, disconnected from what’s happening upstream and downstream, not even the best FCMO can create a measurable revenue lift.
What to do instead
- Hold regular joint reviews between sales, ops, and marketing.
- Align messaging, ICPs, handoff points, and revenue goals.
- Treat pipeline health as a shared KPI, not a marketing KPI.
Growth is a team sport!
Mistake #4: Withholding financials or performance data
A fractional CMO makes decisions based on revenue, margins, acquisition costs, capacity, churn, conversion rates, and more. If they don’t have access to these numbers, they can’t build an effective strategy.
Lack of transparency leads to misaligned decisions, wasted spend, and slow progress.
What to do instead
- Give your FCMO access to dashboards, reports, CRM data, budgets, and historical performance.
- Share sales data and cost structures early.
- Establish a shared source of truth for metrics.
The strategy can only be as strong as the data that informs it.
Mistake #5: Believing fractional means “less than”
Many leaders misunderstand what “fractional” means. It doesn’t mean junior talent, part-time effort, or watered-down expertise.
It means:
- Senior-level leadership without full-time cost
- A consultant’s perspective with an operator’s ability to execute
- A “cheat code,” as Kyle says, giving you hard-won experience without long onboarding cycles
Fractional CMOs often outperform full-time leaders because they’ve solved the same problems across dozens of organizations.
What to do instead
- Embrace the leverage of fractional expertise
- Use their cross-industry experience to shortcut decisions
- Let them amplify your team rather than supplement it
Fractional is not a compromise; it’s a competitive advantage, built together.
And when your fractional CMO is backed by Avalaunch Media’s full-service agency team, you get executive-level strategy with expert execution, analytics, content, creative, SEO, paid media, and development that bring that strategy to life.
Working With an Avalaunch or Amplēo Fractional CMO
Avalaunch Media and Amplēo were among Utah’s first to combine fractional CMO leadership with full-service marketing execution — two sides of the same engine built to deliver results.
Our fractional CMOs meet every criterion in this guide because:
- They’re experienced executive leaders
- They’re backed by two decades of marketing operations
- They have a full agency behind them to turn strategy into impact
- They’ve guided organizations through every growth stage
- They’re trained to align marketing directly to financial outcomes
If you want a fractional CMO partnership rooted in clarity, collaboration, and business growth, we can help. Reach out to us today for a consultation and learn why we might be the right fractional partner for you.
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