A lot of bad marketing hires are good marketers hired at the wrong time.
A seed-stage company doesn’t need someone who can scale a growth team if it hasn’t figured out its positioning yet. A Series C company shouldn’t be figuring out which channels work. But when founders feel pressure to build out marketing, the default is often the same: hire someone senior full-time and expect them to figure it out.
I wrote recently in Fast Company about the rise of fractional marketing leadership and why more companies are using it before committing to permanent headcount. Fractional CMO use is up 42% year over year among companies with $5 million to $50 million in revenue.
It’s not just about replacing a full-time hire with a fractional one to save money. It’s about getting the sequence right.
What Does Marketing Need to Prove Next?
The answer changes as a company grows.
At Seed, you may still be figuring out whether the positioning resonates and who your best customers actually are. At Series A, you need to know whether early traction can become a repeatable acquisition model. By Series B, you’re figuring out which channels and programs can hold up as you put more money behind them. At Series C, marketing needs to become more predictable, with systems and teams that can produce results without relying on a handful of people to hold everything together.
Those are different problems and they require different marketing experience.
Hiring a permanent VP of Growth before you’ve figured out which channels work doesn’t solve that uncertainty. It just makes the experiment much more expensive.
Know What You’re Hiring Them to Own
This is where fractional leadership can be particularly useful.
An experienced fractional leader can come in while the company is still answering some of those questions: refining positioning, testing acquisition strategies, building the first repeatable systems, or figuring out what the eventual internal team needs to look like.
That work also gives founders something they often don’t have when they start recruiting: evidence. You know which capabilities you need. You know what the role should own. You know what success looks like. And you have a much better idea of the person you need to hire.
That’s a very different starting point from writing a job description based on what a Series B marketing org is supposed to look like.
Hire When You Know What You’re Hiring For
At SalientMG, we’ve spend years working with founders through these transitions.
Sometimes the right answer is fractional leadership. Sometimes it’s time to build the internal team. The important part is knowing what marketing needs to accomplish before deciding what the org chart should look like.
Before opening your next marketing role, ask yourself what the business needs marketing to prove next. Once you can answer that, the hire gets a lot easier.
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