In Economics, we learn the theory of rational behavior, that individuals make decisions based on options that provide them with the highest amount of personal utility. As marketers, we realize that people make decisions emotionally. And as growth-focused executives, we strive to bring the rational and emotional together in a way that drives marketing performance.

Getting this balance right is difficult to achieve and is perhaps why Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are so disillusioned with their investments in marketing. According to Harvard Business Review’s Spotlight Series/The Trouble with CMOs, 80 percent of CEOs don’t trust their Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). Compared to just 10 percent of CEOs who feel the same about their Chief Financial Officers and Chief Information Officers.

As a result, the average tenure of a CMO is the shortest among C-level executives. Agencies don’t fare any better, with agency-client relationships lasting, on average, less than three years. This marketing churn chips away at the store of insight about an organization’s most important stakeholders: its clients, customers, users, consumers, shoppers, Etc. With the growing emphasis on audience-driven insights, user experience, and data-derived decision making, how can marketers be set up for success? Businesses can turn to Fractional Leadership, and, in this case, hire a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer.

Here are five tips that will make working with a fractional marketing executive more successful.

1. 1. Align the Fundamentals: Marketing fundamentals are only as strong as your business fundamentals. The underlying pillars of your marketing strategy must be derived from root issues (or strengths) thwarting (or propelling) your business growth. Failure to identify these drivers earlier in the process will only result in superficial tactics that are not designed or intended for growth.

1. 1. Focus on Meaningful Audience Insights: Insights about your audience don’t just come from demographic markers, such as age, income, location, title, and gender. These data may be easier to identify, but behavioral and psychographic information adds a dimension that results in a deeper understanding of a person’s intrinsic and aspirational motivations.If the ultimate objective of marketing activity is to build relationships that lead to sales, demographic data alone doesn’t get you there. Customer panels, qualitative research, and discussion groups with the sole purpose of listening to your customers, with no sales agenda, are a good investment for any client-centric leadership team.

1. 1. Create Campaign Frameworks: The exponential growth of digital platforms has made it easier to connect with audiences faster and cheaper than the monolithic media landscape of yesteryear. However, it has also made the task of execution much more complex. Creating frameworks that provide the latitude to A/B test variables within a loosely aligned structure can help bring order to chaos. A great example of this is the 5 “W” approach: Who? Why? What? Where? Which? Before launching a campaign, thinking through your frameworks collaboratively and cross-functionally helps form thoughtful hypotheses, identify variables that require interrogation, and prevent analysis paralysis.

1. 1. Rally Around Metrics That Matter: The ultimate objectives of any marketing team are to build brand equity and drive sales. Metrics that provide insight into how to deliver these outcomes matter. Therefore, map out the “path to conversion” from audience insight to sale. In navigating through all the vanity metrics, ask yourself the following questions to stay focused on what is important.-Is your NPS score strengthening or declining?
       

      –Is your message clear, relevant, and distinct?
      –Do you have clear benchmarks to evaluate your performance?
      –How are you measuring the quality of your acquisition activity?
      –Can you measure your yield, percent of interest that converts to sales?

1. Wholeheartedly Commit: Jeff Bezos is known to have said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” Too often, the steps that are most important for success — deep audience insights, design, and milestone-driven, iterative planning — are the ones most often skipped or dismissed. The consequence is often a “rush to fail,” which eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in marketing.

The truth is that a lot can go wrong before it goes right. These five ideas can help create an environment where the entire marketing team — internal and external — can collaborate openly, resolve conflict swiftly, and continuously optimize performance results, setting up marketing and your business for sustainable success. Learn more about the Fractional CMO role.

About the Author

Fran Biderman-Gross is the CEO and founder of Advantages, an Inc. 500 global digital branding and marketing agency whose firm assembles strategically lead, full-service teams for companies. Fran is a master at helping others translate their vision and values into a consistent and authentic brand experience. Fran is also the developer of the 3 Keys Workshop, co-author of 3 Keys Book, and an in-demand speaker and consultant who has empowered countless leaders to form the emotional connections that drive revenue growth.

At this point, you understand at a high level why bringing someone onto your leadership team who’s built a business like yours before will help you. In Part 1, we illustrated a high-level Fractional Leader engagement with a real-life business example. Now let’s take a look at the some of the details involved in a Fractional Leadership engagement.

Accountabilities and Deliverables

You and your FL will agree to certain deliverables or areas of accountability and a time frame in which you expect to see the results you want. This is a critical element of any type of Fractional Leadership engagement.

Here are some examples of the deliverables one Fractional Chief Sales Officer (FCSO) included in an agreement:

• Lead sales team to achieve the company’s already-established targets for the year
• Participate in weekly leadership team meetings
• Document the sales process and ensure the team is trained in it and follows it
• Determine and implement measurables to which she will hold herself and the members of the sales team accountable
• Collaborate with the head of marketing to ensure all efforts are absolutely in tandem
• Evaluate current CRM/technology and improve or revamp as appropriate
• If a client has implemented the EOS management framework,
  • Hold Same Page Meetings™ with the company’s Visionary (an EOS® term that usually refers to the CEO).
  • Participate in EOS sessions with their EOS Implementer®, if applicable.

You and your FL will structure the accountabilities based on the FL’s proven process and your own unique needs. The important thing is that you and your FL get absolutely on the same page regarding the deliverables or accountabilities so there is no misunderstanding or crossed wires later on.

Time Commitment

Fractional Leaders make three primary types of time commitments: X number of (i) days, (ii) half days, or (iii) hours per measuring period—that is, week or month. Some engagements even involve as much as half-time work; these individuals take on no more than one or two clients. Other FLs work with their clients only one or two hours per week or a half day per month.

You must agree with your FL on expectations when it comes to time commitment because you can’t define the accountabilities or deliverables without knowing how much time the FL has to accomplish them. As Gary Braun, owner of the FCSO firm Pivotal Advisors, says, you cannot expect your one-day-per-week FL to attend five meetings and still have time left over to create sales processes and manage a sales team.

You should also discuss with potential FLs their client load in general relative to his or her proposed time commitment. Mark O’Donnell, Visionary (CEO) at EOS Worldwide, cautions against entering into an engagement when the FL’s client capacity is filled to the max. As business ebbs and flows or an FL successfully enables you to grow, your needs may change.

“It’s set up for failure systemically when they have three to seven clients [if each are ten to fifteen hours per week]. They end up being forced to not do the right thing for one or more of their clients based on a nonlinear growth trajectory of all their clients.”

Another time-related factor is the fact that like everyone else, FLs need and want to take vacation from time to time. If they commit to a certain number of hours per week and a monthly retainer, they build in a mechanism for vacation time in their engagements.

Cost

Many Fractional Leaders charge a monthly retainer in exchange for a weekly or monthly time commitment. Some charge for each quarter in advance. And still others charge by the hour. Rates vary greatly depending on a number of factors:

• The time commitment
• The depth of the FL’s experience
• Whether the FL is an independent solo practitioner or using a licensed system (licensees generally charge higher rates than solo practitioners)
• Whether the FL is part of an Organizational Fractional Leader firm (OFL) (OFLs generally charge more than both licensees and independent solo FLs)
• The local or regional market (FLs in major metropolitan areas charge more than an equivalent person outside a metro area)

Because of the extreme variation in the size and type of companies, FLs’ experience level, and market rates in each geography, monthly retainer amounts vary significantly. It is therefore impossible to identify a narrow market rate for each type of FL.

Some FLs charge $2,000 for a half day per month or for one hour per week. Others charge $2,500 for a half day per week. Most charge $4,000 or $12,000 per month for a one-day-per-week commitment. I even know of some FLs whose clients pay about $15,000 per month for a one-day-per-week commitment.

Among those who charge an hourly fee, I have seen anywhere between $125 and $325 per hour. Some, both business owners and FLs, prefer the hourly model.

Finally, some FLs agree on a hybrid retainer/hourly approach with clients by establishing a retainer for X number of hours per week beyond which the FL will bill the client at an agreed-upon hourly rate. Another approach some FLs take is accepting a lower retainer in exchange for an equity interest.

Payment Terms

Many FLs, like myself, require clients to pay for each half month in advance, on the first and fifteenth of each month. I personally offer a money-back guarantee on the payment for the first half month if the client and I realize that we are not a good fit.

Others require a whole month in advance. And some require payment for each quarter in advance to take their clients’ minds off money and onto the work they should be doing together since the fees are already paid.

Length of Engagement

Engagement lengths vary from just one quarter to years-long. There is no typical amount of time because the reasons business owners retain an FL vary so significantly.

Those who lose a full-time member of the leadership team or who are just beginning a search process may retain an FL as an interim solution during the process. Such engagements may last only three to six months and end with the successful transition to the FL’s full-time replacement.

Other business owners retain fractional talent because they need an FL’s expertise and leadership but cannot yet afford someone full-time. Engagements like this often last one to two years or longer. They end when businesses’ finances and operations start to require full-time focus and commitment. Once they’ve onboarded the right person, usually with the FL’s help, the FL can help with the transition and step out of the way.

Accountabilities and deliverables, time commitment, cost, payment terms and length of engagement form the foundation of a FL engagement. To help you further define what the best FL engagement is for your business, in Part 3 we’ll discuss a strategic vs tactical FL as well as the categories of FLs, such as organizational, Independent and Licensee Fractional leaders.

Sometimes, illustrating the concept of Fractional Leadership by way of a real-life example can help make it easier to grasp its true value. Consider the following example of one business owner’s experience to better understand what FL engagements look like.

Jack¹ owns a design construction firm that focuses on medical offices, employs about 40 people, and has $14 to 16 million in annual revenue. His attention to detail and nearly obsessive commitment to quality work led him to essentially teach his sales, design, and construction teams that all decisions had to go through him. Every deal required his approval and input. He was intimately involved in design proposals and construction projects. Mistakes were unacceptable and his people did not really know how to predict what he would consider a mistake. It was his view that it was safer to run everything through him for approval.

The firm had hit a blockage. They tried to continue growing, but no matter what they did, they simply could not push past that $14 to $16 million revenue ceiling. But they could not figure out why this was happening.

Last year, Jack took his family on a resort and cruise vacation for the first time in about five years.  They had an amazing time. It was so refreshing because much of the time, particularly on the cruise, there was little or no cell phone reception, so he was able to truly enjoy the time with his family without interruption.

As a result of his time off, Jack returned to work well rested and rejuvenated. But, to his horror, Jack discovered that basically nothing had happened during his absence. Not only had his team made no sales, but they had also lost several of their prospects who needed to the work to move quickly. When the salespeople or designers could not move their projects forward, the potential customers simply went elsewhere.

This was a huge wake-up call for Jack and his team. They finally realized that because he had made himself indispensable to every single sales, design, and operational decision, he was the bottleneck creating the ceiling against which his firm was hitting its collective head. The team hadn’t built any processes or metrics to ensure that people made sales, completed designs, and constructed medical offices the right way, every time, with or without Jack’s involvement.

Inspired by the wake-up call, Jack retained a Fractional Chief Sales Officer (FCSO) to act as the company’s head of sales. The FCSO created a true sales process by clearly documenting the right and best way to do things. He also helped the sales team establish metrics so they had specific actions they knew to take every day and every week to ensure they made enough sales to achieve their goals. He helped the design team do the same thing.

Because of the systems, processes, and metrics the FCSO helped the company put into place and which he oversaw, Jack was able to start redirecting salespeople’s and designers’ inquiries to the right people. He started taking himself out of the equation so the team could sell design construction contracts without him. They started to see their revenues break through that $16 million ceiling and finally had the bandwidth to expand into other types of construction.

At this point, you understand at a high level why bringing someone onto your leadership team who’s built a business like yours before will help you. And if Jack’s situation leading up to his outsourcing a seasoned executive to bring his company’s business growth to the next level sounds at all familiar to you, it might be the right time for to consider hiring a Fractional Leader.

Learn more about each of the five types of Fractional senior executives: the Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (FCMO), Fractional Chief Sales Officer (FCSO), Fractional Chief Operating Officer (FCOO), Fractional Chief Financial Officer (FCFO) and Fractional Chief Technology Officer (FCTO). 

1. Owner’s names has been changed.

 

In a recent Authority Magazine Q&A article, Fractional Leadership Founder and CEO Ben Wolf shares his story about the challenges he encountered on his way to forming his own business and why he never gave up.

Q: Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

A: I left the company where I “grew up” entrepreneurially — a healthcare startup called FreedomCare — because I realized that I like making massive change and building things and my ability to do that had plateaued. I accepted a role as COO at a smaller organization I hoped would be an even greater opportunity long-term to make a massive difference in their mission, growth, and organizational health.

While I knew about some of their major organizational challenges, I had already joined the company when I Iearned about some organizational dysfunction among the partners. This dynamic doomed me to presiding over a slow-motion train wreck I was powerless to avoid.  

I had just left a stable position and had to choose between the misery of feeling responsible to solve problems I was not permitted to even address and risking going out on my own with a wife and four children to support with no certain prospects. With my wife’s support and some savings, I had built up doing some consulting work on the side, I decided that the misery of staying where I was outweighed the risk of taking the entrepreneurial leap.  

I submitted my resignation two months after starting the new role and hung up my shingle as a Fractional Integrator, a term coined by Fractional COOs who work with companies running on the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®). I was very scared.

I began doing business development by having calls with business owners, various kinds of trusted advisors, other Fractional Leaders, and EOS Implementers®. I started a podcast called Win / Win — An Entrepreneurial Community, met with 12-18 people every week, and created measurables for myself to ensure I was doing the right kind of business development work for my new solopreneur business.

It was maddening at the beginning. Together with my beloved wife, before I was able to get any clients, it felt like that song from The Greatest Showman, “Never sure, never know how far we could fall. But it’s all an adventure. That comes with a breathtaking view. Walking a tightrope with you.”

Finally, after over three months, I got my first client. That was amazing! I helped drive massive change with that company and they grew their top-line revenue 25% the first quarter I worked with them. Things got a lot easier for me personally then, but we were still financially walking on a tightrope.

I continued hacking away at emailing, Zooming, calling, and meeting with people for another six months, always putting on a confident, non-desperate affect, when COVID-19 hit. All the business owners I was speaking with froze up, but I kept plugging away at the emails, calls, and Zoom meetings. I wondered whether I would ever feel successful. Would it ever get easier?

Then, in May 2020, the dam finally broke. As people’s paralysis broke and they realized they could no longer put their lives and businesses on hold, more and more started reaching out to me to be their Fractional Integrator. I got one client, and then another, and then another. Once I became fully booked, I began referring the leads I continued to get to other Fractional Integrators and getting invited as a speaker at various entrepreneurial groups. I began paying off my credit card and student loan debt. It was a huge relief I would never have experienced if I hadn’t kept up my weekly regimen of emails, calls, and meetings without regard to the self-doubt I felt.

Q: So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success? 

A: As John Astin used to say on Night Court, “I’m feeling much better now.” Because I kept going out there and helping whoever I could and connecting with more and more people, I started to develop a bit of a reputation as one of the most competent Fractional Integrators and one of the industry leaders in the Fractional Leadership community in general.

Because I continued getting so many referrals and leads for Fractional Integrator clients, I converted my “solo-preneurship” into a firm, Wolf’s Edge Consulting, with several other Fractional Integrators. I developed a proven process we took our clients through, identified what made us unique, and set up a meeting pulse through which we helped resolve each other’s challenges with clients. Now none of us are on an island, a challenge every solopreneur knows too well. 

And the people I met through my podcast, in the EOS community, and in the Fractional Leadership communities ended up making me realize that the whole Fractional Leadership world was completely fractured. There were thousands of websites by the various Fractional Leaders, both firms and solo practitioners, but there was absolutely no center of gravity in this relatively new industry. That ended up being my inspiration to write Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach and creating FractionalLeadership.io as the first vetted Fractional Leader referral platform for business owners.

Read the full Authority Magazine piece, “Ben Wolf of Fractional Leadership: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company.”

Perhaps there are a few people who can succeed in business quickly, but I’m not one of them. It took me three months to get my first client when I went out on my own and eleven months before things really started taking off. I had self-doubt and felt discouraged, though I never showed it outwardly. If I gave up and accepted a full-time job, which several people offered me, it would have guaranteed my failure at creating two businesses and taking on a formative role in the Fractional Leadership industry.

Boy, am I glad I didn’t give up. I learned that three character traits contributed most to my business success:

1. Disciplined persistence
2. A help-first approach to all interactions, and
3. Authenticity

With disciplined persistence, I created measurables for myself and set minimum numbers of email and (custom-written) LinkedIn reach-outs, calls, and presentations each week, month, and quarter. I almost never went below these quotas. These efforts in the long run have a cumulative effect. I wish there was a shortcut, but I haven’t found one that works.

Next, I recognized that nobody wants to be sold to. You have to approach every email, call, and meeting with a help-first approach. Don’t wait for people to give you a lead or make an introduction before you help them. As the saying goes, people only care how much you know after they know how much you care. Here are a few simple ways to do this:

• In every email, share an article or resource you know from a prior conversation the person can really use or needs.
• Take notes about the people you speak with on your calls and refer to those notes before you send an email or have your next meeting with them. Ask about their spouse, kids, hobby, or cause the next time you interact with them.
• Refer other people to them whenever it’s helpful, even if it has nothing to do with what you do. Send them a great florist, app recommendation, favorite movie, show, or connect them with a competitor of yours if they’re a better fit for the person.

Keep this approach up and you’ll build up social capital, your reputation, and people will become more likely to think of you when they or their friends actually do need someone with your experience.

Finally, being authentic can go a long way to developing business relationships. Some people feel they succeed by ensuring that every phrase they utter, every conversation they have, and every podcast interview they do is highly engineered to make them look maximally professional, successful, smooth, and polished. I’m sure that this is one approach, but to me, such people feel fake, slick, and untrustworthy.

I’m not great at posturing and creating highly calculated interactions with people anyway, so my approach is to speak honestly. I openly mention my areas of weakness or past mistakes when it comes up in conversation because it tells people that I am what they see. They don’t have to wonder what I’m concealing because they see I’m not trying to carefully maintain the perfect veneer.

By being authentic with people, they respect and trust me more because they’re not wondering who or what I really am and don’t feel like I’m trying to sell them something if it’s not right for them.

If you’re thinking of starting a business, knowing the positive impact these three traits ahead of time can help give you peace of mind and confidence from the start. (For other insights I believe help makes a successful business and leaders in my blog “The Most Underestimated Aspect of a Successful Company.”)

Perfection Can Hold You Back

As a business owner, insisting on perfection 100 percent of the time won’t get you results. In my experience as a Fractional Leader, the most common mistake I see an entrepreneur or organization’s leadership commit is waiting until everything is “perfect” before launching a new business, product, service, or system.

The Pareto Principle, also called the “80% Rule,” states that most of the time, you get 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of your effort. After your first main push toward creating your new business or product, you’ll find yourself 80 percent of the way toward completion. You then spend 80% of your effort on the remaining 20 percent of the results you need. And your efforts get less and less productive the further into the remaining 20 percent you get. Your efforts have an exponentially diminishing rate of return.

Get yourself most of the way there toward your minimum viable product (MVP), and then just launch it. You’d continue improving and iterating after release anyway, and your efforts at building “perfection” before testing your product or service against the reality of the real world are almost certainly not “perfect” anyway.

Most of the time, the right path is “launch and learn.”

If you can model your business approach around being persistent, helping first and being authentic while at the same time not letting a mindset that seeks perfection slow your progress down, you’re well on the road to success.

The blog is comprised of modified excerpts from Authority Magazine‘s December 2021 article, “Ben Wolf of Fractional Leadership: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company