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FRACTIONAL MATH · ISSUE 009
Marketing Director. VP of Marketing. CMO. Most job posts use the three like they are the same job at three price points.
They are not the same job.
Most of the marketing leadership hires I watch fail have nothing to do with the person. The business handed someone a mandate built for a different seat, and then graded them against the seat it thought it filled.
The conflation is easy to understand. From the outside the three jobs look identical. Campaigns ship, a dashboard exists, someone presents at the offsite. The difference only shows up in what each seat is actually mandated to own, and by the time it shows up, you have already made the hire.
Three jobs, three mandates
A Director of Marketing runs a channel or a function: paid media, content, product marketing, whichever lever is biggest. They execute inside a strategy someone else already set. What a Director needs is a clear lane and a budget sized to it. Hand a Director company strategy with no authority to match and they either freeze or overreach.
A VP of Marketing is the bridge. They own the full budget, build and run the team, and carry a revenue commitment to the leadership table. What a VP needs is a strategy that is already settled and real hiring authority. Drop a VP into a company with no positioning and no ICP and they will default to activity, because activity is the only lever available without a strategy to execute against. That is not the VP failing. That is the only move on the board.
A CMO operates at the business level: pricing, market entry, category narrative, the bets that shape how the company competes rather than how it advertises. What a CMO needs is board access and real strategic authority. Hire one into a Director's job and you get an expensive executive burning out on campaigns beneath the seat, or stalling the org on brand work the business cannot act on yet.
The same ladder in two businesses
A multi-location operator usually needs a Director for one channel long before it needs a VP, and a full-time CMO title is rare in the $3M to $50M band. What that business actually needs in the seat is CMO-level thinking, part-time: someone to set the positioning and the measurement framework, then hand channel work to a Director or a specialist.
A B2B SaaS company in the same band usually starts with a Director owning demand generation or product marketing. A VP becomes right once there is a proven motion and a team of specialists that needs daily management, aligned with Sales on a shared pipeline number. A CMO becomes relevant when the questions turn category-level and board-facing: how do we position for the next round, how do we compete with a better-funded entrant. A VP was never mandated to answer those.
None of this is about titles. It is about matching the mandate to the seat before you match a person to the title.
THE NUMBER
4 years
Average CMO tenure, among the shortest seats in the C-suite. Whatever you pay to fill the seat, the search comes around again sooner than the board plans for.
The math under the ladder
Regulars have seen the full-time math here before. All-in, a CMO for this band runs $300,000 to $450,000 a year, midpoint about $375,000, and year one lands closer to $400,000 to $450,000 once you add a retained-search fee and 6 to 12 months of ramp. A fractional CMO runs $96,000 to $264,000 a year, roughly 25 to 40 percent of the full-time cost, and installs the same strategic layer: the one a Director cannot set and a VP cannot execute without.
The point is not that a full-time CMO is wrong. It is that the timing is a real decision, and most businesses in this band are earlier on the ladder than the job post admits.
Do this Monday
Three questions, not a job description.
Is there a strategy to execute, or does one still need to be set? If nobody in the business can say in one sentence who the best customer is and why you win, that is a strategy problem, not a hiring problem. No title fixes it.
Is there a team big enough to need a full-time manager? One or two people plus some agencies is early for a VP. Five or more specialists needing daily direction is not.
Is the open question about a channel, or about the business? "Our paid spend isn't converting" points to a Director. "We don't know how to compete with a better-funded entrant" points to a CMO. Answer to the wrong seat and you get a well-run channel that never touches the real problem.
None of this needs a recruiter yet. It needs an honest answer to which question is actually open: the channel, the team, or the business. The title follows from that.
Want to know which seat your business needs right now? The Operator's Scorecard will tell you in about 5 minutes, free.
See you next week.
Will Gray
Founder, Graystone Consulting
THE BOARD
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