The question usually arrives as a comparison of two numbers. A salary on one side, a monthly fee on the other, and whichever is smaller wins.
That comparison is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that consistently costs founders money.
Not because the salary figure is inaccurate. Because it is only the visible part of what a hire costs, and because neither number tells you the thing you actually need to know, which is when marketing starts contributing.
What the salary line leaves out
Take whatever number you have in mind for a senior marketing leader. Now add the parts that never appear in the job advert.
Employer costs, which vary by country but are rarely trivial. Recruitment, whether that is an agency percentage or the weeks your own time disappears into a search. Equity, if you are early enough that equity is part of the offer. Tooling and budget, because a marketing leader without a budget is an expensive strategist.
Then add the part almost nobody counts: the months before that person is useful.
A senior hire in B2B technology needs to learn your product, your category, your buyers and your sales motion before their judgement is worth more than a guess. In cybersecurity that ramp is longer, because the buyer is technical and the trust bar is high. Three to six months is normal. You are paying the full cost throughout.
The cost nobody budgets for
The mis-hire.
Marketing hires go wrong more often than engineering hires, and they go wrong quietly. An engineer who cannot do the job is obvious within weeks. A marketing leader who is not right for your stage can look busy for a year.
When it does not work you have lost the salary, the ramp, the opportunity cost of a year of go-to-market, and often a departure that unsettles the rest of the team. Founders who have been through it once tend to be far more careful the second time, which is usually when they start asking about fractional arrangements.
We are not claiming a fractional arrangement cannot disappoint you. It can. But it fails in weeks rather than quarters, and unwinding it does not require a difficult conversation about someone's livelihood.
What you are actually buying, in each case
These are not the same product at different prices. They are different products.
A hire buys you capacity and continuity. Someone in your standups, in your Slack all day, accumulating context that never has to be re-explained. Over years that compounds into something a part-time arrangement cannot match.
A fractional team buys you seniority and speed. Judgement that has already been earned somewhere else, available immediately, at a fraction of the time commitment. What you give up is presence.
Which one is right depends on a question that has nothing to do with either number: do you already know what your marketing should be doing?
If you do, and the work is execution at volume, hire. Capacity is the constraint and capacity is what a hire gives you.
If you do not, hiring is expensive guessing. You are asking a candidate to define the role during their interview, then judging them against a standard you have not set.
On the money, since you asked
We do not publish pricing, for the ordinary reason that engagements differ enough that a number on a page would mislead more people than it helped.
What we will say plainly: a fractional engagement costs less than a full-time marketing manager or director, and less than the agencies most companies compare us against. That is not a discount. It is a consequence of buying senior time in the amount you need rather than in whole days you have to fill.
The more useful figure is not what it costs but when it starts working. With a strategy agreed and a team that executes quickly, the first movement usually shows up inside a month. Not a transformed pipeline in a month. Movement, in the numbers you were watching before we arrived.
The comparison that is worth making
Stop comparing annual cost. Compare cost per month of useful output over the first year.
A hire delivers roughly nine months of useful output in year one, if the hire is right. A fractional engagement delivers from the first few weeks, at lower total cost, with an exit that costs nothing but notice.
Run that arithmetic honestly and the answer is often obvious. Sometimes it favours the hire, and when it does we say so.
The thing most people get wrong about the choice
They treat it as permanent.
The common sequence is that a fractional team establishes the strategy, proves what works, writes the role definition that the evidence supports, and then helps hire into it. The engagement narrows as the internal team grows.
That is not a fallback. It is the sensible order: work out what the job is, then hire for the job you now understand rather than the one you imagined.
We set the wider comparison out on fractional CMO versus a full-time hire, including where the full-time hire genuinely wins.
The question is never which is cheaper. It is which mistake you can afford.
