Your marketing team is busy. Campaigns are running. Content is being published. Yet somehow, revenue isn't growing the way it should.
Sound familiar? You're experiencing what I call the Marketing Leadership Gap -that frustrating space between having marketing activity and having marketing strategy.
The conventional advice is simple: "You need a CMO." But here's what nobody tells you: hiring a full-time CMO is the wrong move for 80% of companies under €10M in revenue.
The Hidden Cost of the Wrong Hire
A full-time CMO in Germany costs €150,000-250,000 annually, plus equity expectations, plus the 6-12 months it takes to find, hire, and onboard the right person. For a Series A company burning runway, that's a massive bet.
But the alternative -promoting your best marketing manager or letting the CEO handle strategy -creates its own problems. You end up with tactical execution without strategic direction, or strategic ideas without bandwidth for execution.
The Marketing Leadership Gap Assessment
After working with dozens of companies navigating this exact decision, I've developed a simple framework. Answer these five questions honestly:
1. Who decides what marketing should focus on next quarter?
If your answer involves a committee, the CEO's gut feeling, or "whoever speaks loudest," you have a leadership gap. Marketing without a single accountable strategist becomes a democracy of opinions -and democracies don't ship campaigns.
Gap indicator: Marketing priorities change based on who attended the last meeting.
2. Can your team explain how marketing activities connect to revenue?
I'm not talking about vanity metrics. I mean: can someone draw the line from that LinkedIn campaign to pipeline to closed deals? If your marketing team reports impressions and clicks while sales reports revenue, you're operating two different businesses.
Gap indicator: Marketing and sales have different definitions of a "qualified lead."
3. When did you last kill a marketing initiative that wasn't working?
Teams without strategic leadership keep doing what they've always done. They add new channels but never subtract old ones. The result is a bloated marketing operation where everyone is busy but nothing is optimized.
Gap indicator: You're still running the same campaigns you ran two years ago, with the same results.
4. Who's responsible for marketing's contribution to the board deck?
Here's a test that cuts through the noise: when it's time to report to investors or the board, who synthesizes marketing into a strategic narrative? If the CEO has to do this themselves -or worse, if marketing data is just appended as an afterthought -you're missing executive-level marketing thinking.
Gap indicator: Marketing slides in board decks focus on activities, not outcomes.
5. Does your sales team create their own marketing materials?
This is the canary in the coal mine. When sales starts making their own one-pagers, pitch decks, and email templates, it means marketing isn't serving their needs strategically. It's not a sales problem -it's a marketing leadership problem.
Gap indicator: Sales has a "swipe file" of materials they've created themselves.
Scoring Your Leadership Gap
Count how many gap indicators apply to your company:
- 0-1 gaps: You likely don't need external marketing leadership yet. Focus on execution.
- 2-3 gaps: You're in the fractional CMO sweet spot. Strategic leadership would accelerate growth without the overhead of a full-time hire.
- 4-5 gaps: You need marketing leadership urgently. Consider whether you need someone full-time to also manage a team rebuild, or fractional to set strategy while your team executes.
Why Fractional Beats Full-Time (For Now)
Most advice about fractional CMOs focuses on cost savings. That's the wrong frame. The real advantage is speed to impact.
A fractional CMO brings pattern recognition from working across multiple companies. They've seen your exact challenges before -the misaligned sales and marketing handoff, the founder who wants to approve every piece of content, the attribution problem that makes ROI invisible.
They can diagnose in weeks what would take a new full-time hire months to understand.
When to Go Full-Time Instead
Fractional leadership isn't always the answer. You should hire a full-time CMO when:
- You're scaling past €15-20M revenue and marketing complexity requires daily strategic attention
- You're preparing for a major exit or IPO and need someone with equity incentive to maximize valuation
- Your marketing team exceeds 8-10 people and needs dedicated people management
- Marketing is your primary competitive advantage (consumer brands, B2C marketplaces)
For everyone else -especially B2B companies between €2-15M -fractional leadership closes the gap without the commitment.
The Bottom Line
The Marketing Leadership Gap isn't about headcount. It's about having someone who can answer the question: "What should marketing do next, and why?"
If that question doesn't have a clear owner in your company, you've identified your problem. The solution might be a full-time CMO, a fractional CMO, or even a strategic advisor -but doing nothing guarantees the gap only widens.
Take the assessment. Be honest about what you find. Then make a decision.