A Fractional CMO’s Guide to Spotting the Warning Signs and Fixing Them Properly
After more than 20 years leading marketing functions across regulated, complex and fast-moving businesses, I’ve learned one thing very clearly:
Most companies do not have a marketing problem. They have a marketing leadership problem.
On paper, everything looks fine. There’s a team. There’s activity. Campaigns are going out the door, but scratch beneath the surface and the cracks appear quickly. Poor alignment with the business. Weak data. Confused priorities. Lots of effort. Very little commercial clarity.
This is usually the point where I’m brought in as a Fractional CMO.
Not to “do more marketing”, but to answer a much more important question: Is the marketing department actually working as it should?
In this article, I’ll show you how to assess that properly, the warning signs I see time and time again, and how I fix them when I step in as an outsourced marketing leader.
Why Marketing Often Looks Busy but Delivers Very Little
One of the biggest myths in business is that marketing failure is obvious. It isn’t.
Rarely does a CEO walk in to find nothing happening. Instead, they see a calendar full of activity, a social feed being updated, emails being sent, agencies being paid, dashboards full of numbers and a team that insists they are flat out.
And yet revenue growth stalls. Sales complain about lead quality. The board asks awkward questions. Confidence in marketing quietly erodes.
In my experience, this happens when marketing becomes execution-led rather than strategy-led.
Activity replaces intent. Output replaces outcomes. That is not a capability issue. It is a leadership one.
The First Question I Always Ask
When I start working with a business, I ask the same question every time:
“Explain to me who your ideal customer is, what problem you solve for them, and how marketing is supposed to influence revenue.”
If that answer is unclear, inconsistent, or different depending on who I ask, everything downstream is already compromised.
Strategy cannot exist without choices.
What I often see instead is vague, catch-all messaging designed to appeal to everyone and therefore resonates with no one. In the worst cases, teams default to copying competitors because it feels safer than taking a position. That kind of copycat marketing strips out differentiation and turns marketing into noise rather than a growth lever.
A classic symptom of this misalignment is activity without intent. Senior stakeholders ask for things like “a viral social campaign” or “more brand awareness” with no link to pipeline, customer acquisition, or commercial outcomes. When marketing activity is disconnected from sales impact, it becomes busy work rather than a driver of growth.
The Warning Signs Your Marketing Function Is Not Working
Over the years, whether in-house or as a Fractional CMO, the same warning signs appear again and again.
1. No Clear Commercial Accountability
If marketing cannot clearly show how it contributes to revenue, pipeline, retention or lifetime value, it is failing its most basic purpose.
I regularly inherit teams that report on impressions, clicks, engagement rates and email opens, but cannot answer simple questions like:
- How much pipeline did marketing influence last quarter?
- Which channels actually convert into revenue?
- What does a good lead look like for sales?
Marketing metrics without a commercial context create false confidence.
2. Strategy Exists in Documents, Not in Behaviour
Another red flag is when a marketing strategy technically exists, but day-to-day activity bears no resemblance to it.
Campaigns are reactive. Priorities change daily. Senior stakeholders drop requests directly onto the team. Everything becomes urgent, and nothing is important.
This usually tells me the strategy was written once and never operationalised. A proper strategy should actively filter decisions, not sit in a folder gathering dust.
3. Sales and Marketing Are Politely Misaligned
When sales say the leads are poor and marketing say sales are not following up, the problem is not effort. It is alignment.
In many businesses, no one has defined what a qualified lead actually is. There are no agreed service levels, no shared metrics and no joint ownership of outcomes.
As a Fractional CMO, one of my first fixes is to force clarity here. Marketing and sales either operate as one revenue system or they undermine each other quietly.
4. The Martech Stack Is Overbuilt and Underused
I see this constantly.
Multiple tools are doing overlapping jobs. CRMs are full of duplicate or incomplete data. Automation switched on without thought. Reporting is stitched together manually because nothing talks to anything else properly.
The irony is that businesses are often paying for sophisticated marketing technology while using a fraction of its capability.
This is not a tooling problem. It is an architecture and governance problem.
5. Marketing Feels Expensive but Indispensable
Perhaps the biggest warning sign is when leadership feels uneasy about marketing spend but is afraid to touch it.
They suspect waste, but cannot see clearly enough to cut or redirect investment without risk.
This is where confidence in marketing leadership has already been lost.
How I Fix This as a Fractional CMO
When I step in as a Fractional CMO, I do not start with campaigns. I start with structure, clarity and control.
Step 1. A Proper Marketing Function Audit
I assess the marketing function as a system, not a set of tactics.
This includes:
- Strategy and positioning
- Team structure and capability
- Data, CRM and reporting integrity
- Martech stack efficiency
- Funnel performance from first touch to revenue
- Alignment with sales and leadership
This audit is designed to surface truth quickly. Not opinions. Not excuses.
Step 2. Re-anchor Marketing to Business Outcomes
I reset marketing objectives so they are explicitly tied to business goals.
That might be pipeline growth, customer acquisition cost, retention, cross-sell, or brand trust in regulated environments. Whatever matters commercially, marketing aligns to it.
Every activity must earn its place.
Step 3. Fix Data and Reporting First
Without clean data, marketing becomes guesswork.
I have led full CRM replacements, rebuilt data models, redefined segmentation and implemented reporting frameworks that give leadership confidence again.
When you can clearly see what is working and what is not, decision-making improves overnight.
Step 4. Create Operating Discipline
I introduce cadence, structure and accountability.
Weekly performance reviews. Clear ownership. Defined priorities. Fewer but better initiatives.
This is often where teams feel the biggest shift. Less chaos. More focus. Better output.
Step 5. Upskill and Stabilise the Team
Most marketing teams do not need replacing. They need leadership, clarity and development.
As a Fractional CMO, I mentor senior marketers, support junior staff and create an environment where people can actually perform.
Confidence returns quickly when people understand what success looks like.
Why Fractional CMO Services Work
A full-time CMO is not always the right answer.
Many businesses need senior marketing leadership, but not at full cost or full time. Others need stabilisation, transformation or a reset before hiring permanently. That is where a Fractional CMO adds real value.
You get:
- Board-level marketing leadership
- Strategic and hands-on execution
- Commercial accountability
- No long-term overhead
- No politics
- No jargon
Just focus, experience and delivery.
Start with a marketing audit today
If your marketing department feels busy but unclear, expensive but untouchable, or active but disconnected from revenue, that is not a failure of effort.
It is a failure of leadership structure, and it is entirely fixable.
If you want an honest assessment of whether your marketing function is working as it should, and what to do about it, that is exactly the role I step into as a Fractional CMO.
No noise. No vanity metrics. Just marketing that earns its place at the table.