In an ever-changing environment, which business always is, the challenges facing CEOs and CMOs must be addressed with adept skills and solutions that not only solve their problems but also give them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
While being a “Chief” of anything inherently means having the highest authority, it doesn’t mean they can lead alone, banking on their IQ, EQ, or experience.
Forbes Councils lists the top 5 Business Challenges faced by executives as the following:
- Generating Revenue
- Time Restraints
- Leadership
- Growth/Strategy
- Marketing
While marketplace conditions will bring specific challenges to the leader’s plate, these five challenges will always be the keystone of effective executive leadership.
On top of having the vision and driving the outcomes, leaders also must have the capacity to positively affect the strategy and tactics to deal with the many moving targets on a day-to-day basis.
To enhance this capacity, CEOs and CMOs bring on Fractional CMOs to help manage the strategy and tactics and the teams performing them.
With a Fractional Partner lending their expertise, executives can be
- Even more effective
- More confident in their strategy and planning
- More focused on revenue growth and brand recognition
- Freed up and have more time for leading the company vision
Top challenges mitigated by the Fractional Partner Model
Challenge # 1 — Generating Revenue
The primary driver of any CEO and CMO is generating revenue – whether it comes from lead generation, higher closing ratios, or recurring revenues.
They lead the vision for finding new markets, driving leads, and building their brand.
Using the Fractional Partner model in their organizations ensures marketing, sales, and finance integration and alignment. As a result, an executive’s vision and desired outcomes are bolstered, supported, and turned out.
A Fractional Partner’s role is to focus on outcomes to
- Get clarity on the direction the organization is going
- Bring expert and intelligent guidance and alignment between teams
- Mitigate any team confusion and frustration that comes with disrupting conflicting strategies.
- Deliver more significant ROI on the marketing budget.
With this alignment, the organization has clarity of purpose and focus on strategy to
- Generate desired revenue
- Increase brand awareness > competitive advantage
- Faster results and more significant ROI with less struggle
- Reduce the challenge of the silo effect between departments and teams
Challenge #2 — Time Constraints
Time is the most scarce resource any CEO and CMO has. Yet, while they have the same 24 hours in their day, everyone seems to demand more and more of it.
When time pressure is most acute, their focus is impaired, so they need more capacity to strategize and think through plans.
If crucial decisions are made without complete information, strategy gets off course, and achieving the desired outcomes becomes another challenge.
The Fractional Partner model puts time back into the executive’s day to focus on the decisions they need to make.
Fractional Partners have diverse backgrounds and experiences to help leaders recognize this hardship and can step in to deliver the desired outcomes:
- Assuring the company’s ability to adapt
- Recurrently meet marketing goals
- Deliver results to stakeholders
Challenge #3 — Leadership
Leadership, defined as influencing others to follow, includes attracting and keeping the right talent on the team.
Many organizations turn to external and contracted team members (agencies, freelancers, contractors, etc.) to keep a whole team. Still, contractors have fewer ties and less loyalty and can leave organizations in a lurch if they’re unhappy.
Without consistent team players working together and aligned to the strategy, leadership has to spend more time managing teams and maintaining momentum.
One of the benefits of a successful Fractional Partner model is to bring in talent to fill gaps within the organization. They can
- Manage the necessary resources needed to combat current and upcoming challenges,
- Implement the right strategies,
- Help leadership invest appropriately in talent, and
- Keep all players working together towards the company’s goals.
When the right people are on the team, executives:
- Have confident teams that know how to execute the marketing strategy
- Adapt to changes more easily and quickly.
- Obtain best practices and systems to achieve goals.
Challenge #4 — Growth and Strategy
Depending on a CEO and their specific mission, whether taking the company to the next level, expanding nationally, creating a long-term strategy, etc., hiring a Fractional Partner can make the difference between success and failure.
Fractional Partners bring proactive thinking, tenacity, and decades of expertise in developing, aligning, and executing marketing strategies.
To promote a solid strategy that leads to the growth executives want, a Fractional Partner’s proficiency is unmatched in their ability to:
- Finding areas of friction in current marketing strategies
- Observe and watch for current and upcoming challenges that could interfere with accomplishing company objectives
- Connect brand strategy to business outcomes
- Align teams across sales and marketing to fulfill the company initiatives
Challenge #5 — Marketing
CEOs and CMOs don’t always collaborate to execute strategies and promote growth.
Sometimes the disorganization of strategies or lack of confidence in each other’s ability to lead their part of the mission can derail a plan put in place.
A Fractional Partner supports the executives’ efforts to achieve the company’s mission by
- Organizing strategies across teams,
- Investing the right dollars in the right place,
- Ensuring all marketing stays on plan, and
- Guiding all players in doing their part.
Fractional Partners can execute marketing plans in an everchanging marketplace where the thinking and delivery platforms morph daily, and executives can’t keep up with trends, tools, and the latest practices in marketing.
Because Fractional Partners work with multiple companies and marketing teams, the depth and breadth of their vision to see how market changes affect companies’ marketing efforts are enhanced.
Hiring a Fractional Partner adds:
- Proactive guidance to solve marketing problems
- Easy implementation of marketing strategy
- Clarity and purpose to your teams
- Ability to meet desired outcomes
Why hire a Fractional Partner to mitigate your challenges?
Being pressured by the ever-moving targets of marketplace changes and the leadership challenges that come with them is intrinsic to the leadership role.
CEOs and CMOs must understand there are challenges and ensure they have someone with the expertise to meet them and thrive through them.
Hiring a Fractional Partner is getting a trusted advisor who gathers the insights needed and works with executives to assess, plan, align, execute, and achieve.
They come with the intellect, education, expertise from multiple companies, and the capacity to see the challenges as opportunities to win.
A Fractional Partner comes on board to support the CEO and CMO through their challenges and to achieve desired outcomes with solutions implemented with teams in place.
So, what’s next?
If you’re facing these challenges and are ready to get past them, we can provide the clarity, confidence, and ROI to make it happen.
Book a complimentary 30-minute advisory session with our team today.
We’ll talk about your business and how we can help your team achieve your strategic and business goals.
