Where I've worked
Every marketing hire is a cost until the marketing can show it wins customers for less than they are worth. Most never show it. I put that test in place, and the way of working that keeps marketing measured against it. Once it is in, it is yours.
Permanent, part-time or interim, the arrangement makes little difference to the result. The playbook rarely changes: review the ICPs, refresh the messaging, adjust the channels, fill the calendar. The work that looks like progress.
What decides whether marketing pays is not the hours booked or the title on the door. It is where the strategy starts: the data beneath it, and whether the spend is built on that. Start from the wrong place, as marketing usually does, and the numbers do not move. It is why marketing has the shortest tenure in the C-suite, and why the next appointment repeats it.
Hence the name. When marketing cannot show what it returns, the honest question is the one this practice is named for. Why marketing at all?
The advice to a growing business is that it needs senior marketing but cannot yet afford it, so it should buy a fraction. That gets one word wrong: afford. A marketing leader is not funded out of revenue. They are funded out of the return on what marketing already spends, and whether that return can carry the hire is a question with an answer.
Almost no growing business has been shown it, because no one is measuring. Do the sum and the picture usually turns: the acquisition cost already on the books would justify the leader the business was told to do without. If the expertise is needed, it is needed. What is missing is the evidence to hire on, and that is what the audit settles, before a penny of salary is committed.
What does a customer cost you to win, and what are they worth once they stay? That one comparison tells you whether marketing is building the business or draining it.
Everything follows from the answer: which customers to chase, which to let go, where the budget goes, what good looks like. It is the discipline finance already lives by, applied to marketing, in numbers your board trusts.
See the diagnostic →The standard stays after I leave, so you are not buying my presence, you are buying the discipline.
I was trained in sales by IBM, eighteen months, pass or fail, then sold software for three years before IBM trained me in marketing. So I have sat in the seat marketing usually reports on, which is why I will not turn your marketing into a second sales team. Since then I have been CMO and marketing VP at global technology brands more than once, led teams across regions, and run budgets that answered to a board. Today I split my time between advising businesses on this and building one of my own. I am writing a book on how B2B marketing learned to look productive without being accountable.
Run marketing with me for a stretch, alongside your team, or as a steady hand mentoring the leader you already have. As much or as little as it takes to make the test yours. The starting point does not change: the money comes first.
Start with the diagnostic for a finance-grade read on where you stand, or book a call to talk it through. Either way, you start from the number.