You’re Hiring a Marketing Manager. But Who Sets the Strategy They’ll Execute?
I talk to founders every week who are about to make the same expensive mistake.
They've built a good product. They've closed their first customers. Now they're raising a Series A or have just finished it — and they're ready to "do marketing properly." So they open a job listing for a Marketing Manager.
Here's the thing nobody tells them: a Marketing Manager is an executor, not a strategist.
They're brilliant at running campaigns. Writing content. Managing agencies. Coordinating launches. But ask them to build a positioning framework from scratch, decide which market to enter first, or define the ICPs your sales team should be targeting — and most of them will look at you and wait.
They're waiting for strategy. And nobody has given it to them.
The gap between funding and growth
You've just raised €10M. You have 25 people, growing fast. Marketing has been done by you, the co-founder, in between everything else. You know it's not enough — so you hire someone to take over.
The Marketing Manager starts on Monday. They ask:
Who's our primary buyer persona?
What's our positioning versus competitors?
Which channels have historically converted?
What's the MRR target, and how does marketing contribute to it?
If you don't have clear answers to those questions — and most founders at this stage don't, because they were too busy building — your new Marketing Manager will spend months figuring it out. Burning budget on the wrong channels. Building brand before you've found the message that converts.
This isn't their fault. They're doing the job you hired them for. The gap is in the layer above: strategy.
What a Fractional CMO actually does
I've worked with 200+ B2B companies over 18 years. The pattern shows up constantly in the 20-50 employee phase.
A Fractional CMO comes in and does the work that nobody else is positioned to do:
Defines positioning — Who you're for, who you're not for, and why you win when you win.
Builds the go-to-market — Which markets, which segments, which channels, in which order.
Sets the KPIs — What does success look like in 90 days? In 12 months? How does marketing contribute to ARR?
Builds the stack — What tools do you need? What do you already have? What's redundant?
Creates the playbook — So your Marketing Manager (and the next one) can execute with clarity.
That last part matters. A Fractional CMO isn't a replacement for a Marketing Manager. They're the foundation that makes your Marketing Manager effective from day one.
The honest economics
A full-time senior Marketing Manager in the Netherlands costs €50,000–€70,000 per year in salary, plus employer costs. Add agency fees for the work they can't do themselves. You're looking at €90,000–€120,000 per year before any meaningful marketing budget.
And that assumes you hired the right person. In my experience, the first marketing hire has a high failure rate — because the strategic direction was unclear, and the hire wasn't set up to succeed.
A Fractional CMO engagement runs €3,500–€6,500 per month. You get C-level strategic input, 18 years of pattern recognition across 200+ companies, and a playbook that survives when the person executing it changes.
Most clients run both in parallel: a Fractional CMO setting direction, a Marketing Manager executing it. The CMO role can taper off once the strategy is established — often after 6–12 months.
The question before the hire
Before you write the Marketing Manager job description, ask yourself one question:
Do I have a clear enough strategy for this person to execute?
If the answer is yes — great. Hire the best executor you can find.
If the answer is no, or "mostly" — you need the strategy layer first. Otherwise you're handing someone a hammer without telling them what to build.
That's the gap a Fractional CMO fills. Not permanently. Not expensively. But at exactly the moment you need it.
Bart Knijnenberg is a Fractional CMO with 18 years of experience across 200+ B2B companies. He runs the Autonomous Growth System — a 13-agent AI marketing team that works while you sleep.
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