Is It Too Soon to Hire a CMO or CRO?

You've got early customers, a product that works, and investors who want to see more. The next hire could be your smartest move, or an expensive mistake. In this post, Ian explores how growth-stage B2B companies are bridging the gap.

The old model for building a go-to-market function is breaking; it was simple: create proof of market fit, raise funding, hire a senior CMO or CRO, and then build the team beneath them.

Today, in a tougher investment market, investors need more than just market fit; they are scrutinising growth before investing.

Those early adopters from the founders' network who demonstrate product fit show early promise, but the company needs to show that it can achieve a breakthrough in the broader mainstream market.

But, for a founding team focused on developing the product and servicing those early customers, this is tough, even in the good times.

Early adopters, keen to try something new, show up, take a risk, and are quickly convinced. Mainstream buyers are harder to reach, more sceptical, and slower to convert, and channels are noisier.

It takes focus, experience, repeatable models, and expertise to appeal to the mainstream. Senior go-to-market expertise that a pre-Series B P&L can rarely justify.

Too early for the big hire, too late for guesswork

Hiring too early, based on hope and not a proven sales motion, creates a hole in the P&L that can quickly sink a growing young company.

These promising, expensive resources can leak more cash than they generate, and making a change comes at the cost of the business's momentum.

The winners get this timing right, delaying the heavy-hitter hiring until the business has a demonstrable pipeline quality, velocity, and a conversion flywheel that they can then accelerate.

Confidence without Commitment

Fractional talent helps young companies bridge that period of risk when success requires experience.

It can build a credible sales motion that instils confidence in the board and investors without the potential growth-sapping cost and friction of an FTE, at a time when a company needs to be most agile.

This isn’t a big team with a fancy tech stack; this is a minimum viable model that demonstrates a repeatable path to revenue, aligned across sales and marketing around a clear, credible story that resonates with the market.

In other words, a revenue engine that works and that can be scaled.

Five benefits to this approach

1. Alignment across the Revenue Department. Sales and marketing work toward the same commercial outcomes, not against each other when the pipeline dries up.
2. Credibility you can point to. When investors ask who's running your go-to-market, the answer matters. A fractional CMO or CRO gives you a serious answer without a permanent headcount.
3. Senior thinking without premature commitment. You get someone who has seen this stage before, without having to bet £150k+ on a full-time hire.
4. Operator-led execution. Fractional leaders don’t just create strategy decks; they are hands-on, fixing messaging, building pipeline, and driving conversion.
5. Flexibility as the business evolves. Dial up, dial down, or change direction without the cost or friction of a permanent hire.

Lessons from the other side of the table

We’ve seen this unfold like a Goldilocks story. In our past lives as senior sales and marketing executives, we’ve been hired too early, at just the right time, and too late.

We’ve seen, up close, the challenge of founders who have hit the limit of their sales bandwidth, junior marketers learning their playbook on the job, or poorly directed agencies creating activity without traction. And we’ve been in the room when investors start asking the awkward questions.

A good example was working with a growing call center software company whose young founding team was seeking a significant Series B investment. They needed to demonstrate market presence, grow pipeline sources, and reduce dependency on paid ads and a single agency.

By providing hands-on fractional marketing leadership, we demonstrated what was possible with a quick refresh of their marketing messaging, operations, and technology, and then helped them hire the team to take them to the next stage.

Does this sound familiar?

Most growth-stage companies don’t need a full-time CMO or CRO yet, but they do need the expertise, experience, and execution to build the revenue motion that gets them there.

If this is where you are right now, let’s chat.