Your marketing manager isn’t your marketing director
At a quarterly board meeting, a growing business agrees an ambitious target: 20% growth over the next twelve months. Marketing leaves with a marketing plan. Sales leaves with a sales target.
By the next quarter, sales are questioning the quality of the leads, and marketing is questioning whether sales are following them up. The board is left asking where the growth has gone.
We see this pattern often in SMEs. The cause is rarely effort or talent. It is usually down to who is sitting at the table, and who is missing from it.
The boardroom is changing, at every level
Even the UK’s largest companies are reconsidering where marketing sits. Research by The Marketing Directors, reported in Marketing Week, found that no FTSE 100 board now includes a marketing-specific role, compared with 14% in 2007. Yet 70% still have meaningful marketing, customer and brand expertise at board level. In practice, that expertise often sits under a growth or revenue title.
Large organisations have found ways to bring commercial growth thinking into the boardroom without a CMO title. Most SMEs have not. Marketing sits below board level, reporting on activity, while decisions about growth are taken without it.
Why your marketing manager can’t simply step up
Promoting the marketing manager appears logical, but marketing direction is a different discipline from marketing management. A strong marketing manager excels at delivery. A marketing director sets direction, challenges assumptions, shapes the growth plan and holds budgets to account against commercial targets.
Position matters too. It is difficult to tell a managing director that the growth plan does not add up when you report to them. This is not a criticism of marketing managers. It is a structural gap, and asking one person to bridge it alone is unfair to them and to the business.
The problem with one-dimensional expertise
In the SME market, senior commercial expertise tends to be one-dimensional. Businesses typically have people who understand marketing, or people who understand sales and business development, but rarely someone with genuine experience of both.
Growth does not stop when marketing hands a lead to sales. Anyone who has worked in business development knows a sales team needs leads they will genuinely pursue, collateral they will use in front of buyers, and messaging that reflects the conversations they are already having. Without that understanding, marketing produces material that sales ignore, and sales chase prospects that marketing never warmed up.
This is the gap that brought Definition into being. Before 2016, Kirsty was running a marketing agency in Manchester and Kathryn had a business development consultancy. Working with a joint client, we saw how much stronger the results were when the two disciplines were planned and delivered together.
The board’s blind spot
In many SMEs, the rest of the board has little direct experience of marketing: what good looks like, which activities genuinely drive revenue, or what a sensible budget should be. Marketing becomes a cost line that is either accepted without question or cut at the first sign of pressure.
Most marketing leaders will recognise the scenario. A marketing manager is keen to try a new channel, platform or campaign format. They are not wholly convinced it will make a difference to the business, but it is an opportunity to build their own experience. Without informed oversight, the activity goes ahead, and the budget goes with it.
A fractional marketing director with real responsibility provides that check:
- They manage upwards, translating marketing into commercial terms the board can scrutinise with confidence.
- They manage downwards, making sure the marketing and sales teams focus their time and budget where it will make the greatest difference.
Why growing businesses are turning to fractional leadership
For most SMEs, a full-time director with senior experience across marketing and business development is neither affordable nor necessary. Research by The Slice Network and Robert Half Talent Solutions, reported in Marketing Week, found that the main driver of demand for fractional marketing leaders is access to senior expertise (33.9%), well ahead of cost savings (18.6%). Yet only 3.8% said businesses engage them to prove return on investment. Few businesses are yet using fractional leadership to connect marketing to the revenue line.
That is where we focus. When we work with a business as its fractional marketing director, we bring marketing and business development together at board level, with a single growth plan, shared targets and reporting the board can act on. Behind that sits the wider Definition team, filling the gaps across sales and marketing, from PR, content and digital campaigns to lead generation and business development support. The plan does not stall at the point of delivery, because the people who shaped it are also making sure it happens.
Three questions for your next board meeting
- Who owns the growth plan across marketing and sales?
- Does the board know what marketing should cost, and what it is delivering?
- Who is checking that time and budget are going where they will make the most difference?
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