GuideHow marketing gets bought
Interim vs. fractional
Definition
An interim CMO fills a vacant marketing seat full time, with an end date set by the permanent hire. A fractional CMO owns marketing on a fixed share of the week, open-ended.
How you recognize it
Start from what the role is for. If your CMO has left and an existing machine needs running at full capacity while you recruit, you are covering a gap; that is interim work, and it succeeds by ending. If nobody owns marketing and a full-time CMO is more capacity than the company can use, you are staffing the function itself; that is fractional, and it rolls on for as long as the model fits. The clean test is what happens when a strong permanent candidate appears: an interim leader hands over and leaves by design, while a fractional engagement carries on until the company outgrows it.
What to watch for
An interim engagement with no recruitment running underneath it has stopped being cover and become the org chart. A fractional engagement loaded with five days of meetings on two contracted days will fail on calendar arithmetic before anything else. A choice made on price alone points the wrong way: if the work is a full-time machine that must keep running, the part-week model leaves days of it unowned. Check which question you asked when you signed: who covers the gap, or who owns the function.
The question you ask
“What has to be true for this engagement to end?”