I have been into technology marketing for over a decade. Many times, I have been asked ‘what’s your role in your company’ and the answer which I consistently give in last few years has been “I learn and practice MarTech”.

The last couple of months me and my co-founder where pondering on this thought that every start-up needs’ a marketing team but may not have one. We came up with the following reasons 

• Start-ups focus on Product, Sales & Support first, ‘Marketing can wait’
• Budget needs to be allocated to Product/Service development vs marketing
• Steep learning curve w.r.t marketing

There are many other reasons but these are my top most, due to which I feel start-ups should think of getting help from a marketing partner.

With our love for MarTech and seeing the marketing needs of start-ups, we launched Fractional CMO.

Next couple of days we brainstormed on our mission statement, we came up with “marketing launch pad for Start-ups” as our mission behind Fractional CMO. We both fell in love with it

The next step for us was to structure our offering and the initial questions we asked ourselves were

• What difference are we going to make to a start-up?
• How are we different from the 100’s of marketing agencies out there?
• For us which is more important - Value or Volume

We spent the next couple of days sipping a lot of coffee & hot chocolate and meeting start-up founders sharing our thoughts with them and then came up with the following answers. 

What difference are we going to make to a start-up? 

In the initial stage, Start-up's priority is to focus on creating a world-class marketable product/service. BTW at this stage, they need a lot of market research to validate their idea, I would love to get involved from this stage with a start-up, but most of the entrepreneurs would prefer doing this on their own. The next thing they focus on is sales and support.

The priority for most start-ups is product, sales & support because of which ‘marketing can wait’. This is where I think the approach is wrong. Product must be built based on client(s) need.

Every start-up should think of having a marketing function from the ideation stage, not necessary that you need a full-time resource. My first and foremost reason to start Fractional CMO. 

What sets us apart from other marketing agencies

Marketing needs of large enterprises and SMB’s are different. SMB’s need agile marketing methodology. There are professional agencies helping companies in their marketing effort, but one problem I have seen across the board is that each agency helps in solving one aspect of marketing but not the entire marketing gambit.

What we want to do is solve the entire gambit of marketing for start-up. We want to create Marketing POD’s (image below) for start-ups with one of us being the Principal Consultant.

Once the start-up is ready for an in-house team, they have a choice to migrate the POD or built their own. They get our joint 20+ years of technology driven marketing experience with a team which we manage till they are ready to bring them in-house. This solves the challenge of budget, time and learning curve.     

For Fractional CMO, what is more important : Value or Volume? 

With Fractional CMO from day one we were clear, we will not bring more than 3-5 customers onboard in our first year. Thus for us, it was value over volume. If I take more than that, I will not do justice to my idea. BTW there is nothing wrong in having volume as your major goal :)

Thus with these thoughts, we started our entrepreneurial journey and I am sure we will build up many long lasting partnerships with many start-ups (be part of their success)