Marketing holds together only thanks to a capable junior, but they are buried in execution. Sales sits on the company’s CEO, who has no room for strategy. The sales team has a few people but does not really know how to sell. Everyone in the company is starting to sense something needs to change.
This situation is common in Czech B2B companies. And it is also the moment when the CEO faces a decision: keep the status quo and stagnate, or start dealing with it.
The classic three paths out of this situation are: hire someone new, promote someone internal, or tough it out somehow. But there is also a fourth, which few in the Czech market yet consider, the fractional model. In this article we break down when each of these four paths makes sense, and what a CEO usually buys (and pays) with each.
Why it so often ends in a bad decision
A CEO with a gap in marketing or sales leadership usually does not make a bad decision because they lack ability. They make it because they lack the time to weigh all the paths properly. They pick the one that feels least risky at that moment, but cannot see around the corner, because marketing and sales may not be their primary expertise.
Amanda Schwartz Ramirez, who works as a fractional COO and advisor at the consultancy Garden Labs, put it figuratively in an interview for First Round Review:
Finding the perfect executive is like throwing darts at a moving target and hoping you hit the bullseye.
- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez for First Round Review
Hitting that bullseye means finding a person who fits the company on skills, culture and drive all at once. Each of those three things changes constantly in startups and growth companies. And if you choose wrong, you have someone in leadership who is expensive and painful to let go.
That is why it pays to spend a few hours going through all the options and deciding which one best solves your specific situation.
Path one: Hire a new full-time director
The most common path. A position opens, a job ad is written, contacts are activated, sometimes a recruitment agency is hired, and the search begins. In an ideal world the company finds someone in three months who starts and begins onboarding.
In the real world it usually takes even longer. And it is not just about time. Salary expectations for senior managers in B2B marketing or sales have risen in the Czech market in recent years. Add the cost of recruitment, onboarding and possible severance if it does not work out. Calculate in our calculator how much a full-time director really costs you a year, with payroll taxes, bonuses and benefits.
A second layer that gets forgotten: if the company itself does not yet know exactly what it wants from the role, it searches blind. Interviews happen, but nobody knows by what criteria to choose. From our experience this leads to two extremes, either the company keeps rejecting candidates because "it is still not quite it", or it eventually takes whoever shows up, and that turns into an expensive mistake that is hard and painful to fix.
When this path makes sense
- The company has a built marketing or sales team that needs daily leadership.
- There is clarity about what the new director should do, what the strategy is, what the goals are.
- The budget can handle a senior director’s salary expectation plus a reserve for a possible mistake.
- The company has time for a six-month search without grinding to a halt because of it.
Path two: Promote someone you already have
The second most common path, and in Czech B2B companies almost the default choice. The best marketer is promoted to head of marketing. The best salesperson is promoted to sales director. The logic behind it is clear: they know the company, know the people, know the product. No need to teach them the context.
It works. Sometimes. When it works, it is the best thing that can happen to a company, an internal promotion strengthens the culture, motivates the team and saves money.
When it does not work, the problem is that the promoted person gets a new role but not necessarily new capacity and the know-how to do it. Schwartz Ramirez put it this way:
When you dump a task on someone inside the company who has no outside experience, you hope they learn it fast. It is a bet on the existing team, sometimes it pays off, but often you need outside expertise and contacts that take years to build.
- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez for First Round Review (quote translated)
Three typical problems with promoting from within that we see in practice:
First, burnout. The best marketer keeps doing the best marketing (execution), and on top of that is supposed to lead a team, do strategy and sit in leadership meetings. Instead of a step up, it becomes double the load.
Second, missing perspective. When someone has done the same thing in a company for years, they tend to keep doing it, just from a bigger position. Strategic perspective and experience from other companies simply cannot be replaced in a month.
Third, losing a good specialist. When you promote your best salesperson to sales director, you lose your best salesperson. And you do not always gain an equally good sales director.
When this path makes sense
- The promoted person is interested in leading, not just in the title and a higher salary.
- The company can give them mentoring from outside, from an advisor, a coach, or an experienced partner.
- Part of their previous agenda is redistributed, rather than a new role simply piled on top of them.
- The company has time to give them a year to grow into the role.
Path three: Tough it out until something comes along by itself
The third path is not a decision, but the absence of one. The CEO does nothing, or more precisely, does everything themselves and hopes the situation somehow resolves. Marketing keeps sitting on the junior, sales keeps sitting on the CEO, quarterly plans somehow come together, leads somehow arrive. Usually fewer than they could.
For this state Schwartz Ramirez uses the vivid term white-knuckling, gripping the wheel so hard the knuckles turn white. In practice it means the team divides up the departing or missing director’s agenda, everyone takes on a bit extra, and everyone hopes it holds.
The hidden cost of this path is quiet and you will not find it in the accounts. It is the CEO’s lost time. Wasted quarters in which marketing or sales did not move forward. The gradual burnout of a team pulling more than it should. And an inner feeling that the company is standing still, even if it works on the surface.
The worst thing about this path is that it has no end. If the CEO does not actively say "enough", it drags on a year, two, three. Then the company wakes up and finds the competition has overtaken it in marketing, in sales and in technology, because someone there eventually put a person in a similar position.
When this path makes sense
- Short term, for a few weeks, between the departure of the old director and the arrival of a new one or the start of another solution.
- In a deep crisis where the company is dealing with survival, not growth, and all resources go elsewhere.
- In a very small company where the role of a marketing or sales director objectively does not make sense yet.
Outside these three situations, "toughing it out" is usually the most expensive path of all four, only nobody sees it in the accounts.
Path four: Fractional (that is, partial) leadership
Between "I have a small team doing execution" and "I have a full-time director who costs a fortune" there is a big gap. And the fractional model belongs in it.
A fractional CMO or CSO is external strategic leadership of marketing or sales for a few days a week. Not an employee, an external partner. They work in parallel for two to four clients, invoice a monthly flat fee and have a clear project frame, typically three to six months, with a plan of what should happen in that time.
If you want the details of what a fractional CMO and CSO does, when to hire them and how they differ from an interim manager, we have a complete guide on it. In this article we focus on when the fractional path is better than the other three.
The fractional model solves exactly what is wrong with the other three paths:
Compared with a full-time hire: a faster start, lower risk (a three-month contract, not a two-year one), and the chance to have a senior person you probably could not afford as an employee. You can calculate exactly how much you save versus a full-time director here.
Compared with promoting an internal person: immediate perspective and experience from other companies, without needing to teach someone the role on the fly. And that outside experience can also help build someone internal, many fractional engagements end with a senior marketer in the company growing into a leadership role precisely thanks to mentoring from the fractional manager.
Compared with "toughing it out": a concrete plan. A fractional manager starts, analyzes, builds a strategy and begins to lead. No more years of waiting to see whether the situation resolves itself.
What to do next
If you have doubts about marketing or sales leadership, look at those four paths with some distance. Which one best matches your situation today? Which one in a year?
If the fourth came out, fractional, and you would like to talk about it in the specific terms of your company, let us meet. We will get together over lunch, go through the situation and tell you straight whether the fractional model makes sense, or whether we should point you elsewhere.
No slides, no commitments. We will talk about where you are, where you want to go and whether we can help.
Book an intro meeting