Jon Miller says fractional CMOs are making B2B short-termism worse. He’s half right. The half he’s missing is more interesting.
The incentive structure of fractional work creates real short-term pressure. A fractional CMO is paid monthly. They are hired to solve a specific problem. They are measured by visible deliverables, not by whether the strategy compounds over three years. When the engagement ends, they leave before the marketing flywheel has time to prove anything.
That mechanism is real. It does produce behavior optimized for quick wins. Jon Miller — co-founder of Marketo, one of the architects of modern B2B demand gen — is right about the mechanism.
The problem he is describing is not a fractional CMO problem. It is a thinking problem. And the thinking problem is just as common in the full-time version.
The average full-time CMO tenure at Fortune 500 companies is 4.3 years, per Spencer Stuart. The average time to meaningful brand compound is longer than that. The full-time CMO who runs borrowed playbooks for four years and then moves on has produced the same short-termism, just with a different org chart.
Short-termism does not come from the staffing model. It comes from what happens inside the model. From treating last quarter’s campaign as this quarter’s strategy. From running the same lead scoring approach because everyone else runs it. From optimizing the funnel for the buyer your analytics described instead of the buyer who actually exists.
Jon Miller built Marketo on a real insight: that B2B buyers do not make decisions the way the industry assumed. That was first principles thinking. The problem is not that he was wrong. The problem is that when Marketo became a best practice, ten thousand marketers copied the form of what he built without copying the thinking underneath it. The form has a shelf life. The thinking compounds.
That is where short-termism actually comes from. Not from the org chart.
If you pulled out your current marketing strategy and asked “how much of this did we reason from first principles, and how much did we adopt because someone credible was doing it” — what would the ratio look like?
Most honest answers land somewhere between 20/80 and 40/60 in favor of borrowed.
Best practices fill that vacuum because they are already packaged, already credible, already ready to present. When a quarter needs defending, the first thing that gets cut is the time to ask whether the underlying assumptions are still true.
The fractional CMO is an easy target because the model is visible and the tenure is short. But the full-time leader who runs borrowed playbooks for four years before moving on has produced the same outcome at greater expense.
The issue was never fractional vs. full-time. The issue is whether whoever is running marketing is reasoning from first principles or running the play they got from a conference in 2022.
Those are different problems. Only one of them gets fixed by changing the staffing model.
The Cold Take is a newsletter about what is actually underneath the assumptions that run B2B marketing. Not best practices. The first principles the tactics are supposed to be built on.
Forward this to whoever just hired a fractional CMO to fix their pipeline
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