Pick the option that fills the gap in front of you, and most teams can name that gap in an afternoon. If nobody knows which bets to make, you want a fractional CMO. If you want someone to own marketing for years, hire. If the plan exists and nothing ships, you want a team that builds.
Nobody sells these options on their weaknesses, so the weaknesses tend to show up after the contract is signed. A new hire needs a quarter before the first campaign ships, and most agencies, in our experience, deliver less than the pitch promised. That is usually when people go looking for a comparison like this one.
For most Seed to Series C teams, what closes the gap is a senior team that owns strategy and execution together. It works inside your Slack and your CRM, and has campaigns live in the first month. That model is what we mean by embedded, and it is how we run demand generation for Deck and usecure.
What decides the choice between a fractional CMO, an agency and a hire?
The gap you are filling decides it, and there are only three gaps worth naming. We call this the three-gap test.
| The gap | What it sounds like in a board meeting | What fills it |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | "We are not sure which segment or channel to bet on next year" | A fractional CMO, an advisor, or a Head of Marketing |
| Capacity | "We know what to do and nobody has time to do it" | A hire, a freelancer, an agency, an embedded team |
| Speed | "We need pipeline this quarter, from a standing start" | An embedded team, or a specialist freelancer on one channel |
Run it with your leadership team in ten minutes. Three questions sort most companies.
- Can you name next year's two pipeline channels and the buyer they target? If the room disagrees, the gap is direction.
- Is there a written plan that nobody has had time to build? If so, the gap is capacity.
- Does the board need pipeline inside ninety days? If so, the gap is speed, and any option that starts with a hiring process misses it.
Most companies searching this comparison have a capacity gap and go shopping for direction. The founder already knows the ICP. Positioning is roughly right and the pipeline target is signed off. What is missing is anyone to build the campaigns, write the pages, wire the CRM and read the numbers each week.
A fractional CMO hired into that gap produces a plan the company still cannot run.
What does a fractional CMO do for a B2B SaaS company?
A fractional CMO is a senior marketer you rent for one to three days a week, usually to set direction. Harvard Business Review frames part-time senior leaders as a way for smaller companies to reach talent they struggle to access and afford.
Fractional work is growing in the UK, and the professional body for interim executives now measures it. In the Institute of Interim Management's 2026 survey, nearly a quarter of respondents delivered their last assignment fractionally. It was the first year the survey asked.
The hours decide what a fractional CMO can do. Two days a week is about sixteen working hours, and the leadership meeting and the board pack come out of them first. Most of the build lands back on your team.
No independent survey prices fractional CMOs, so the nearest benchmark is the same IIM survey. It put the average interim day rate at £907. Private sector rates averaged £1,004, over £1,000 for the first time, and assignments averaged ten months.
At £1,004 a day, each day a week costs about £4,350 a month. Two days come to about £8,700, and three to about £13,000.
Now add the part of the job the hours do not cover. A two-day fractional CMO plus a small agency at £3,500 to £7,500 comes to about £12,200 to £16,200 a month. For that money you have a strategist, a pair of hands, and nobody accountable for pipeline.
Three situations make a fractional CMO the right buy. The founder is making channel bets on instinct and needs someone senior to argue with. The board wants a marketing plan before it releases budget. Or you have a team of doers with no leader, and need someone to hire and shape it.
What does a first marketing hire cost in the UK?
A £65,000 marketing hire costs about £91,600 in the first year, or roughly £7,600 a month. About £26,600 of that sits on top of the salary, and none of it appears on the job advert.
| Cost in year one | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Salary, a Head of Marketing near the UK average | £65,000 | Indeed's UK average is £63,660 across 1,200 reported salaries, updated 21 September 2026 |
| Employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 | £9,000 | GOV.UK rates for 2026 to 2027 |
| Pension, employer minimum of 3% on qualifying earnings | £1,321 | The Pensions Regulator's qualifying band of £6,240 to £50,270 |
| Recruitment fee at 22% of first-year pay | £14,300 | Reed's published terms charge 22% to 27% of first-year remuneration |
| Laptop, software seats and tooling | about £2,000 | Our estimate, and the one line here without a source |
| Year one total | £91,621 |
Year two drops to about £76,000 once the recruitment fee falls away, or £6,300 a month for one person.
The calendar costs as much as the invoice, because nothing ships until the hire starts. SmartRecruiters' 2025 benchmark of 89 million applications puts the median time to hire at 40 days in the UK. For technology roles it is 48 days, and a senior candidate usually has a notice period to work after that.
The Bridge Group put ramp to full productivity at 6.2 months in June 2026, measured on sales hires. We have not found a published figure for marketing hires, so treat that as the nearest benchmark. A hire made in October contributes properly some time in the new year.
A wrong hire costs more again, and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation has put a price on it. Its 2017 research with Indeed found a poor hire at mid-manager level on £42,000 can cost a business more than £132,000. The study is nine years old and the figure is modelled, so treat it as an order of magnitude.
None of that arithmetic makes hiring the wrong call. A good first marketer gets better every year they stay, because they carry the product knowledge, sit in sales calls and own the number.
Zunaira, one of our demand gen leads, was the first marketing hire at three startups. Each time, her opening move was pulling paid media back in-house. Our engagements plan for that same handover from day one. At Series A, one strong in-house owner plus an embedded team beats either one alone.
Why do B2B SaaS teams give up on agencies?
In our experience, most leave because the agency never gets close enough to the business to ship what it needs. Large advertisers point the same way. The ANA found in 2023 that 82% of its members run an in-house agency, up from 42% in 2008. After cost, the benefits they cite most are better knowledge of the brand and institutional knowledge.
Inside an agency, the gap usually opens the same way. A senior team wins the pitch. By month four the account belongs to a coordinator, and the seniors appear for the monthly review. An account manager sits between you and the people doing the work, so questions take a day and changes take a week.
Anything outside the original scope needs a new statement of work. Reporting then fills the space where shipping should be. An account can look busy for a whole quarter that way and still produce nothing a CFO would recognise.
Published prices for UK B2B SaaS agencies run from about £3,500 a month for advisory work to £15,000 and up for a full programme.
What does an embedded demand generation team change?
The people who pitch do the work, and they do it inside your Slack and your HubSpot, where you can watch it happen. Everything else about the embedded demand generation model follows from that.
Our team is seven senior operators with no juniors, and both founders stay on client calls. There is no account manager in the middle, so nothing waits for a change request. The person who picks a channel also builds the campaign.
Scope is the other half. It is where the invoices stop being comparable. Paid search and LinkedIn, the landing pages behind the ads, the HubSpot workflows and lifecycle definitions, the reporting tied to pipeline, webinars and CxO dinners. All of it sits inside one fee, and nothing on that list needs a new statement of work.
Pricing is £7,500 to £10,000 a month for the full programme, or £4,500 to £5,500 for paid media alone. Both run on a three-month minimum and roll on after that.
You should test the speed claim, so the week-by-week timeline is published on our embedded demand generation page. Messaging, the HubSpot dashboard and quick wins land in week one, and paid media is running within weeks two to four.
At Deck, a standing weekly call, a shared Slack channel and monthly reviews meant the budget moved within days of a signal.
The fair objection is that an agency will always tell you not to hire. Yet we ran the process that recruited usecure's first in-house Demand Generation Lead.
The FAQ on our embedded demand generation page puts the plan in writing. Around month six we name the channels a full-time person can take over, help draft the role, review CVs and circulate it in our network.
Damian Fairbrother Jones, Chief Operations Officer, put it more plainly than we could. "We would not have got those webinar results had we done those ourselves, and I'm confident we'd still be without a website."
Put next to a fractional CMO, the difference is what the money buys. A fractional CMO is one person selling judgement by the day. An embedded team is a demand generation function you rent, with the judgement included.
If you are making your first marketing hire
Hire the owner, and buy the execution around them for the first two quarters. A first marketer walking into an empty function has to pick the channels and build them. They also wire the CRM, write the copy and report on all of it, and nobody does five jobs well at once.
In the version that works, the hire owns the number, the roadmap and the relationship with sales. The embedded team runs the channels that need daily attention, and builds the pages and the tracking. Channels move in-house as that side grows, starting with the one that needs the most product knowledge.
The same hire fails when they walk into a £20,000 annual budget and a blank tool stack, with pipeline expected by quarter end. They spend the first month choosing tools and the second interviewing freelancers.
If you have a plan and nobody to ship it
This is a capacity gap, and the fix is hands on keyboards. A fractional CMO adds a second plan on top of the first.
It is the most common shape we see in Seed to Series C SaaS. There is a marketing manager or a growth generalist, often the first hire, running events, the website, the newsletter and the ads at once. The strategy deck exists. Two thirds of it has never been built.
What works is simple enough to fit on one page. Name the two channels that carry pipeline. Put a senior operator on each, with their own targets, and leave the in-house person owning the plan and the brand.
Campaigns go live inside the first month, because there is no recruiting, notice period or HR onboarding in the way.
What does each option cost over twelve months in B2B SaaS?
A hire, a two-day fractional CMO and a full embedded programme all land between £90,000 and £120,000 a year, so price rarely decides this.
| Option | Monthly | Year one | Speed to value | Scope of work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional CMO, two days a week | about £8,700 | about £104,000 | A plan in weeks, campaigns when your team reaches them | Strategy, ICP and channel direction. No build |
| Fractional CMO plus execution support | £12,200 to £16,200 | £146,000 to £194,000 | Four to eight weeks | Strategy from one supplier, delivery from another, and you hold them together |
| First marketing hire at £65,000 | about £7,600 all in | about £91,600 | Six to seven weeks to hire, first campaign ten to fourteen weeks after the advert | Whatever one person covers in a week |
| Typical agency retainer | £3,500 to £15,000 | £42,000 to £180,000 | Four to six week onboarding | The channels named in the statement of work. Anything else is a new one |
| Embedded paid media | £4,500 to £5,500 | £54,000 to £66,000 | Paid live inside the first month | Paid media across LinkedIn, Google and Meta, landing pages, creative and CRM reporting tied to pipeline |
| Embedded team, full programme | £7,500 to £10,000 | £90,000 to £120,000 | Useful work in week one, paid live inside the first month | Paid media, landing pages, CRM and reporting, webinars and events, and the handover when you hire |
What separates them is scope and speed. Picture the plan needing a landing page, a HubSpot workflow and a webinar in the same fortnight. Ask who builds each one, and whether it is live this month or next quarter.
What is the most expensive mistake in this decision?
Buying direction when the gap is capacity, because you pay for it twice. The plan arrives in month two and nobody has time to build it. By month six you are paying again, for the hands you could have bought first.
If you have a plan and nobody to run it, that is what we do. We are seven senior operators on one fixed fee, with campaigns live in the first month and a handover when you are ready to hire. See what sits inside each package in our embedded demand generation pricing.
