Your CMO resigned on Tuesday. The search will take four to eight months. There's a board meeting in six weeks, a quarter's worth of campaigns half-built, and a marketing team of four who found out at the same time you did.
That's the interim problem. It has almost nothing in common with the fractional one, even though the two words get used as though they're interchangeable.
The structural difference
A fractional CMO is an operating model. You've decided you don't need forty hours of executive marketing time, and you've built a permanent arrangement around fifteen. It can run for years.
An interim CMO is a bridge. There's a gap, the gap has a defined end, and the job is to get across it without losing anything important. The engagement is designed to terminate.
That difference changes what success looks like. A fractional CMO is judged on growth over quarters. An interim CMO is judged on whether the function was stable when they handed it over and whether the person taking it on had what they needed. Those are different jobs and they reward different behavior. The head-to-head comparison is here if you're choosing between the two.
When you need one
An unplanned departure. The obvious case. Your marketing leader has gone and the function has no head. Every week without one, decisions stack up and the team defaults to executing last quarter's plan.
A planned departure with a long notice period. Sometimes better handled by an interim than by the departing person, who is understandably disengaged.
A search that's dragging. Four months in with no offer. An interim takes the pressure off, which paradoxically improves the permanent hire, because hiring under time pressure is how you end up with the wrong person and doing it twice.
Post-acquisition. Two marketing functions, two brands, two teams who don't trust each other. Someone with no history in either organization has a real advantage here.
A performance problem you can't yet name. Marketing isn't working and you're not sure whether it's the strategy, the team, or the leader. An interim brief that starts with diagnosis is a legitimate use of the model, though be honest with yourself and everyone else about what you're doing.
The first ninety days of a good interim
Days 1 to 14: stop the bleeding
Not strategy. Continuity. Find out what's in flight, what's committed, what's contractually promised, and what's about to break.
The immediate risks after a departure are usually mundane and expensive: an agency contract auto-renewing next month that nobody has reviewed, a campaign scheduled with copy that the departing leader never signed off, a domain or ad account with credentials only one person had, a customer commitment made verbally with no record.
The team also needs telling what happens now. Uncertainty after a leadership exit costs you people, and the good ones leave first.
Days 15 to 45: diagnose
Now the honest assessment. What's actually working, what the numbers really say once you look past the reporting, whether the team is right for what the company needs next, and what the permanent role should actually be.
That last one is the most valuable output of the entire engagement. Companies routinely re-post the job description of the person who just left, which assumes the role was correctly defined in the first place. It often wasn't. Most CMO failures are scoping failures rather than talent failures, and an interim is well placed to say so, because they don't have to live with the answer.
Days 45 to 90: run it and shape the hire
Keep the function performing while feeding the search. Write the real job description. Sit in on candidate interviews, because someone who has run the function for two months will spot a mismatch that a CEO won't. Make the decisions that can't wait, and deliberately defer the ones that should belong to the permanent hire.
That restraint is the skill. An interim who reorganizes the team, rebuilds the stack, and rewrites the positioning in month two has just made their successor's job harder and taken decisions that weren't theirs.
The handover is the deliverable
Judge an interim engagement on the handover, because that's the entire point of it. The incoming CMO should receive:
- An honest state-of-the-function document, including the parts that don't reflect well on anyone
- Current numbers with the caveats about where the data is unreliable
- A written assessment of each team member and the open questions about the structure
- Every agency and vendor relationship, with contract dates and a frank view on each
- Decisions deliberately left open, with the reasoning
- The commitments made during the interim period and who they were made to
An interim who leaves without that has done half a job, however well the quarter went.
What to look for in an interim specifically
The profile differs from a fractional hire in ways that matter.
They've done it before. Interim work is a distinct skill. Walking into an unstable function, earning authority in a fortnight, and making decisions with incomplete information is not the same as building something from a standing start.
They're available properly. Interim usually needs three or four days a week in the early period, sometimes full time. Someone offering ten hours is offering you a fractional arrangement with a different label.
They're comfortable being temporary. Some operators can't resist trying to convert an interim into something permanent. That's a conflict of interest sitting right on top of the advice they're giving you about the permanent hire. Ask directly whether they'd be a candidate for the full-time role, and prefer a clear no.
They can start now. The value decays fast. Someone excellent who's free in seven weeks is worth less than someone good who starts Monday.
The cost, and the thing it buys
Interim rates run higher per hour than fractional ones. Higher intensity, shorter duration, and the operator carries the gap between engagements. The total cost is often similar to a few months of the salary you're not paying, so the fee is rarely the real question.
The question worth asking is what a leaderless marketing function costs for four months. Campaigns run on autopilot. Agencies drift toward whatever's easiest. The team stops making decisions because nobody's authorized to. Pipeline built in that period shows up as a hole in your numbers two quarters later, at which point everyone has forgotten why.
Against that, an interim is usually the cheap option. It just doesn't look like it on the invoice.