Should we fire our CMO, or did we hand them a message nobody could sell?

Last updated: September 2026

What does the fire-the-CMO conversation actually sound like?

Two weeks ago I got a call from the CEO of a $23M ARR company that sells credentialing and privileging software to multi-hospital health systems. He opened with the sentence I hear about once a month. I think I have to let my CMO go.

I asked what she'd done wrong. He gave me a specific answer, which is rarer than you'd think. Eleven months in. Website refresh shipped. Two campaigns running. Conference program cleaned up. MQLs up about 40%. Closed-won flat. Sales still saying the leads are garbage. Board asking why marketing costs more and produces the same.

Then I asked the second question. What did you hand her on her first day?

He listed it out. The revenue number. The budget. The team. A brand kit from a design agency they'd used in 2023. A competitive matrix somebody in product had built. I asked whether there was a document anywhere that said who they were for, what they were replacing, and why a health system should move now instead of next year. Long pause. He said, we all kind of know that.

We all kind of know that is one of the most expensive sentences in B2B. She had been hired to scale a story nobody had ever decided, and eleven months later he was about to pay a search firm to hire someone else to do the same thing.

What's actually broken when a CEO wants to fire their marketing leader?

Almost every marketing leader who gets fired at a $5M-$75M B2B company was hired against an Empty Brief.

An Empty Brief has real things in it. A revenue target. A budget. Headcount. A brand kit. Sometimes a positioning statement written three years ago by someone who left. What it doesn't have is a decided answer to the three questions that make marketing executable: who exactly are we for, what are we replacing in their world, and why should they move now.

Here's why that isn't the CMO's to fix. Deciding what a company stands for isn't a marketing task. It's an ownership task. The raw material lives in the founder's head, in the customer success team's calls, and in the real reason your best three customers signed. A CMO can extract some of it. A CMO can't ratify it, because the person who has to say yes, that's what we are, is you.

The good ones try anyway. They write a version. They take it to the exec team. The CRO pushes back because it doesn't match what he sells in the room. Product pushes back because it undersells the roadmap. You have three edits of your own. It gets softened until nobody objects, which is the same thing as nobody repeating it. Then it goes on the website and does nothing, and eleven months later it reads like a marketing performance problem.

It isn't. The identical failure shows up when an agency does the work instead, which is why Why does every marketing agency we hire fail? is the same post from a different chair. Change the executor, keep the input, get the result.

Why is this worse in 2026 than it was three years ago?

Three years ago you could hire a marketing leader for execution and get real value from that alone. Building campaigns, producing content, standing up a website, running the channel mix. That work was slow and expensive, and someone who did it well earned the seat on that basis.

AI took the cost of that execution to roughly nothing. Your team can produce a landing page, a nurture sequence, and forty pieces of content in an afternoon. What AI didn't touch, at all, is the decision about what any of it should say.

The value of the seat moved. Execution used to be the scarce thing. Now the scarce thing is a decided, specific, lived-truth position for the execution to be pointed at. Hand a modern marketing team an Empty Brief and AI doesn't rescue them, it accelerates the problem. More output, more channels, more volume, all of it averaged toward the middle of your category. Nobody can tell your campaigns from your competitor's.

That's also what makes this firing decision so easy to get wrong right now. The output volume looks healthy. The dashboard looks busy. When revenue doesn't move, the natural read is that the person running it isn't good enough. The truer read is that a lot of competent execution got aimed at nothing in particular.

“7 in 10 fractional CMO engagements in 2026 end in disappointment within six months. The founder thought they were hiring a strategist who would extract the company's narrative and name the villain. What they got was a senior marketer who audited the funnel and reported on click-through rates. Those are not the same job.”

... Fractional Freedom Friday, May 2026

Same mechanism, different price tag. The founder wanted someone to extract the narrative and name the villain. What showed up was a senior marketer auditing the funnel, because that's the job the brief actually described. The full-time version costs more and takes eleven months to discover instead of six. If you're weighing a fractional as the replacement, Why do most fractional CMO engagements fail, and how do you pick one that won't? walks the same trap at the other price point.

How do you tell if it's the CMO or the brief?

Three tests. All of them take a week. None of them require hiring anybody or telling your board you're running them.

1. 1The sentence test. Ask four people separately, on their own, without seeing each other's answers: you, your CRO, your CMO, and your best account executive. One sentence each. Who we're for, what we replace, and why now. If four different companies come back, your marketing leader has been executing against an argument, not a brief. If the four broadly agree and the market still isn't moving, now you have a genuine marketing question and you should ask it.
2. 2The decision test. Take the last three months of marketing output and go piece by piece asking what decision each one was serving. Not which campaign it belonged to. What call it was making about who you're for and what you stand against. If the honest answer for most of it is that it was on the calendar, then the calendar is running your marketing, and the calendar will keep running it after the CMO is gone.
3. 3The inheritance test. This is the decisive one. Look at what happened under the previous marketing leader, or the agency before that. Different person, different playbook, different budget. Was the outcome different? If the same flat result survived a change of executor, the constant is the input. You're about to pay a search fee to run the experiment a third time.

The inheritance test is the one CEOs skip, because the last hire is an uncomfortable memory. Run it anyway. Two identical outcomes under two different leaders is data, and it's pointing at the brief, not at them.

What do we see across companies at this decision?

When a CEO calls us about firing a marketing leader, the first thing we ask for is the brief. Almost nobody can produce one. What comes back instead is a job description, a board deck, and a brand kit. Three documents about what marketing should do, and not one about what the company should say.

The second pattern is timing. The call lands somewhere between month nine and month fourteen with striking regularity. That's roughly the point where the first wave of the new leader's work has shipped and hasn't moved the number. It isn't long enough to judge a marketing strategy. It's exactly long enough to judge a hire, so the hire gets judged.

The sentence test is what ends most of these conversations. When we run it across an exec team, four matching sentences is not something we see. Two out of four is a good day. That result lands harder than anything I could say to a CEO, because he watches his own leadership team describe four different companies in real time, and after that it's very hard to keep believing this was a hiring problem.

How does this play out in practice?

Here's the composite, stitched from the version of this I've watched run more times than I can count. The specifics change every time. The shape doesn't.

A $19M compliance-software company. Second marketing leader in three years. Same complaint both times: plenty of activity, pipeline that looks fine at the top and dies at the demo, sales insisting the message doesn't match what they actually sell in the room. The CEO has the fire-them conversation queued for the next board meeting.

We run the sentence test first. Four people, four sentences. The CEO writes that they help health systems stay compliant. The CRO writes something about audit readiness for multi-site operators. The CMO writes about a platform. The account executive writes the one that turns out to be right: we're the reason nobody gets fired after the surprise inspection. He has been selling that sentence on every call for two years. It appears on no page of the website.

That's not a marketing failure. That's a truth that was never extracted, never ratified, and never written down, so the marketing leader had nothing authoritative to point a department at.

We spend six weeks on the story instead of six months on a search. The buried truth comes out of the account executive and two customer calls, not the executive team. Then the CMO, the same CMO who was two weeks from being fired, rebuilds the homepage, the deck, and the campaign spine on top of it in about five weeks. Execution was never the thing she was missing.

What moves after that is the part CEOs don't expect. Volume doesn't go up. It usually goes down, because a decided story kills a lot of activity that existed only to fill a calendar. What goes up is the rate at which the right buyer identifies themselves before the first call, and how short that first call gets, because the prospect arrives already knowing what you're for.

The CMO stays. Once the brief exists, that happens more often than the firing does.

What should you do before you make the call?

You may still fire your CMO. Some of them should be fired, and pretending otherwise doesn't help you. Just make it a decision about a person, instead of a decision that's secretly about a document nobody ever wrote.

1. 1Run the sentence test this week. Four people, four separate sentences, no coaching and no comparing notes. Do it before the board meeting where the CMO question is on the agenda, because the result changes what that meeting is about.
2. 2Run the inheritance test on the previous leader or the last agency. Write down what was genuinely different about their approach and what was identical about the outcome. If the outcome was identical, say that out loud in the room before anyone starts a search.
3. 3If you do decide to make the change, write the brief before you write the job description. Who you're for, what you replace, why now, in the language your best customer would actually recognize. A candidate you can interview against that is a completely different candidate from one you asked to own marketing.

What's missing here isn't a marketing leader. It's the document a marketing leader can execute against. The Magnetic Messaging Framework (MMF) is the strategic narrative system built around four anchors: category design, villain framing, an old-way / new-way contrast, and a promised-land outcome. It exists to end exactly this argument. Take the thing your best salesperson already says on every call, extract it, get your executive team to genuinely ratify it, and write it down so it stops getting re-litigated every time someone new runs marketing.

That matters to you for one specific reason: a decided narrative is portable. It survives the CMO, the agency, the next hire, and the AI tools your team is already using without telling you. Without it, every leadership change restarts the story from zero, which is the pattern in Why does our messaging start over every time we hire a new marketing leader?. With it, the CMO question gets small. It turns back into a question about execution, which is the question you wanted to be asking in the first place.

PitchKitchen builds Magnetic Messaging Frameworks for founder-led B2B companies in the $5M-$75M range. Founded by Greg Rosner, author of Story Craft for Disruptors, PitchKitchen fixes broken marketing messages and underperforming websites for CEOs whose sales are stalling because their message isn't doing the work. If you're weighing the CMO decision and want a fast read on what they've been handed, the Brand Signal Score, PitchKitchen's free homepage messaging diagnostic at pitchkitchen.com/brand-signal-score, scores the page your marketing leader has been trying to make work.