CMO, Head of Partnerships, Head of Growth: Pick One
When a company lists “CMO / Head of Partnerships / Head of Growth” as a single job title in a hiring brief, it is not being ambitious. It is being confused. These are three distinct roles with different skill sets, different success metrics, and different places in the organisational chart. Conflating them into one hire is a structural decision that usually reflects a leadership team that hasn’t yet decided what it actually needs from marketing.
The confusion matters because it shapes who you hire, how you measure them, and what happens when results don’t arrive on the timeline the board expected. Getting the role definition right before you recruit is one of the highest-leverage decisions a growth-stage company can make.
Key Takeaways
- CMO, Head of Partnerships, and Head of Growth are structurally distinct roles. Bundling them into one hire usually signals a leadership team that hasn’t defined what it needs from marketing.
- Growth roles are often lower-funnel by instinct. The best growth operators understand that capturing existing demand is not the same as creating new demand.
- Partnerships is a commercial function first. Putting it under marketing often dilutes accountability and slows deal velocity.
- The CMO title carries strategic weight. Using it to describe a channel manager or a campaign executor is a mismatch that attracts the wrong candidates and sets unrealistic expectations.
- If your company isn’t sure which of these roles it needs, that ambiguity is worth resolving before you post the job, not after the hire starts.
In This Article
I’ve spent more than 20 years inside agencies and on the client side, and the pattern I see most often in early-to-mid stage companies is that the title inflates while the brief stays vague. A founder wants a CMO but budgets for a marketing manager. Or they want a growth operator but write a job description that reads like a brand strategist. The mismatch creates friction from day one, and the hire rarely survives 18 months.
If you’re thinking carefully about marketing leadership, the broader conversation happening at the Marketing Leadership Council is worth following. The questions being asked there about how senior marketing roles are structured, scoped, and measured are exactly the ones that trip up companies when they’re trying to define a role like this one.
What Each Role Actually Means
Start with the basics, because the definitions get blurred in practice far more often than they should.
A CMO is a strategic leadership role. The person in it is responsible for how the company is positioned in the market, how marketing investment is allocated across the funnel, how the brand is expressed, and how marketing connects to revenue and business outcomes. They manage people, budgets, and agency relationships. They sit in the leadership team and have a point of view on product, pricing, and customer experience, not just campaigns. That last part matters more than most job descriptions acknowledge.
A Head of Growth is typically a performance and experimentation role. The focus is on acquisition metrics, conversion rates, channel efficiency, and iterating quickly on what works. It’s a hands-on, data-heavy function. The best growth operators I’ve worked with are intellectually restless and deeply comfortable with ambiguity in data. The risk, and I’ve seen this play out more times than I’d like, is that growth roles default to lower-funnel optimisation and mistake demand capture for demand creation. Someone who is excellent at squeezing more out of paid search is not necessarily building the brand equity that makes paid search cheaper over time.
A Head of Partnerships is a commercial development role. It involves building and managing relationships with distribution partners, technology partners, co-marketing partners, and channel resellers depending on the business model. It requires commercial negotiation skills, relationship management, and a clear understanding of how partnership revenue fits into the broader growth model. Putting this under marketing often makes sense organisationally, but the person doing it needs to think like a business development operator, not a marketer.
Why Companies Bundle These Roles
The bundling usually happens for one of three reasons.
First, budget. The company can’t afford three senior hires, so it tries to find one person who can do all three. This is understandable at seed stage. It becomes a structural problem when the company is at Series B or beyond and still hasn’t separated the functions.
Second, the leadership team doesn’t have a clear mental model of what each function does or how they interact. I’ve sat in leadership offsites where the CEO used CMO, Head of Growth, and Head of Marketing interchangeably in the same conversation. When the people at the top of the organisation don’t have a shared vocabulary for these roles, the job description reflects that confusion back at candidates.
Third, the company is trying to signal ambition without committing to scope. Calling something a CMO role when it’s really a senior marketing manager position attracts candidates who will be frustrated when they discover the reality. And it repels the actual CMOs who read the brief carefully and recognise the mismatch immediately.
For companies that genuinely need senior marketing leadership but aren’t ready to commit to a full-time executive hire, there are structured alternatives worth considering. CMO as a Service is one model that gives you strategic leadership without the overhead of a permanent hire. It’s particularly useful when you’re still working out what the role needs to be before you recruit for it permanently.
The Growth Role Trap
I want to spend a moment on growth roles specifically, because I think the industry has a slightly distorted view of what they deliver.
Earlier in my career I was as guilty of this as anyone. I over-indexed on lower-funnel performance metrics and treated them as the primary evidence that marketing was working. Click-through rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. These numbers are real and they matter. But a lot of what gets credited to performance marketing was going to happen anyway. The person who was already searching for your product, already in-market, already close to a decision, was going to find you whether or not your bid strategy was perfectly calibrated that week.
Real growth, the kind that compounds over time, comes from reaching people who weren’t already looking. From building enough brand presence and trust that when someone enters the category, your name comes to mind first. That’s harder to measure and slower to show up in a dashboard, which is why growth roles tend to gravitate away from it. The incentive structure pushes toward what’s attributable, not what’s actually driving the business forward.
When I was growing an agency from a team of 20 to over 100 people, the work that actually moved us forward wasn’t the performance optimisation we were doing for clients. It was the brand positioning, the thought leadership, the relationships we built in the industry over years. None of that showed up cleanly in a conversion funnel. All of it mattered.
A Head of Growth who understands this distinction is genuinely valuable. One who doesn’t will spend two years optimising the bottom of a funnel that’s getting narrower because nothing is filling the top.
When to Use a Fractional or Interim Model
Not every company needs a full-time CMO. And not every company that needs a CMO is ready to hire one permanently. The gap between those two statements is where a lot of companies get stuck.
Fractional marketing leadership has become a genuinely useful model for companies that need strategic direction without the cost and commitment of a senior full-time hire. A fractional CMO can help you define the role properly, build the function, and then hire into it once the scope is clear. That’s a better sequence than hiring a permanent CMO before you’ve worked out what you need them to do.
Similarly, if you’re between marketing leaders or going through a period of significant change, an interim CMO can hold the strategic function while you take the time to recruit properly. Rushing a permanent hire because the seat is empty is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. The wrong permanent hire costs far more than three months of interim leadership.
The same logic applies further down the seniority ladder. If you need marketing direction at a more operational level, an interim marketing director can provide continuity and momentum while you work out the longer-term structure. what matters is matching the seniority and scope of the interim engagement to what the business actually needs right now, not what it aspires to need in two years.
How to Separate the Roles in Practice
If you’re a founder or CEO trying to work out which of these roles to hire first, here is a practical way to think about it.
If your primary problem is that you don’t have a coherent marketing strategy, you don’t know how to position the company, or you’re not sure how to allocate budget across channels, you need a CMO or a senior marketing leader with strategic capability. The other roles are secondary until the strategy exists.
If your strategy is reasonably clear and your primary problem is acquisition efficiency, conversion rates, or channel scaling, a Head of Growth makes sense. But be clear with yourself and with candidates about what that role is. It’s an execution and optimisation role, not a strategic one. Calling it a CMO when it isn’t will attract the wrong people and create the wrong expectations.
If your growth model depends significantly on partnerships, whether that’s distribution, co-marketing, technology integrations, or channel resellers, then Partnerships deserves its own dedicated resource. Asking a CMO or a growth operator to absorb it on top of their primary function usually means it gets deprioritised whenever something more urgent comes up. And something more urgent always comes up.
I’ve worked with companies that had all three of these functions sitting inside one person’s remit. In every case, one of the three was being neglected. You can’t give equal attention to brand strategy, acquisition optimisation, and partnership development simultaneously. Something gives.
The CMO Title and What It Actually Signals
There’s a broader point worth making about the CMO title specifically, because it carries weight that other titles don’t.
When you give someone the CMO title, you’re signalling to the organisation and to the market that marketing has a seat at the leadership table. That person is expected to have a view on business strategy, not just marketing tactics. They’re expected to push back on the CEO when the brief doesn’t make sense. They’re expected to connect marketing investment to business outcomes in a way that holds up to scrutiny from the CFO and the board.
Using that title for a role that is really about managing campaigns or running paid acquisition is a category error. It sets the person up to fail because the expectations attached to the title don’t match the authority or scope they’ve actually been given. And it confuses the rest of the organisation about what marketing is for.
I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness tied to business results. One thing that becomes clear when you look at the work being submitted is that the campaigns which genuinely moved business metrics almost always had a CMO who understood the commercial context deeply and had the authority to make decisions that went beyond the marketing department. The title wasn’t decorative. It reflected real organisational weight.
If you want that kind of impact from your marketing leader, you need to give the role the scope, authority, and resources that make it possible. If you’re not ready to do that, be honest about it in the brief. You’ll attract better candidates and set more realistic expectations.
For more thinking on how senior marketing roles are structured and where they create the most value, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub is a good place to continue. The articles there cover everything from how to evaluate candidates to how to build a marketing function that actually connects to commercial outcomes.
A Note on Company Name in the Title
One small but telling detail: when a job posting lists the company name alongside three different role titles in the heading, it often signals that the company hasn’t decided internally which role it’s actually hiring for. The company name is there because the recruiter or the ATS required it, but the triple-title construction reflects a brief that went through multiple internal iterations without ever resolving the core question.
If you’re a candidate looking at a posting like this, it’s worth asking directly in the first conversation: which of these three functions is the primary focus? What does success look like in year one, and how is it measured? Who does this role report to, and what decisions can they make independently? The answers will tell you more about the role than the job description will.
If you’re the hiring company, the fact that you can’t answer those questions cleanly before the first interview is a sign that the role definition needs more work. A CMO for hire engagement, whether fractional or interim, can help you get there. Sometimes you need someone with the experience to help you work out what you need before you can recruit for it effectively.
What Good Looks Like
A company that has thought carefully about this gets a few things right from the start.
The role has a clear primary function with a defined scope. If it’s a CMO role, the brief reflects strategic leadership, not channel management. If it’s a growth role, the brief is honest about the hands-on, data-heavy nature of the work. If partnerships is included, there’s a clear explanation of how it fits and what the commercial model looks like.
The success metrics are defined before the hire starts. Not “grow revenue” but something more specific: what channels, what timelines, what level of investment, and what the reporting structure looks like. Ambiguity in success metrics is how good hires fail.
There’s a realistic view of what marketing can and can’t fix. I’ve worked with companies that expected marketing to solve problems that were really product problems, or pricing problems, or customer service problems. Marketing can amplify what’s working. It’s a blunt instrument when the underlying product or experience isn’t delivering. Getting that distinction right before you hire matters enormously, because it shapes what you ask the role to do and how you evaluate whether it’s working.
And the title matches the actual scope. If you’re hiring a marketing manager, call it a marketing manager. If you’re hiring a CMO, give them the authority and resources that title implies. The gap between title and reality is where trust breaks down, and it usually breaks down fast.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
