Most fractional CMOs sell you the thinking and leave you to build it. We do both, on one retainer.
Book a Strategy CallThe maths on a senior marketing hire rarely works in medtech. Most founders only find that out after they've started the search.
You need someone who can name your category, build the narrative, and sequence a go-to-market that survives a value analysis committee. But the person who can do all three is expensive, hard to find, and usually already employed. So you look at a fractional CMO instead, because the numbers look kinder and the commitment is shorter.
Then somebody still has to build the thing.
That's the gap this page is about. We do the senior thinking, and we build what it decides.
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who runs your marketing function part-time, usually on a monthly retainer, reporting to you rather than to a marketing director.
That's the textbook answer. Here's the practical one.
They own the decisions a marketing manager can't make alone. Which category you're competing in, and whether it has a name your buyers already use. What your narrative is, and whether it survives a room full of skeptical clinicians. Which segment you attack first, and which you ignore for four quarters. What gets measured, and what reaches the board.
What they usually don't do is the work itself. They won't write the case study, build the search programme, run the webinar, or produce the enablement deck. That isn't a criticism. It's the shape of the role. You're buying judgement by the month, not hands.
And that's where most medtech engagements come unstuck. In a company of forty people with no marketing team underneath, judgement without hands produces a very good plan and no movement.
This is the comparison you're really running. So let's do it with numbers instead of adjectives.
A full-time VP of Marketing. In medical devices the average sits at $176,675 a year in the US. The middle of the market runs $137,000 to $205,000, and senior people clear $242,500 (ZipRecruiter, August 2026). At CMO level, total compensation lands between $250,000 and $400,000. Then add equity, payroll costs, and a search that in this industry routinely runs two to three quarters before anyone signs.
It can be worth it. But it's worth it once your category is settled and the job has become scale, because that's the problem a VP is built to solve. Before then, you're paying a premium for someone to answer a question you haven't framed yet.
A fractional CMO. The market runs $5,000 to $20,000 a month, and most engagements settle around $10,000 to $12,000 (2026 industry rate surveys). Call it $120,000 a year for senior thinking, available in weeks rather than quarters, with no equity and no severance conversation.
That's a good deal for the thinking. The catch is everything downstream of it.
An execution agency. From about $5,000 a month upward, and they'll produce work reliably. But they run whatever strategy you hand them. So when strategy is the missing piece, an agency executes your uncertainty faithfully, and at volume.
This. The thinking and the building from one team, priced as one retainer. You get a named senior owner making the category and narrative calls, plus the writers, search, and campaign people who turn those calls into shipped work.
The right answer depends on which piece you're missing. Already have a strong senior marketer and need hands? Hire a production agency. Category settled and the job is scale? Hire the VP. Missing both halves? That's us. We'll tell you which one it is on the call, including when it isn't us.
Senior strategic ownership. Category, narrative, and go-to-market sequencing, owned by someone who has carried a bag and sold devices into hospitals. Not someone who has read about it.
A working team underneath it. Writers, search, and campaign execution, managed by us. You don't hire, onboard, or performance-manage any of them. And you don't absorb the cost when someone leaves.
One monthly rhythm. We report on what moved, then plan and build the next month. So you know what's shipping before it ships, instead of waiting on a quarterly review to find out.
Board-ready reporting. The commercial narrative in the form your investors already read. That matters more than it sounds when your next raise depends on someone believing the traction story.
Month one is diagnosis. We audit what exists, interview your commercial team, and pressure-test the category you think you're in against the language your buyers actually use. You get a written read on where the constraint sits. It's often not where you expected.
Month two is architecture. Category definition, narrative, and the order things get built in. This is the part a fractional CMO would normally hand over and leave.
Month three onward is build and report. We ship, measure, and bring you a plan for the following month. Every month has a stated intent and a set of things that will exist by the end of it.
Engagements are monthly and rolling, and they typically run about a year, because market engineering compounds. A quarter rarely shows more than leading indicators. There's no long lock-in. If it isn't working you should be able to leave, and you can.
Device, diagnostics, and digital health companies, usually between Series A and exit.
You have budget for marketing but not for a marketing department. Right now your founder is the marketing department. That got you here, and it's clearly stopped scaling. You have a product that works and a story that lands in the room, but has never been written down in a way anyone else can repeat.
We're a poor fit in two situations. If you already have a strong senior marketer and just need capacity, hire a production agency and keep strategy in-house. You'll resent paying us for a layer you already have. And if you're pre-clearance with no commercial timeline, you're early. Come back when you have a date.
A generalist fractional CMO brings a SaaS playbook, because that's where most of the fractional market trained. Those playbooks carry three assumptions. None of them hold in your business.
They assume the user is the buyer. But the surgeon wants it, the value analysis committee decides, and the two are rarely in the same meeting.
They assume you can pivot on evidence. Your regulator doesn't permit it, so the positioning you take to market is closer to permanent than any software team would accept.
They assume pricing is yours to set. Reimbursement disagrees, and a coding pathway shapes your commercial model more than a pricing framework ever will.
So the work needs someone who has sat in those rooms. Not someone who needs them explained.
MarketCraft is a medtech market engineering agency, founded by Omar Khateeb. Omar sold surgical robots into hospitals before he built the firm. He now hosts State of MedTech, a podcast past 400 episodes with the founders, investors, and operators in this industry. He also speaks at the summits where your investors gather, which is a large part of how our clients end up in rooms nobody invited them to.
The methodology isn't ours alone. MarketCraft is acknowledged in Market Engineering by Bruce Cleveland, published June 2026. Cleveland ran product and marketing at Apple and Oracle, then became a founding partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. His framework came out of watching funded companies stall in the gap between shipping a product and finding real traction. That gap is where most medtech companies sit when they call us.
"MarketCraft joined the board of investors meeting, they were very impressed by MarketCraft's results."
Lloyd Mencinger, CEO, Aqua Medical
Companies come to us for capacity and stay for the category work.
The first month tends to surface the same finding. Marketing was never the constraint. The market had no name. So every campaign paid, again and again, to explain the same thing from scratch, and none of that spend compounded.
That's medtech branding, and it's the layer this whole engagement runs on.
Both. You get a named senior owner who makes the calls, and the people who execute against what they decide. You won't be handed a junior account manager after the sales call.
We work to outcomes on a monthly plan rather than to hours, because counting hours produces busywork rather than results. You'll know what ships each month before the month starts.
A monthly retainer, typically across a year, and scope sets the number. You'll have a figure on the first call rather than after three meetings. It sits in the range where a fractional CMO and a small execution team would otherwise cost you separately.
You can. But we'll tell you upfront that a quarter shows leading indicators rather than pipeline, because market engineering compounds and the early months are foundation. If a quarter is all you have, say so and we'll scope something honest for it.
Some clients keep us as the execution layer underneath them, which is often the cheapest way to give a new CMO immediate capacity. Others hand over and leave. Both are fine. We document as we go either way, so nothing walks out of the door with us.
An agency executes a strategy. We set the strategy and then execute it, so there's nobody to blame in the middle when the two don't match. That's the whole design.
Tell us what has stalled. We'll tell you whether you need strategy, hands, or a full-time hire. And we're happy to talk you out of this if the answer is one of the other two.
Thirty minutes with someone who has carried a device bag. No deck.
P.S. If you want a read on where you stand before you talk to anyone, run your deck through the Pitch Deck Analyzer. It takes a few minutes, and it tells you which belief your current story fails to move.