The Small Team Playbook: How Jennifer Brookman Built a High-Performing Fractional Marketing Function
The VP of Revenue Operations & Innovation at WCD on challenging the status quo when it comes to the traditional marketing team model (and what’s working for her).
If you've spent any time in B2B marketing, you know the particular kind of pressure that comes with selling something complex.
Not complex in a bad way—but in the way that enterprise solutions tend to be. The kind of product or service that solves a real, meaningful problem for large organizations, but takes time, trust, and the right conversation to explain. The kind where the sales cycle is long, the buyers are sophisticated, and the marketing has to do serious heavy lifting before a single sales call ever happens.
That's the world Jennifer Brookman operates in.
As VP of Revenue Operations & Innovation at WCD—a mid-market company that helps enterprise organizations transform their back-office operations—Jennifer sits at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and business growth. Her work isn't just about generating awareness or filling a content calendar. It's about building a brand credible enough to earn a seat at the table with procurement teams, operations leaders, and executives who have seen every pitch in the book.
And she's doing it with a lean team.
Not because she has to… but because she's decided it's actually the better way.
The question most marketing leaders don't ask
There's a default playbook for growing a marketing function: when the workload climbs, you hire. When the content backlog grows, you hire. When leadership wants more, faster… yup, you hire.
Jennifer has lived that instinct. She's been in the room when the numbers are tight and the to-do list is long and every bone in your body is screaming we just need more people.
But over the past few years—navigating a significant business transformation at WCD, including a major divestiture that reshaped the company's focus—she’s found herself asking a different question.
Not “how do we add more capacity?” But “what does the best possible team actually look like, given everything we have to work with?”
The answer she landed on surprised even her.
“I went into budget season fully expecting to justify a new hire. And then when I actually looked at what we had—these incredible, specialized external resources who already knew our brand inside and out—I thought, why would I trade that?”
What she built instead was something that's harder to describe on an org chart but easier to see in the results: a small, intentional network of fractional specialists who don't sit inside WCD's walls but operate, in every meaningful way, like they do.
Building the team (and why it looks the way it does)
Here's what Jennifer's marketing function looks like in practice. Four distinct pieces, each playing a specific role:
Creative services
A design team that's actually part of WCD but technically operates as a separate creative agency with its own clients and revenue targets. Think of Jennifer’s marketing team as the anchor client, but because the design team is so embedded in WCD and shares an office, they know the brand instinctively. (Genuinely—how dreamy would it be if every marketing team could have their creative agency in the same space?!)
Content
A fractional content team handling brand storytelling, thought leadership, sales enablement, and all the content goodies. (That's us, hi 👋)
SEO/GEO
A technical SEO specialist working in lockstep with content, so strategy informs execution and vice versa—not two people working in silos and hoping it adds up.
Go To Market Strategy
AKA “The Bruce Factor”—Jennifer's words, not ours. Bruce Cleland of Whiteboard Growth Strategies is the team’s senior strategic advisor, former CMO/CRO/CEO, who exists specifically to challenge assumptions, pressure-test thinking, and do the thing that's genuinely hard when you're deep inside a business: see it clearly.
And that last point is actually the thread that runs through the whole model.
Every single one of these partners brings something an internal hire often can't: an outside perspective. They work with other companies, other industries, other problems. They walk into WCD without the weight of organizational history on their shoulders—and that, it turns out, is a competitive advantage in disguise.
"One of WCD’s biggest strengths is also one of our biggest weaknesses," Jennifer said. "We have this incredibly loyal, long-tenured team—people celebrating 20, 30+ year anniversaries. It's incredible and a source of genuine pride. But what can happen when you have people in the business for so long is tunnel vision—you don’t know what you don’t know. When you bring someone in from the outside with a completely different lived experience, they can diversify perspective and foster innovation."
The thing that makes or breaks this model
Here's where most outsourced marketing arrangements can quickly fall apart: the marketing leader becomes the hub. Every request flows through them. Every approval waits on them. It feels like control… but eventually it’s just a bottleneck ready to burst.
But Jennifer figured this out, and deliberately built around it.
"Everybody on our fractional team knows one another, and they’re in direct contact and constant communication," she said. "So while it's external, it also acts like an internal team."
Her SEO specialist talks directly to her content partner. Her creative team syncs with her strategist. Nobody is routing everything through Jennifer waiting for a green light.
The result is faster execution, less micromanagement, and—here's the part people don't always say out loud—better work. Specialists who collaborate directly produce something different than specialists who work in isolation and hand off through a middleman.
"If you become the conduit between everyone, you become the bottleneck. Let your marketing partners talk to each other. You're going to get a better result."
She also keeps the whole group aligned the same way she would an in-house team: connect them to the strategy, then ask where do you see your contribution here? It creates buy-in instead of just task lists. And it also means she doesn't have to be in every single meeting to keep things moving.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, though
Although this sounds like a dreamy scenario, Jennifer is also candid about the friction.
The biggest challenge with a fully fractional team: you don't own their capacity.
When something urgent pops up—a product launch, a last-minute deck, a request that materialized out of thin air at the eleventh hour—you can't just turn to someone and say get this done pronto, por favor! Your specialist has other clients, other deadlines, and possibly a vacation that was booked three months ago. The solution?
"You have to plan ahead," she said. "Urgent projects cannot always get done quickly because everybody's got their own stuff going on. And sometimes, you simply have to step in yourself and get it done."
It requires a different operating rhythm that’s more deliberate, and less reactive. For marketing teams used to being pulled in seventeen directions at once, that discipline can take some getting used to. But it also just means being more intentional, which in our eyes, is a major win.
What she'd build if she were starting from scratch
After working through all of this out loud during our discussion, something in Jennifer shifted. What started as a practical conversation about team structure turned into something closer to an epiphany.
"I think I came into this conversation ready to say I would have done it differently if I had to do it again—hired someone, built it out more traditionally," she said. "But now that we've talked through it, I'm actually more inspired by the end result I have."
Her advice to senior leaders thinking about marketing headcount is pretty direct: stop assuming more people means better marketing.
"Truth be told, I don't know that I would ever want a large marketing team," she told us. “Having a small team of specialized experts and high performers who share your brain and just get stuff done is more effective than ten people all working on their own individual pieces and coming back to you. It’s quality over quantity."
She used a metaphor that stuck with us. Years ago, she took a creative writing course that used Twitter (now X) as an example of constrained creativity. In other words, when you only have so many characters to work with, you get real intentional. You figure out how to say exactly what needs to be said within the limits you've been given.
"I think of that often, and it relates to how we’ve built this team," she said. "If this is all I have, how can I be creative in order to achieve the end result?"
Turns out, constraint was never the obstacle. It was the way.
Jennifer Brookman is VP of Revenue Operations & Innovation at WCD. This is part of From the Desk Of—Outspoke's ongoing series featuring senior B2B marketing leaders. If you’re interested in being interviewed for this series, reach out to hello@outspoke.ca.
