Fractional Teams for SaaS: How to Build a Marketing Function for International Expansion

Hiring a full marketing team before you've validated a new market is one of the most expensive mistakes a B2B SaaS company can make. But entering a market with no marketing support at all is a recipe for wasted time and zero traction.

So what's the middle ground?

In a recent episode of The Multilingual Content Podcast, Nicola Calabrese spoke with Joliene van Grieken, Co-founder of The Growth Syndicate , a fractional marketing team that embeds inside B2B SaaS companies to help them scale. Joliene has spent her career in startup and scale-up marketing, and she had a clear take on how companies should structure their marketing when they're expanding across borders: start fractional, stay lean, and let AI handle the execution layer.

Here's what she recommended , and what it means for your international growth strategy.

What Are Fractional Teams for SaaS?

Fractional teams are external professionals or small teams that work inside your company on a part-time or project basis, filling the same roles a full-time hire would , but without the commitment and cost of a permanent headcount.

For SaaS companies, this model has become increasingly popular in marketing. Instead of hiring a full-time CMO, a head of content, and a performance marketer before you've even proven demand in a new market, you bring in fractional talent that can build and execute your marketing function from day one.

The key difference from hiring an agency is that fractional teams embed within your company. They work alongside your internal people, attend your standups, and have full context on your product, positioning, and goals. They're not executing a brief from the outside , they're building the function from the inside.

Joliene's company, The Growth Syndicate, operates exactly this way. They place themselves within companies that have hit a growth plateau, haven't started marketing yet, or keep hiring the wrong people for their marketing needs. If you want to understand this model in depth, their Fractional CMO Hiring Guide is a good place to start.

Why Fractional Makes Sense for International Expansion

Joliene's argument for starting with fractional talent during expansion is practical:

Marketing is broad. If you're entering a market with a complex product, you might need a product marketer first. If your growth depends on events and local relationships, you might need an event manager. If your motion is primarily content-driven, you need a strong content lead.

The problem is that most companies make this hiring decision before they understand the market well enough to know what's actually going to work. They hire based on what worked in their home market , and then discover that the same playbook doesn't transfer.

This connects directly to what Filippo Irdi of Orderchamp described about European expansion: assuming that success in one market can be replicated by copying the same approach is almost never the case. Different markets have different buying cycles, different channels that work, and different expectations from buyers.

Fractional teams give you the flexibility to figure this out without locking into permanent hires too early. You get experienced marketing leadership that can assess the market, set up the right foundations, and help you determine what kind of full-time team you'll eventually need , based on evidence, not assumptions.

The New Core Team: Content, Design, and a GTM Engineer

One of the most specific and useful parts of the conversation was Joliene's view on what the core marketing team should look like now , particularly for SaaS companies using AI to scale.

Her recommendation comes down to three roles:

A content person. Even with AI generating more content than ever, you still need someone who understands your audience, your positioning, and what kind of content actually resonates in each market. AI can accelerate production, but the strategic judgment , what topics to pursue, what tone to use, what angle will land with a specific buyer persona , still requires a human with real expertise.

A designer. The same logic applies. AI design tools can speed up execution, but someone with a trained eye for visual communication is what makes your brand look credible and consistent across markets. As Joliene put it, you need someone who has the vision , someone who knows what to change and how to give direction, not just someone who can generate outputs.

A GTM engineer. This is the newer role, and it's where the shift is most visible. A GTM engineer builds the technical infrastructure that powers a signals-based marketing approach: connecting tools, setting up automated workflows, creating systems that detect intent and surface real-time competitive intelligence. This is the person who makes sure your sales team has a live battle card instead of a six-month-old PDF.

The key insight here is that you don't need three content writers or three designers anymore. One strong person in each role, supported by AI agents, can produce what used to require a much larger team. The execution layer is increasingly handled by AI , what you need are the people who direct it.

For international expansion, this has a specific implication: you can enter new markets without building a full local marketing team from scratch. Your core team works across markets, with AI handling the scaling of content production, and local resources brought in only where human presence and cultural expertise are essential.

What About Localization? Where Does It Fit?

Joliene made a point during the episode that maps directly to how we think about this at Undertow: localization happens everywhere the buyer is touched.

It's not a separate function that sits at the end of the content process. It's not something you do after the "real" marketing work is done. Localization is embedded in your design (visuals differ by market), your messaging (positioning changes by country), your ICP definition (buyer personas shift across borders), and your content strategy (what works in the Nordics won't work in Germany).

This means your fractional team , or your lean core team , needs to have localization thinking built into how they work, not bolted on as an afterthought.

As Björn Ingmansson of Kognic shared, localization is a muscle you need to start training early. Companies that treat it as a late-stage translation task end up doing all the work and then realizing they have a problem. The ones that integrate it from the start , into their content process, their design workflow, and their market entry strategy , build traction much faster.

And this is where the fractional model has another advantage. A fractional localization partner, like Undertow , works the same way a fractional CMO does: embedded in your process, with full context on your brand and your markets, producing adapted content that's on-brand from the start. You don't need to hire a full in-house localization team before you've validated demand in a new market. You need a partner who can move as fast as your core team does.

The Niche Agency Trap

Joliene raised a warning that's relevant to any SaaS company assembling its marketing function for expansion: be careful with agencies that are too specialized.

The issue isn't that specialist expertise is bad. It's that a partner whose entire business depends on one channel has an inherent incentive to tell you that channel is working , even when it's not. An SEO agency will never advise you to cut your SEO budget. A performance marketing agency will always recommend more ad spend.

For companies in expansion mode, this can be particularly costly. You're operating in markets you don't fully understand yet, and you're relying on external partners to give you honest signals about what's working. If those partners are too narrow in scope, you end up optimizing individual channels without anyone looking at whether your overall market entry strategy is producing results.

This applies to marketing leadership, content production, and localization alike.

It's the same principle behind what Hugo Pereira described about trust and credibility in international markets: you need partners who understand the full picture of what it takes to build credibility in a new market , not just partners who can execute one piece of it.

How AI Is Reshaping the Execution Layer

A theme running through the entire conversation was how AI is compressing the execution side of marketing , and what that means for team size and structure.

The execution layer, producing content, generating visuals, running analyses, building reports, is increasingly handled by AI tools and agents. What doesn't get replaced is the strategic layer: deciding what to build, for whom, and why.

For international expansion, this creates both an opportunity and a risk.

The opportunity is that you can produce multilingual content, localized campaigns, and market-specific assets faster and at lower cost than ever before. AI can translate, adapt, and generate at a speed that would have required a much larger team just two years ago.

The risk is that speed without judgment produces content that looks right but doesn't resonate. As Joliene warned, too many teams stop thinking about their audience the moment AI enters the workflow. The content becomes a checkbox , technically correct, but not relevant to the people reading it.

This is where the human-in-the-loop matters most. Your content person isn't there to write everything , they're there to make sure everything that gets published actually serves the audience in each market. Your designer isn't there to create every visual , they're there to make sure the brand stays coherent and credible across languages and cultures.

And your localization strategy needs the same approach. AI can handle the heavy lifting, but someone needs to ensure that what comes out the other side is on-brand, culturally adapted, and structured for visibility , both with human buyers and with the AI tools those buyers are using to research solutions.

Key Takeaways

• Fractional teams for SaaS give companies the flexibility to build a marketing function for international expansion without the cost and risk of premature full-time hires. They embed inside your company and bring experienced marketing leadership from day one.

  
  

• The new core team is three roles: a content person, a designer, and a GTM engineer. AI handles the execution layer, but strategic direction and creative judgment still require experienced humans.

  
  

• Localization isn't a separate function , it's embedded in everything your marketing team does, from messaging and design to ICP definition and content strategy. Build it into your process early, not as a late-stage translation step.

  
  

• Avoid partners that are too specialized during expansion. You need people who can see the full picture and give honest signals about what's working across your entire market entry strategy.

  
  

• AI is shrinking marketing teams but increasing the need for strategic thinking. Speed without judgment produces content that doesn't resonate , keep humans in the loop for every market you operate in.

FAQ

What are fractional teams for SaaS?

Fractional teams are external marketing professionals who embed inside a SaaS company on a part-time or project basis. Unlike agencies, they work within your team, with full context on your product and goals. They're particularly useful during international expansion, when you need marketing leadership but don't yet know what kind of full-time hires the market requires.

How is a fractional marketing team different from an agency?

An agency executes a brief from the outside. A fractional team works inside your company , attending standups, understanding your product, and building the marketing function alongside your internal team. They have broader strategic accountability, not just channel-level execution.

What marketing roles should a B2B SaaS company hire first for international expansion?

According to Joliene van Grieken of The Growth Syndicate, the core team is a content person, a designer, and a GTM engineer. These three roles, supported by AI tools, can cover what used to require a much larger team. Local resources should be added once you have evidence of demand in a specific market.

Should you localize before or after validating a new market?

Start with a Minimum Viable Experience: localized landing pages, key case studies, and essential support content, to test the market without full commitment. Build out your localization as you see traction. As Joliene advises: "If you've not found your magic sauce in your own country, then don't do it at all. Find a market that's adjacent in the buying cycle." The key is to integrate localization thinking into your process from the beginning, even if the scope starts small.

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This blog post is based on Episode 56 of The Multilingual Content Podcast: "From SEO to AI Search: Rethinking International Growth with Joliene van Grieken, Co-founder of The Growth Syndicate." Listen to the full conversation for more on building marketing teams that scale across borders.

Scaling into new markets and need multilingual content that keeps up with your team? Undertow works as a fractional localization partner inside B2B SaaS companies , embedded in your workflow, aligned with your brand, and ready to move as fast as your marketing team does. Let's talk about your expansion.