Most companies know what marketing leadership costs. Excel Recruitment's 2026 Sales and Marketing Salary Guide puts an Irish head of marketing at €85,000 to €120,000 base, and Morgan McKinley's 2026 Ireland Salary Guide puts a Dublin marketing director at €120,000 to €180,000. Add employer PRSI at 8.9 percent rising to 11.15 percent, pension auto-enrolment at a minimum 1.5 percent employer contribution since January 2026, and a recruitment fee of 15 to 20 percent of first year salary. At SME level the all-in number sits near €120,000 a year.
The number nobody calculates is the other side. Going without marketing leadership has a price too, and because it never appears as a line on the P&L it tends to be paid for years.
Where the money actually goes
Agency spend without an owner. Companies with nobody senior setting direction cycle through agencies every 12 to 18 months, paying for onboarding and brand discovery each time. Gartner's CMO Spend Survey put B2B marketing budgets at 7.7 percent of company revenue in 2025, down from 11 percent in 2020, so the pot being wasted is smaller and the waste costs relatively more.
Pipeline that restarts every month. When demand depends on the founder's calls and the occasional campaign, nothing compounds. The median B2B SaaS sales cycle is around 84 days, so a quarter of drift is a quarter with no revenue behind it.
Positioning that drifts. The website says one thing, the deck says another and LinkedIn says a third. In a market of 401,359 active enterprises where 99.8 percent are small or medium sized, according to Central Statistics Office figures for reference year 2023 published in December 2025, buyers shortlist on clarity. Ambiguity loses deals that the product would have won.
Slower hiring. Candidates research a company before applying. A thin public presence narrows the field for every role, not just marketing ones.
The compounding problem
Marketing is a compounding activity. Content published this month brings traffic next month and conversations the month after. A year without direction is not one year of missing leads. It is a year of authority not built, which then takes time and money to recover.
The waiting argument
Many companies plan to hire when revenue justifies it. The difficulty is that marketing is often part of what gets revenue there. Investors want demand that does not depend on the founder, buyers want a company that is easy to understand, and salespeople want a pipeline that survives the founder being busy.
Doing the arithmetic honestly
Compare two numbers rather than one. On one side, the cost of leadership, full time or by the day. On the other, the agency spend that produced nothing measurable, the deals lost to a clearer competitor, the months where pipeline came only from referrals, and the hires that took twice as long to fill.
Where to go next
If the full-time number is the obstacle, the part-time marketing director page covers buying the seniority by the day. To compare the options properly, read fractional CMO versus agency versus in-house. To work out whether your own bottleneck is positioning, channel or sales follow up, see where marketing can drive your next stage of growth. Every figure quoted here is listed with its source in the Irish B2B marketing benchmarks edition.