Fractional CMO services
Fractional CMO services: executive judgment, without an executive hire.
A fractional CMO owns the strategy, the plan, the budget, and the team running it, a few days a month. I've sat on a board, presented to C-levels, and run the table in rooms where the marketing decision funded the quarter. This is that same seat, sized to a growth-stage business.
The first 90 days of the engagement, in sequence
The order is deliberate. Diagnosis before position, position before plan, plan before spend. Engagements that start with campaigns spend month four undoing month one.
Week one and two: read the business, not the marketing
Revenue by segment, win rates, sales call recordings, pipeline sources, and the last four quarters of spend. Most marketing problems are diagnosed correctly only after the numbers and the sales conversations are read side by side.
What it produces
A written diagnosis naming the constraint, with the evidence behind it.
Week three: settle the position and the message set
One position, the reasons to choose it, and the proof under each. This is the decision every campaign, page, and sales deck inherits, so it gets made before anything gets built.
What it produces
A position statement and message set your team can repeat the same way twice.
Week four: a plan with owners, dates, and a budget
Channels chosen against where your buyers actually decide, not against a best-practice list. Each initiative gets a named owner, a start, and a number it is expected to move.
What it produces
A quarterly plan, a budget allocation, and a one-page scoreboard.
Month two onward: run the operating rhythm
A weekly working session with the team, a monthly review with leadership, and a quarterly reset. The rhythm is what turns a plan into shipped work, and it is the part most stalled marketing functions are missing.
What it produces
Weekly standing sessions, monthly reporting, and a quarterly replan.
Ongoing: build the team and the vendor bench
Hiring briefs, interview scorecards, and management of the writers, developers, and agencies already in place. Fractional leadership is worth more when it makes the people around it better.
What it produces
Role definitions, hiring support, and vendor scopes held to a standard.
The handoff: make yourself replaceable on purpose
Documented positioning, playbooks, reporting, and a hiring plan for the full-time leader who eventually takes it. A good fractional engagement has an exit written into it from the start.
What it produces
A documented marketing function and a succession plan for the role.
A consultant recommends. A fractional CMO decides, reports on the decision, and lives with the result.
- 4-8
- Days a month for a typical growth-stage engagement
- 30
- Days to a written diagnosis, position, and plan
- 6
- Metrics on the standing scoreboard
- 15+
- Years across B2B software, manufacturing, and services
What a fractional CMO engagement includes
Fractional leadership is a seat, not a deliverable list. These are the responsibilities that come with it.
Owned strategy and plan
The quarterly plan, the position, and the channel mix are mine to own and defend, not a recommendation left on your desk.
Budget accountability
Spend allocated, tracked, and reallocated against results, with the tradeoffs explained in plain terms before they are made.
Team and vendor leadership
Direct management of in-house marketers, contractors, and agencies, including the uncomfortable conversations about underperforming scopes.
Leadership and board reporting
One scoreboard and a monthly narrative your leadership team, board, or investors can read without a translator.
Sales and marketing alignment
Shared definitions, a working lead handoff, and enablement built from what sales actually gets asked on calls.
Customer experience as one system
Onboarding, retention, and advocacy treated as part of marketing, because that is where growth-stage revenue quietly leaks.
Where a fractional CMO fits a growth-stage business
Four situations account for nearly every fractional engagement I take.
Revenue outgrew the marketing function
The founder or a sales leader has been running marketing on instinct, and the instinct stopped scaling somewhere around the second product or the third channel.
A capable team with no senior direction
You have doers who ship well and no one setting the priorities, so the calendar is full and the pipeline is flat.
A full-time CMO is premature
The problem needs executive judgment a few days a month, not a six-figure hire with equity attached before the position is even settled.
Agencies are executing without a strategy
You are paying for activity against a brief nobody senior wrote. Fractional leadership gives the agency something evidence-based to execute.
How success gets measured
Six numbers, agreed in the first month, reviewed monthly with leadership. Anything not on this list is activity, not progress.
Pipeline sourced by marketing
The share of qualified pipeline attributable to marketing, tracked monthly against where it stood the month I started.
Cost per qualified opportunity
Total spend divided by qualified opportunities, watched by channel so budget moves toward what works rather than what is familiar.
Win rate on marketing-sourced deals
Whether the leads marketing brings actually close, which is the honest test of positioning and targeting.
Sales cycle length
Days from first conversation to close. Better messaging usually shows up here before it shows up in volume.
Retention and expansion
Renewal and expansion rates, because customer experience belongs in the marketing scoreboard, not next to it.
Plan execution rate
The percentage of committed initiatives shipped on time, which is the leading indicator for every metric above it.
How an engagement usually starts
Almost every partnership opens with a marketing audit. It gives both of us the same read on channels, messaging, and pipeline before anyone commits to a monthly arrangement, and it ends in three prioritized decisions whether or not the engagement continues.
Still deciding between structures? The fractional CMO, agency, and in-house comparison works through the tradeoffs, and pricing publishes the ranges. If you want a number before a conversation, the project scope estimator asks nothing of you but a few answers.
If the constraint is customer language rather than leadership capacity, a voice of customer program is usually the better first move.
Common questions
What does a fractional CMO actually do?
Owns the marketing strategy, the plan, the budget, and the people executing it, on a part-time basis. The distinction from a consultant is accountability: a consultant recommends, a fractional CMO decides, reports on the decision, and lives with the result.
How many days a month does an engagement take?
Most growth-stage engagements land between four and eight days a month. The first month runs heavier because diagnosis and positioning happen there, then it settles into a weekly working session and monthly reporting.
How long before the work shows results?
Positioning and plan clarity land inside the first month. Execution metrics move on the length of your sales cycle, so a 30-day cycle shows movement by month two and a nine-month enterprise cycle shows leading indicators first.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency executes a scope. A fractional CMO sets the scope, then holds the agency to it. Many engagements keep both, and the comparison of fractional leadership, an agency, and an in-house hire is laid out in more detail on the comparison page.
What happens when we are ready for a full-time CMO?
I write the role definition, help interview, and hand over documented positioning, playbooks, and reporting. That handoff is planned from the beginning rather than negotiated at the end.
What does it cost?
Monthly partnership ranges and the hourly project rate are published on the pricing page, and the estimator will scope a range without a form or a phone call.
Next step
Bring the quarter you are trying to fix.
One conversation is usually enough to say whether fractional leadership is the right shape for it, or whether a smaller piece of work would settle the question first.