Notes from
the practice.

Four of the last seven engagements I picked up started with the founder having hired a "Head of Marketing" in the previous nine months. In all four cases, the marketer is wrong for the company.

The diagnostic that catches this in week one of a kickoff sprint is not the marketer's resume. It is the founder's answer to a single question: "What single result would make you say this hire was worth it twelve months from now?"

When the founder cannot answer in concrete terms — when the answer is "build a marketing function" or "tell our story better" — the hire is going to fail. Not because the marketer is bad, but because the founder has hired against an undefined goal.

Most B2B SaaS pricing pages are designed by accident. Three columns of features-vs-tiers, a vague "Enterprise — call us" at the right edge, and "Most popular" plastered on the middle one because someone read a blog post about anchoring.

Your pricing page is the most-read piece of marketing copy on your site. The conversion of pricing visitor → trial signup is typically 2–3x higher than home page visitor → trial signup. And yet pricing is the artifact founders leave to a designer to lay out, not a marketer to think through.

The pricing page is positioning made literal. Every choice — tier names, anchoring, what is on which row, what is "contact us" versus published — communicates who the product is for and how the company thinks about its own value.

There is one operational question that determines more about a B2B SaaS company's next twelve months of growth than any other: which channel are you going to win.

Not "what channels can we run?" — every company can run any channel. The question is which channel is going to compound for this specific product, this specific buyer, this specific founder. Most companies pick wrong because they pick by what is easiest to start, not by what compounds at scale.

I have a diagnostic I run with every new client in the first thirty days. It is not a framework. It is two questions and a chart.

I tell every prospect this in the discovery call: my job is to make myself replaceable. The 12–24 month engagement model exists because that is roughly how long it takes to build the marketing function that does not need a fractional CMO.

Some of my peers run engagements that go on indefinitely. The retainer never expires; the founder never quite manages to hire someone full-time; the fractional becomes a permanent line item on the budget. That is a legitimate business model. It is not the model I run.

The reason is simple: a fractional CMO who is not actively engineering their own replacement is not actually senior. Real CMO work includes building the team that will own the function after you. If you are not doing that work, you are doing growth-marketing-consulting.