Key takeaways
- The first month is diagnosis and positioning, not campaigns. Anything launched before that is guessing with your money.
- By day sixty there should be a written plan, a budget by channel and the first measurable work live.
- By day ninety you should have a reporting page you trust and a decision about who runs marketing day to day.
- The CMO should leave behind a system that works without them, which is the test of whether the seat was worth it.
Owners hire a fractional CMO because marketing has become a list of vendors and invoices with no one accountable for the total. An agency runs ads, a freelancer posts, the website was built three years ago, and nobody can say what a customer costs. Ali takes this seat himself for BC companies and the first ninety days follow a pattern that we will set out here so you know what to expect and what to demand.
The short version is that month one is about understanding, month two is about building, and month three is about proving and handing over. If your fractional CMO starts with a campaign in week one, ask why.
Days one to thirty, find out what is true
The first weeks are spent inside the business, not inside advertising accounts. The CMO sits with sales, listens to calls, reads the last six months of enquiries, and asks the people who talk to customers what they actually hear. They review every active vendor and every live channel and write down what each one costs and what it has produced.
Positioning comes next. Who exactly do you serve, what do they pay for, and why would they pick you over the two competitors they also called. Most companies have never written this down, which is why their website, ads and sales calls all say slightly different things.
- Vendor and channel audit with real cost per lead where the data exists.
- Customer and sales interviews, summarised in plain language.
- A one-page positioning statement you can read aloud without wincing.
- Tracking fixed so that every enquiry has a source.
Days thirty one to sixty, build the plan and start
With the facts in hand the CMO writes a plan that fits your capacity. A plan that generates more enquiries than your team can answer is a plan to burn money. The plan names the channels, the budget for each, the owner of each, and the number that tells you whether it is working.
Then the first work goes live. Usually that means fixing the website pages that customers actually land on, tightening the offer, and launching or rebuilding one or two paid channels with proper tracking. Our team joins by function here, which is where a fractional seat differs from a solo consultant. A designer, a developer and an analyst can all be on your account the same week without you hiring anyone.
Expect the CMO to say no to a few things in this month. A channel you like that has never produced a booked job, a sponsorship that was a favour, a rebrand that would delay revenue. Part of the value of the seat is a senior person who can turn those down with the numbers in hand.
Days sixty one to ninety, prove it and decide who runs it
The third month is about evidence. The CMO builds a reporting page that shows spend, enquiries, booked appointments and revenue by channel, and reviews it with you every week. Weak channels are cut, working ones get more budget, and the plan for the next quarter is written from numbers instead of opinions.
This is also when the question of who runs marketing day to day gets answered. Some companies hire a marketing coordinator under the fractional CMO. Others move to our outsourced marketing department and keep the CMO on fewer days. Either way the decision is made with ninety days of data behind it.
What you should see at the end
- A positioning statement and messaging that sales and marketing both use.
- A channel plan with budgets, owners and targets for the next two quarters.
- Working tracking from first click to closed sale, or as close as your tools allow.
- A weekly reporting page you understand without a translator.
- A decision on the permanent shape of the marketing function.
What it costs and how to judge it
Our fractional executive engagements sit between $25K and $60K per month depending on the days and the team behind the seat. Judge the first ninety days on whether you now know your numbers, whether the plan is written, and whether the team can run the system when the CMO is not in the room. Judge the second ninety days on revenue.
If you want a sense of what properly run marketing can do, our agencies publish their trades results at hvac.agency/case-studies, including CombiBoiler.ca at 300% ROI and more than 300 monthly leads. Those numbers come from the same discipline described above, applied for years.