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What does the first 90 days with a fractional CMO look like?

Audit and baseline, then strategy and priorities, then execution with the metrics wired up.

Days 1 to 30 are audit and baseline. Days 31 to 60 are strategy, positioning and budget allocation. Days 61 to 90 are execution with the metrics wired up and reported against that baseline. At $195 an hour and 10 to 20 hours a month, the first quarter is roughly 30 to 60 hours of senior time.

Days 1 to 30: find out what is actually true

  • The funnel. Where leads come from, what they cost, what percentage qualify, what percentage close, and how long it takes.
  • The spend. Every channel, every vendor, every tool, and what each one is supposed to be producing.
  • The team. Who does what, who is underused, and what skill is missing.
  • The stack and the tracking. Whether conversion data is trustworthy. It usually is not, and everything downstream depends on fixing that. See our data and analytics work.

Output: a written baseline. Not opinions, numbers. This is the document everything after gets measured against, and most companies have never had one.

Days 31 to 60: decide

Positioning and message, because a channel plan built on fuzzy positioning wastes money efficiently. Then channel mix and budget allocation, with explicit decisions about what stops as well as what starts. Then the metric set: the three or four numbers leadership will actually run the business on. Then a written plan with owners and dates.

The hardest part of this month is usually killing something. A channel that has been funded for two years because nobody measured it.

Days 61 to 90: run it

Execution starts against the plan, tracking gets rebuilt where it was broken, vendors get held to the new metrics, and the first real report lands comparing performance to the day 30 baseline. Ninety days is enough to prove or disprove the direction on paid channels. It is not enough to judge SEO, and a good fractional CMO will say so rather than pretend.

What it is not

It is not 90 days of deck building. If you reach day 60 with no decisions made, that is a failed engagement and you should say so.

Related: What does a fractional CMO actually do?, How many hours a month does it take?, How much does a fractional CMO cost?, Fractional CMO services