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We sit on your leadership team like a partner, not a vendor. The strategist who signs the SOW runs the work, daily, weekly, quarterly. No bait-and-switch, no junior associate doing the meaningful thinking.
What is fractional CMO? · Quick answer
Fractional CMO means a senior marketing leader who works with your business on a part-time, ongoing basis, typically 1-3 days per week. You get C-suite-grade thinking and strategic ownership without the $300K+ full-time salary. We're embedded in your leadership team, run the function, hire the people, and own the numbers.
A quarter-by-quarter plan that turns chaos into systematic growth.
Concrete outputs every month. No ambiguity about what you're paying for.
A complete GTM plan with positioning, messaging, channel selection, and launch timeline tailored to your ICP and market.
Data-backed recommendations on where to spend, how much to allocate per channel, and expected returns at each budget tier.
Write the JDs, screen candidates, onboard hires, and set KPIs. Build the marketing team you need without the wrong hires.
Audit your agencies, renegotiate contracts, set SLAs, and hold vendors accountable to revenue metrics instead of vanity reports.
A live dashboard and weekly written report tying every marketing dollar to pipeline and revenue. No vanity metrics.
Monthly competitive teardowns covering positioning, pricing, ad strategy, content, and market moves so you never get blindsided.
30-page written report
Signed off in writing
Async, no calls unless needed
Public, written, honest
If team change needed
When you need them
Two weeks of audit: market, ICP, channels, attribution, competition, internal team. Written diagnostic delivered.
Specific milestones, channel bets, KPI targets, content calendar, hire plan. Signed off in writing.
We attend your weekly leadership stand-ups. Run the marketing function as fractional CMO. No deck-making.
Public retros. What worked. What didn't. What we're betting on next quarter. Honest, written, shared with the board.
Discovery sprint + 90-day deployment plan + quarterly OKRs + weekly rhythm + monthly board update + vendor oversight. 1 to 3 days per week of senior leadership without the full-time salary, embedded in your team.
2-week discovery sprint
Audit current channels, attribution, team, vendors, P&L contribution. Talk to 5-10 customers. Tag last 100 closed-won deals against ICP. Output: signed scoping doc.
90-day deployment plan
Instrument first (week 1-2), validate one channel (week 3-4), layer second + GEO (week 5-8), hire the operator (week 9-12). Kill criteria built into every milestone.
Quarterly OKR session
1 objective, 3-5 measurable key results, single named owner per KR, weekly confidence rating. Kill criteria for each KR. No 10-KR aspiration lists.
Weekly leadership rhythm
30-min review with founder/CEO. Pipeline, channel performance, what shipped, what is blocked, what is next. Asynchronous Notion update for the rest of the team.
Monthly board-ready dashboard
Pipeline created, MQL→SQL conversion, blended CAC, CAC payback, contribution margin, runway impact. Same template every month so trends compound.
Vendor + agency oversight
Brief, scope, manage, fire. Renegotiate stale contracts. Audit vendor reporting against actual outcomes. Most fractional engagements save 30%+ on vendor spend within 90 days.
Hiring scorecards + interviews
Job ladders for marketing roles, interview rubrics, scorecards. Lead the loop for senior hires; coach the founder through the rest. Avoid the 9-month rediscovery trap.
Founder coaching
1:1 every two weeks with the CEO/founder. What they need to know, what they should not know, what decisions to escalate. Fractional CMO role is partly therapist.
Exit ramp scoped from day 1
Engagement length, transition plan, knowledge transfer to in-house hire. We exit cleanly when the ops are humming, not when the contract runs out.
The exact templates and articles Xpand uses when standing up or scoping a fractional engagement. Lock the engagement before week 1, set OKRs that drive pipeline, plan the 90-day deployment.
We don't take every fractional engagement. Book a 30-min fit call. We'll tell you if we're right for each other in week one, not month three.
Marketing Strategy Resource Hub
Field notes, downloadable templates, glossary definitions, and FAQ answers, all scoped to marketing strategy. Updated continuously.
4 field notes
You just raised. The 90-day marketing-spend playbook for post-seed founders
Most post-seed founders blow the first six-figure marketing budget on the wrong channels because they hire fast, deploy faster, and instrument never. The 90-day deployment playbook reverses that order.
How fractional operators package the Xpand frameworks for their own clients
Independent fractional CMOs and growth contractors use the Xpand Media free templates and SOPs to scale their own delivery. The legitimate way to integrate them, attribution included.
The MQL is dead. 7 metrics RevOps leaders track in 2026
MQL is a 2014 metric that does not survive 2026 buying patterns. The 7 metrics RevOps leaders at Series A through C SaaS actually track: pipeline velocity, time-to-first-value, contribution margin, and 4 more.
The post-Series-A marketing team in 2026: 3 hires, not 7
Most post-Series-A founders try to hire 7 marketing roles in 12 months and burn $1.5M on team that does not produce pipeline. The 3 hires that actually work in 2026: senior generalist, performance lead, AI ops engineer.
8 terms
Trusted across 20+ platforms
Formal partner status on every primary ad platform we run
We wire these into client stacks as the operating layer
AI engines we work with directly for citation and GEO
Free resources
16 free templates, 8 learning tracks, weekly playbook posts, and a 60+ entry FAQ. Everything we’d hand a new client on day one.
16 production-ready templates for GEO, performance ads, outbound, CRO. Drop straight into your stack.
Get them freeStructured learning tracks across all 8 services. Built for founders and business owners, not students.
Start a trackHow we run growth ops in 2026. New post weekly. Real numbers, not theory.
Read the latest60+ answers. Pricing, scope, sectors, results timelines. The questions buyers ask before booking.
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