The 22 questions people ask before they hire me.

A typical fractional CMO sets the marketing strategy, decides where the budget goes, manages the marketing team or agency, and reports to the CEO on pipeline. Some run campaigns themselves; most direct other people who do.

What I do is narrower and more permanent. I build the marketing engine: positioning and messaging, lifecycle sequencing, lead scoring, CRM and marketing automation integration, routing rules, the marketing and sales SLA, attribution, and a weekly operating cadence. I build it in your tools, teach your operator to run it, and leave.

A marketing engine is the set of systems underneath marketing that decide what gets made, for whom, where it goes, and whether it worked. It has three layers. The strategy layer points it: ICP, positioning, and channel bets with kill and scale criteria. The operating system runs it: one definition of a good lead, scoring, routing, the SLA with sales, a working process for your AI tools, and a weekly cadence. The optimization loop makes it more efficient: pipeline per dollar by channel, on one scoreboard, reviewed monthly.

Most companies have content and campaigns but no engine. That's why nobody can say which of last quarter's activity produced pipeline.

I'm a fractional CMO and marketing systems architect based in Atlanta. I spent twenty years leading B2B SaaS and fintech marketing teams, most recently four years as VP & Head of Marketing at a B2B fintech payments company, where I led a company-wide AI marketing transformation, served as interim sales leader, and helped execute the sale when the company was acquired in 2026. I also build Kindling, an AI marketing teammate for very small teams.

A full-time CMO is an employee who owns the marketing function, manages the team, sits in executive meetings, and carries the number. A fractional CMO provides the same level of judgment part-time, without the salary, the recruiter fee, or the three to six months it takes to hire one.

The right choice depends on stage. Five or more people reporting into marketing, or a board that wants a named owner of the number, means hire full-time. Revenue but no marketing leader, sales sourcing most of the pipeline, and a small team without senior direction means fractional. I wrote the full comparison, with the year-one cost math, at neelythomson.com/fractional-cmo-vs-full-time.

An agency produces work: content, creative, campaigns, paid media. A fractional CMO decides what work should be produced, for whom, and how you'll know if it paid off. The two are complementary, and a fractional CMO often manages the agency.

I don't produce work and I don't act as agency of record. If you need an agency, I'll help you brief one and I'm glad to refer people I trust.

Because a retainer pays the consultant for staying, and a build pays them for finishing. On a retainer, the systems tend to live in the consultant's head and leave when they do. In a build, every system passes through a three-rep handoff and ends up in your tools, documented, run by your person. I'm always trying to work myself out of a job, because I don't think a permanent fractional CMO is healthy for a marketing team.

Four phases. Diagnose (weeks one and two): audit, ICP, positioning brief, pipeline math, and your operator gets named. Architect (weeks three to five): brand system, messaging architecture, channel bets written as hypotheses, the scoring model, routing rules, the marketing and sales SLA, and the data architecture underneath. Build (weeks six to ten): the systems go live, each through the three-rep cycle. Hand off (weeks eleven to thirteen): your operator runs the engine unaided, runbooks recorded. Then I sit on your Monday call for four more weeks, silent unless asked.

Every system I build goes through the same cycle. I build the first version live while your operator watches, screen recorded. Your operator builds the second version and I review it before it ships. Your operator builds the third version alone and I review it afterward. A system isn't finished until someone on your team has done it three times. It's the reason the engine still works six months after I leave.

One named operator, and their time. About six hours of interviews in the Diagnostic, four hours a week in Architect, six hours a week in Build, and four hours a week in Hand off. The operator is usually a marketing manager, a marketing ops person, or a sharp generalist. Without one, there's nothing to hand over, so I don't start engagements that don't have one.

Six working artifacts, in your own tools. The Engine Doc (ICP, channel bets with kill and scale criteria, and a decision log). The Messaging Kit (category narrative, value proposition, messaging by segment and persona, proof points, objection handling, voice guidelines). The Pipeline Model and Scoreboard (funnel stages, five metrics with owners, a dashboard wired to real data, a budget model). The Systems Spec (sequences, scoring model, routing rules, CRM field architecture, the SLA). Documented processes for every workflow. And the Weekly Loop plus a 30/60/90 runbook for your operator.

The Advisory Seat is an optional monthly arrangement, roughly ten hours a month, scoped per client. It covers a monthly read of the scoreboard, kill and scale calls on live channel bets, and being on call for whoever runs marketing, usually your operator. Strategy and systems only, no production work. Some clients take it after a build; some take it on its own because they already have an operator and need the judgment, not the plumbing.

B2B software companies selling into regulated or institutional buyers: fintech, edtech and workforce development, healthtech, govtech. Usually $2M to $30M in revenue, a dozen or more closed deals, some marketing spend going out the door, and no marketing leader above the manager level. It works when four things are true: you want to own the engine rather than rent an operator, you can name the person who'll run it, creative and media stay with your team or a partner, and you know who your buyer is.

Companies that need someone to run marketing week to week; that's an operator hire, and I'll say so on the first call. Teams of five or more that need a manager. Product-led companies where marketing is the whole growth engine and belongs in-house full-time. And companies earlier than about a dozen closed deals, where positioning work will do more than plumbing.

Yes, and it's where I learned most of this. I built AI-assisted content production and web operations at a B2B fintech payments company under NACHA rules and CFPB scrutiny, with legal sitting inside the workflow instead of reviewing it at the end. Selling to banks, credit unions, and payment platforms means a security reviewer on the buying committee, procurement that gates on fiscal year, and claims that have to be substantiated before they ship. I build engines that treat those as steps in the process rather than gates at the end.

Yes. Companies selling to school districts, state education departments, hospital systems, and government agencies share the same buying mechanics as fintech: long committee sales, procurement rules, fiscal-year timing (most state fiscal years start July 1, the federal one October 1), and a legal or compliance reviewer somewhere in the loop. Sales usually sources most of the pipeline, and marketing's job is to feed and route it. That's the situation the engine is designed for.

That's one of the most common reasons companies call. The tools are live (Copy.ai, Jasper, Canva, HubSpot's AI features, whichever landed last quarter) and the output looks the same as before, or worse, because there's no process around them and no internal owner. I build the process: a prompt and template library built from your messaging framework, brand guardrails in the design tools, a review path that legal can live with, and a named person who owns it. I don't write the content the tools produce.

Send a short note through the form at neelythomson.com/#start, or message me on LinkedIn. I'll reply with a few questions and, if it looks like a fit, a Diagnostic SOW. The Diagnostic is two weeks and $7,500, and at the end of it you'll know what's broken and what I'd build, in writing.