A fractional CMO, because strategy alone isn’t enough.
Senior growth leadership, part time, attached to a team that can actually build the thing. The strategy and the people who ship it, from one place.
● Start here
Tell us about the business.
It takes about a minute. It reaches the people who would do the work rather than a sales inbox, and if we are not the right fit for what you need we will say so.
Goes to hello@katama.io. No sequences, no newsletter, no list.
● What a fractional CMO does
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader working part time, usually one to three days a week, who owns growth strategy and the pipeline number without joining as a full-time executive.
The version worth buying comes attached to an execution team, because a strategy handed to a company with no capacity to run it changes nothing.
The constraint was never the thinking.
The founder is the marketing department.
It usually starts the same way. Growth is on the founder or the CEO, on top of the job they were actually hired for. Decisions get made late or not at all, agencies are managed in the gaps, and nobody owns the number.
The obvious fix is a full-time CMO, which at the wrong stage is a two hundred thousand dollar bet on a hiring decision made by someone who has never managed a marketer.
Pipeline target
A number agreed in the first month, reported against weekly, hit or explained. No moving it quietly at quarter end.
The other common fix is a consultant, who produces a strategy document that is often correct and rarely executed, because the constraint was never the thinking.
A fractional arrangement works when it carries both: someone senior enough to decide, and a team behind them who does the work.
Cost per opportunity
Trending across every channel, because the job is allocating budget well, not spending it enthusiastically.
What the role owns.
The first ninety days are about deciding what the company is going to do, writing it down, and putting a number against it. Most of the value is in stopping the four things that were never going to work.
After that it is cadence. A weekly meeting where the pipeline number is either moving or being explained, and a quarterly reset where the plan changes because the evidence did.
The engagement includes the execution team, so decisions turn into shipped work rather than into a to-do list handed back to you.
● Included
- Growth and go-to-market strategy
- Pipeline target setting and forecasting
- Sales and marketing alignment
- Channel strategy and budget allocation
- Agency and vendor management
- Team structure and hiring plan
- A thirty-day diagnostic, written down and yours to keep
- A weekly cadence where the number moves or gets explained
- A quarterly reset when the evidence changes the plan
- The execution team behind the decisions
How the work runs.
Diagnose in thirty days
Funnel, channels, data, team and pipeline history. Ends with a written view of where growth actually is, which is often not where the dashboard says.
Decide and write it down
Strategy, targets, budget and what the company is going to stop doing. Signed off by the founder or CEO, not left implied.
Install the cadence
A weekly meeting with the same agenda and the same numbers. Unglamorous, and the single most reliable predictor of whether anything changes.
Execute and adjust
The team ships against the plan, the plan changes quarterly on evidence, and the target is either hit or explained.
What gets owned.
Pipeline target
A number agreed in the first month, reported against weekly, hit or explained. No moving it quietly at quarter end.
Forecast accuracy
How close the prediction was, which matters more to a board than the raw number and is far harder to fake.
Cost per opportunity
Trending across every channel, because the job is allocating budget well, not spending it enthusiastically.
Who this suits.
- Growth currently sits with a founder who has another job
- You need senior decisions faster than you can hire for them
- Several agencies are running with nobody coordinating them
- The board is asking for a plan with numbers attached
- You want a full-time executive in the room every day
- The founder will not delegate the growth decisions
- You need one specific channel run, not leadership over all of them
- There is no budget for execution behind the strategy
Fair questions.
How much time do we actually get?
One to three days a week depending on the engagement, plus the execution team behind it. We are explicit about which days and what is in scope, because fractional arrangements fail when the expectation is quietly full time.
Is this a route to a full-time hire?
Often, and that is a good outcome rather than a threat to the arrangement. Part of the job is defining the role, building the function and, when the time comes, helping you hire the person who takes it over. A fractional leader who blocks their own succession is not doing the job.
What if we already have a marketing team?
Then the job is leadership rather than replacement. Most in-house teams are competent and under-directed, and the first month usually finds capacity that was already there and pointed at the wrong work.
Can we start smaller?
Yes. A growth audit is the usual first step and commits you to nothing. If a fractional engagement is not the right answer we would rather say so at that stage than sell you one.
Works well with.
Revenue operations
A growth leader without trustworthy numbers is guessing confidently. This is usually the first project.
Read →Lead generation
The execution engine most fractional engagements end up standing up first.
Read →Brand & messaging
When the diagnosis is that nobody understands what you sell, this comes before any channel spend.
Read →