What: A tactical walkthrough of a CMO’s first 90 days
Who: Founders, teams, or decision-makers hiring fractional leadership
Why: Sets expectations, timelines, and early outcomes clearly
How: Week-by-week outline with core milestones, tools, and deliverables
In This Article
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A week-by-week breakdown of what your marketing function can expect when a fractional CMO steps in, from audit to alignment to acceleration.
Unlike consultants who offer recommendations and walk away, a fractional CMO is embedded in your business. They take ownership of strategy, align execution, and build the systems your team needs to scale, all while working within a defined timeline.
But without clarity on what to expect, teams can feel uncertain, and momentum may stall.
This blog breaks down a typical 90-day marketing engagement with a fractional CMO. Whether you’re evaluating this model or about to start working with one, the following plan outlines what happens week by week, from audits and alignment to quick wins and scalable campaigns.
Week 1–2: Listening, Auditing, and Alignment
The first two weeks are about understanding, not acting. A strong fractional CMO starts by listening to stakeholders, auditing existing assets, and aligning expectations. This phase lays the foundation for everything that follows.
1. Internal Stakeholder Syncs The CMO meets with founders, team leads, and anyone influencing marketing. These conversations reveal goals, pain points, and past efforts. It also helps the CMO assess team strengths and bandwidth.
2. Funnel and Channel Audit Before building new strategies, the CMO audits your funnel: website performance, ad accounts, email flows, lead quality, and analytics. They identify bottlenecks, gaps, and opportunities.
3. Campaign Review and Asset Inventory Ongoing and past campaigns are assessed for performance and alignment. Content libraries, brand assets, and paid creatives are reviewed for reusability or required updates.
4. Audience and Messaging Review The CMO checks whether your messaging matches your audience. They study buyer personas, tone, and value proposition across platforms.
5. Alignment on Goals and Reporting This is where expectations are clarified. The CMO sets the framework for what will be tracked, how often, and which metrics will signal progress. Weekly or biweekly update formats are also agreed upon.
By the end of Week 2, the CMO knows your current state, your goals, and your operational readiness, and your team knows what’s coming next.
With insights gathered from audits and stakeholder conversations, the fractional CMO now shifts into strategy mode. The goal during this phase is to define a clear direction, prioritise initiatives, and align the team around measurable outcomes.
1. Defining or Refining Positioning and Messaging The CMO sharpens your unique value proposition, ensuring that your messaging speaks directly to the right segments. This becomes the foundation for upcoming campaigns and content.
2. Building a 3–6 Month Roadmap Based on your business model and growth goals, the CMO creates a clear marketing roadmap. This includes strategic themes, key projects, and performance expectations. It’s realistic, focused, and aligned with available resources.
3. Prioritising Growth Levers Not all channels deliver equally at every stage. The CMO identifies the top opportunities based on current traction and growth stage, whether that’s lifecycle marketing, paid media, content, or conversion optimisation.
4. Establishing Success Metrics The CMO defines success in terms that are specific, measurable, and tied to business outcomes. Each priority in the roadmap includes metrics such as CAC, MQL velocity, campaign ROI, or channel-level KPIs.
5. Aligning Execution Rhythm Marketing is a team sport. The CMO sets up a working cadence with internal team members, agency partners, or freelancers, defining roles, timelines, and workflows for faster execution.
By the end of Week 4, the strategy is no longer abstract. It’s documented, shared, and ready for execution.
With a clear roadmap in place, the fractional CMO now moves into the execution phase, launching priority initiatives, enabling the team, and creating systems for sustainable delivery. This is where strategy starts translating into measurable activity.
1. Launching Quick Wins The CMO prioritises low-effort, high-impact actions that build momentum early. This might include relaunching paused campaigns, improving lead forms, refining CTAs, or fixing conversion gaps on key landing pages.
2. Establishing Marketing Rituals and Operating Rhythm The CMO introduces consistent workflows: weekly standups, campaign sprint planning, reporting loops, and feedback systems. These rituals drive predictability and performance across the team.
3. Rescoping Roles and Responsibilities If execution gaps were identified, the CMO helps realign responsibilities. Some functions may be outsourced, others restructured internally. Every team member gains clarity on what they own and what success looks like.
4. Training and Upskilling Where needed, the CMO runs working sessions or templates for junior marketers, onboarding freelancers, or agency partners. They transfer frameworks and expectations rather than micromanaging every task.
5. Rebuilding or Fixing Underperforming Funnels Based on early audits, the CMO begins hands-on improvements in content workflows, email automation, ad funnel structure, or lead handoff to sales. Every change is made with a performance objective in mind.
By the end of Week 8, the team is not just aligned, it’s executing faster, with more clarity and accountability.
With key systems in place and early results coming in, the focus now shifts from building to scaling. The fractional CMO ensures that what’s working is expanded, while refining anything that’s lagging behind expectations.
1. Doubling Down on High-Performing Campaigns Channels or campaigns showing early traction, whether it’s paid, content, partnerships, or email, are scaled with additional investment, refined targeting, or extended distribution.
2. Expanding Content or Channel Cadence The CMO works with the team to scale content production, improve frequency, or launch supporting campaigns. Performance dictates pace, not guesswork.
3. Launching Real-Time Dashboards If not already implemented, the CMO now formalises campaign tracking dashboards, lead generation scorecards, and channel performance reports. These are used for weekly or biweekly check-ins and leadership reporting.
4. Reviewing KPIs and Adjusting the Plan At this stage, initial KPIs are assessed for actual vs. expected performance. Adjustments are made to optimise CAC, increase MQL quality, or rebalance budget allocation.
5. Planning Next Sprint or Leadership Handoff The CMO may either begin planning for the next 90-day cycle or prepare a structured handover, especially in cases where internal leadership or hiring is expected to take over. Documentation, process maps, and performance logs are compiled.
By the end of Week 12, your marketing function is operating with strategic direction, performance rhythm, and clarity on what’s next. The CMO’s impact is visible and scalable.
The 90-Day Fractional CMO Plan at a Glance
Timeframe
Focus Area
Key Activities
Week 1–2
Listening and Auditing
Stakeholder syncs, performance audits, messaging review, and expectations alignment
Week 3–4
Strategy and Prioritisation
Roadmap creation, goal setting, growth lever mapping, execution rhythm planning
Week 5–8
Execution and Enablement
Launching quick wins, team rituals, rescoping roles, and campaign optimisation
Week 9–12
Scaling and Performance Optimisation
Doubling down on what works, dashboards, KPI reviews, sprint planning or handover
Use Case Snapshots: How the 90-Day Plan Drives Early Results
Fractional CMOs are most effective when they have the space to lead and the clarity to act. These real examples show how early momentum and systems transformation happen within the first 90 days.
Example 1: Aligning Cross-Functional Teams by Week 4
A fintech startup had siloed teams across marketing, product, and sales. The messaging was inconsistent, and campaigns lacked coordination.
What the CMO did: Held structured stakeholder sessions, audited performance gaps, and rebuilt the GTM framework. Introduced weekly syncs across departments.
Outcome by Day 30: All future campaigns were planned with shared ownership. Lead quality and sales alignment improved by mid-quarter.
Example 2: Rebuilding an Underperforming Paid Funnel by Week 8
A B2C services brand was spending heavily on paid media but seeing poor conversions and high CAC.
What the CMO did: Audited the landing page flow, implemented clearer CTAs, redesigned creatives with better positioning, and shifted spend to better-performing channels.
Outcome by Day 60: Cost per lead dropped by 35 percent. ROAS improved, and the internal team learned how to test messaging in cycles.
Example 3: Preparing for Leadership Transition After 90 Days
A SaaS company brought in a fractional CMO to stabilise the function after a failed leadership hire.
What the CMO did: Created a marketing roadmap, clarified team roles, built dashboards, and introduced sprint planning. Coached the internal content lead to take over as interim manager.
Outcome by Day 90: Performance improved across key metrics, and internal leadership was ready for a handover without loss of momentum.
Hiring a fractional CMO is not about outsourcing strategy. It’s about embedding experienced leadership that can clarify your priorities, energise your team, and drive execution with purpose, all in a defined timeframe.
The first 90 days are critical. It’s when foundational systems are built, direction is set, and early wins begin to compound.
What separates high-performing engagements from average ones is not just what gets done, but how structured, measured, and scalable that work becomes.
If you want marketing leadership that brings both vision and velocity, a structured 90-day plan is where it begins.
FAQs
1. What should I expect in the first 30 days of a fractional CMO engagement
In the first month, the CMO focuses on stakeholder alignment, marketing audits, and creating a strategic roadmap. You’ll also see early team rituals and success metrics taking shape.
2. How soon can we expect results from a fractional CMO
Initial quick wins often appear within the first 30 to 45 days. Larger outcomes like funnel performance and campaign ROI typically show measurable progress between 60 and 90 days.
3. Will the CMO work with our existing team
Yes. Fractional CMOs are most effective when working with your in-house talent, freelancers, or agencies. They bring structure, clarity, and leadership that enhance team performance.
4. What tools or systems are introduced in the first quarter
This can include campaign planning templates, growth dashboards, OKR frameworks, team check-ins, and marketing scorecards, all designed to improve consistency and track performance.
5. Is the 90-day plan fixed or customisable
The structure is proven, but priorities and execution are always tailored to your company’s growth stage, team size, and current challenges.
6. What happens after the first 90 days?
Depending on your needs, the CMO can continue in a leadership role, transition to advisory support, or help onboard a permanent marketing lead, with full handover documentation and systems.
7. How does upGrowth support onboarding for fractional CMOs?
We use a structured onboarding process that includes business immersion, toolkit deployment, and goal tracking. Each engagement starts with a clearly mapped 90-day plan and weekly syncs.
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For Curious Minds
A fractional CMO’s initial deep discovery phase is fundamentally different from a consultant’s review because it is designed for direct implementation, not just recommendations. This embedded approach ensures that the subsequent strategy is built on a practical understanding of your team’s capabilities, existing assets, and specific business challenges. It prevents the common pitfall of receiving a strategic plan that is disconnected from your operational reality.
The audit and alignment phase is structured to create a solid foundation by:
Mapping internal dynamics through stakeholder syncs to understand historical context and political landscapes.
Quantifying the current state by performing a funnel and channel audit to establish baseline performance metrics.
Creating an asset inventory to identify reusable content and creatives, saving time and resources later.
Establishing clear expectations for goals and reporting to ensure complete alignment from day one.
This foundational work is what allows for rapid, confident execution in the following weeks, transforming insights into tangible action. To see how this audit directly informs strategic priorities, explore the full 90-day plan.
Establishing clear, quantifiable success metrics early on transforms your marketing strategy from a collection of activities into a focused, goal-oriented engine for growth. By defining KPIs like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) velocity in the initial strategy phase, you create a shared language of success that aligns the entire team, from marketing specialists to the C-suite. This clarity eliminates ambiguity and ensures every subsequent action is measured against its contribution to core business outcomes.
This process is about linking effort directly to impact. It involves:
Tying every strategic theme in the roadmap to a primary business metric.
Assigning channel-level KPIs to specific initiatives for granular performance tracking.
Creating a transparent reporting framework so everyone understands progress against the goals.
This data-driven foundation ensures your marketing function operates with purpose and accountability. Learn more about how these metrics are integrated into a cohesive 3-6 month plan in the full article.
The decision to prioritize one growth lever, such as lifecycle marketing, over another, like paid media, is a strategic choice based on a company's unique context. A fractional CMO weighs several factors to identify the channels that will deliver the highest return at a specific stage. For instance, an early-stage company with a solid user base but low retention might see a much higher ROI from investing in improving customer activation and engagement through lifecycle marketing than from spending more on top-of-funnel acquisition.
Key factors influencing this decision include:
Growth Stage: Startups seeking product-market fit benefit more from optimizing the existing user journey, while scale-ups may need aggressive acquisition via paid channels.
Business Model: Subscription businesses depend heavily on retention, making lifecycle marketing a primary lever.
Funnel Analysis: The audit might reveal a high volume of low-quality leads from paid ads, indicating a need to focus on conversion optimization first.
Resource Availability: Lifecycle marketing can often be implemented with existing tools and teams, offering a more capital-efficient path to growth.
Understanding how to weigh these variables is central to building a realistic and impactful marketing roadmap.
Findings from the initial audit directly inform the priorities and projects outlined in the 3-6 month marketing roadmap, ensuring the strategy is corrective and proactive. For example, if the funnel audit reveals that sales consistently rejects leads due to poor quality, the fractional CMO can trace the issue to its source. The roadmap would then be built to systematically address this, moving beyond surface-level fixes.
Here is how that specific finding might translate into strategic action:
Month 1: A project to refine audience targeting in ad accounts and sharpen messaging on landing pages to attract better-fit prospects.
Month 2: An initiative to implement a lead scoring system and an MQL definition, ensuring only qualified leads are passed to sales. The MQL velocity becomes a key success metric.
Month 3: The development of mid-funnel content, like case studies or webinars, designed to educate prospects and improve conversion rates from lead to opportunity.
This evidence-based approach ensures that every item on the roadmap is a direct response to a diagnosed problem or a confirmed opportunity.
Aligning the execution rhythm is crucial for translating strategy into consistent action, and a fractional CMO often implements agile-inspired frameworks to achieve this. The goal is to create a predictable cadence that fosters communication, accountability, and momentum without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. This structure ensures the internal team feels supported and clear on priorities, rather than simply receiving directives.
A proven model for this often includes a combination of meetings and documentation:
Weekly Team Syncs: A dedicated time to review progress against weekly goals, identify blockers, and confirm priorities for the upcoming week.
Bi-weekly Strategy Updates: A forum for the fractional CMO to share progress against the larger roadmap and connect daily tasks back to strategic objectives.
Shared Project Management Tools: Using platforms like Asana or Monday.com to provide a single source of truth for project timelines, ownership, and status.
Defined Reporting Structure: A clear dashboard tracking key metrics like campaign ROI, shared regularly to maintain focus on outcomes.
This rhythm makes the strategy tangible and empowers the team to execute effectively, as detailed further in the 90-day engagement plan.
To maximize the effectiveness of the initial two-week audit, a B2B SaaS company should proactively gather and organize key marketing assets and performance data. Providing this information upfront allows the fractional CMO to move quickly from understanding to analysis, accelerating the timeline to strategy development. The goal is to offer a comprehensive, transparent view of what has been done, how it performed, and what resources are available.
A well-prepared team should have the following ready:
Access to All Platforms: Grant admin or viewer access to Google Analytics, ad accounts (Google, LinkedIn), marketing automation platforms, and your CRM.
Past Performance Reports: Compile reports on historical campaign ROI, lead generation by channel, and customer acquisition cost (CAC) trends over the last 6-12 months.
A Centralized Asset Library: Organize all brand guidelines, logos, sales collateral, blog content, case studies, and ad creatives in one accessible location.
Audience Documentation: Share any existing buyer personas, ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and customer survey data.
Having this prepared enables a much deeper and faster audit, setting the stage for a more impactful engagement.
The foundational work completed in the first four weeks of a fractional CMO engagement is designed to build a scalable marketing function that can be handed off seamlessly. The marketing roadmap, defined success metrics, and established reporting framework act as a comprehensive operating system. This system ensures that a new full-time leader can step in and understand the strategy, priorities, and performance benchmarks from day one, dramatically reducing their ramp-up time.
This foundation provides a new leader with:
A clear, documented 3-6 month roadmap outlining strategic goals and key projects.
An established execution rhythm and workflow that the team is already accustomed to.
A robust reporting dashboard tracking essential KPIs like MQL velocity, providing immediate insight into what is working.
Well-defined positioning and messaging, ensuring brand consistency during the transition.
Essentially, the fractional CMO builds the engine and provides the manual, allowing the next leader to start driving immediately. This process de-risks a critical hire and sustains momentum.
Beyond the initial 90 days, the strategic framework evolves from building foundations to driving optimization and expansion. The fractional CMO's role shifts from architect to operator, focusing on scaling successful channels, experimenting with new growth levers, and mentoring the internal team. The established roadmap becomes a living document, updated quarterly to reflect market feedback and changing business priorities.
This embedded leadership model is gaining traction because it offers a solution to common growth-stage challenges:
Access to Senior Talent: It gives startups access to executive-level expertise without the cost of a full-time hire.
Flexibility: The model allows companies to scale marketing leadership up or down based on need.
Focus on Execution: Unlike consultants, fractional CMOs own the outcomes, ensuring strategy is connected to implementation.
As markets demand greater agility, more companies will turn to this model to navigate growth efficiently, making the principles of this 90-day plan a core competency for modern marketing.
The structured listening and auditing phase acts as a critical safeguard against the pressure to deliver immediate, but often misguided, results. By dedicating the first two weeks to a systematic deep dive, a fractional CMO deliberately avoids making decisions based on incomplete information or assumptions. This methodical approach ensures the subsequent strategy is not just a collection of popular tactics but a direct response to the company's specific situation.
This initial phase de-risks the entire engagement by:
Validating Assumptions: Cross-referencing stakeholder interviews with performance data from the funnel audit to separate opinion from fact.
Understanding Constraints: Assessing team bandwidth and budget realities to ensure the final plan is executable.
Identifying Root Causes: Digging into analytics to find the true source of problems, like why CAC might be rising, instead of treating symptoms.
This ‘measure twice, cut once’ philosophy is what separates a sustainable growth strategy from a series of disjointed, short-term actions. Discover how this discipline shapes the rest of the 90-day journey.
The intense focus on stakeholder syncs and transparent goal-setting in the first two weeks is a deliberate strategy to build psychological safety and organizational trust. When a fractional CMO prioritizes listening to the team's experiences, pain points, and goals, it signals respect for their expertise and creates buy-in for the changes to come. This process transforms the engagement from an external mandate into a collaborative partnership.
This early alignment work is crucial for building momentum because it:
Reduces uncertainty by clearly defining roles, communication cadences, and what success looks like.
Builds credibility by showing the new leader is taking the time to understand the business before prescribing solutions.
Fosters collaboration by making team members active participants in the strategy-building process.
Sets clear expectations for reporting, so everyone knows how progress will be measured and communicated.
This foundation of trust is what enables a team to move quickly and confidently once the strategic roadmap is in place.
Translating audit insights into a prioritized roadmap is a systematic process designed to focus resources on the highest-impact initiatives. The fractional CMO synthesizes all findings from the first two weeks to identify key strategic themes, such as 'improve lead conversion' or 'increase customer retention'. These themes become the pillars of the roadmap, ensuring every project is aligned with a core business objective.
The process typically follows these steps:
Synthesize Audit Findings: Consolidate all data points from stakeholder interviews, funnel analysis, and campaign reviews.
Identify Strategic Themes: Group findings into 2-4 major opportunity areas or problems to solve.
Brainstorm Initiatives: For each theme, list specific projects that could drive improvement (e.g., 'launch a new email nurture series').
Prioritize Based on Impact and Effort: Score each initiative to focus on quick wins and high-impact projects first.
Build the Timeline: Sequence the prioritized projects into a 3-6 month timeline with clear owners and success metrics like improved campaign ROI.
The roadmap is built as a living document, reviewed quarterly to adapt to new data and market dynamics, ensuring continued relevance.
The distinction between defining and refining positioning is critical, as it determines the scope and direction of all marketing efforts. A fractional CMO will focus on defining positioning from scratch when a company is pre-product-market fit, pivoting to a new audience, or has messaging that is clearly disconnected from customer needs. In contrast, they will focus on refining positioning when the core value proposition is strong but needs to be sharpened for clarity, consistency, or competitive differentiation.
This choice dictates the strategic approach:
Defining positioning involves foundational work like customer interviews, competitor analysis, and developing a new value proposition. It is a major strategic project.
Refining positioning is an optimization exercise. It focuses on sharpening taglines, updating website copy, and ensuring a consistent tone of voice across all channels.
Getting this right is vital because your positioning is the bedrock of every campaign. A mismatched approach can lead to wasted ad spend and confusing communication, underscoring why this is a key step in the 90-day plan.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
