Meet the Fractional CMO who
can help you understand what ‘good’ looks like
Imagine working with an experienced marketing leader with
a track record in building brands & driving business growth...
But what if you don’t need that skill set five days-a-week?
That’s where Diane Perlman comes in
She’s a seasoned tech marketing leader and B2B scaleup CMO who knows how to get you to exit.
Her clients typically come to her at a key inflection point for the business, where strategic marketing leadership becomes a high priority, such as receiving a new funding round, considering an exit in the not-too-distant future or simply the realisation that founder-led marketing leadership isn’t sustainable at the current stage of growth.
When she takes on a fractional client, Diane embeds within the team and becomes part of the leadership. Since 2023, she has worked with clients to:
Devise a coherent marketing strategy aligned to business goals, often on tight budgets
Build the marketing engine designed to drive brand, demand and lead gen activities that deliver notoriety and pipeline
Professionalise marketing operations and output, realign team structure or reset marketing
Develop or evolve brands and value propositions into compelling narratives that resonate with clients and customers and drive greater consistency, focus and impact across the business
Lead and mentor existing marketing teams or recruit a new marketing team, with a view to establishing a high-performing and self-sustaining marketing function.
Bringing Branding Matters in as your fractional CMOs offers your business:
Flexibility & adaptability.
The right skills at the right time.
How does a fractional CMO engagement typically work?
To enable Diane to get up to speed at pace and hit the ground running, most of our fractional CMO engagements begin with an immersion period of 2-3 weeks. During this time, Diane will conduct 1:1 and group sessions with the leadership, existing marketing team, sales team and client services, among others, to deep dive into business objectives, growth priorities and challenges in more depth, as well as what marketing success looks like. She’ll also conduct desk research on the company website, socials, competitors, SEO/AEO and any relevant documentation.
Following the immersion, Diane will assimilate everything learned and deliver a working document covering key observations, strategic marketing pillars, quick wins and medium-term recommendations.
Once the immersion report is complete, Diane gets straight to work devising the marketing strategy or aligning the current strategy to the business goals and establishing the marketing foundations, depending on the needs. This might include:
Develop the marketing strategy and establish key KPIs
Set-up the right tools and operations to deliver high-quality brand, demand and lead gen outputs
Evolve or build the brand
Develop the vision and mission
Nail the value proposition and messaging
Recruit and mentor the team
Review the CRM and database setup and set cleanup/enrichment needs into motion
At this stage, Diane embeds within the team as the fractional CMO. She joins the company’s leadership team and also takes over day-to-day leadership of the marketing function and team, typically one or more days per week, depending on the client needs and budget. During this time, she will be driving the creation and execution of a cohesive marketing strategy and plan, leveraging owned, earned and paid channels. This might include:
driving brand and demand generation and lead capture, such as building content and thought leadership programmes
go-to-market planning for new product or service or market launches
leveraging the company’s existing tech stack and the latest AI tools and tactics to drive efficiency and effectiveness
leading and mentoring the marketing team, as well as recruiting
encouraging and driving collaboration with sales and other key functions across the business
Regular tracking and reporting on KPIs and executional progress
Introducing a new offering from Branding Matters
Paceworks delivers a rapid, external strategic business, brand and marketing assessment for newly promoted C-Suite leaders navigating their critical first 180 days and beyond.
Why?
CEO tenures are shrinking. Board expectations are rising. Market complexity is accelerating.
Yet most newly appointed leaders receive less structured support than they did at every previous career stage. Not only that, 88% of new CEOs are first-timers and only 10% have marketing backgrounds.
As a first time C-Suite executive, expectation is sky high. Runway is short. Your first 180 days will define everything. You need external, objective, commercial clarity, delivered fast.
“She played fractional CMO for us...and took us from DIY founder-led marketing into a much more professional outfit.
Di recruited and mentored a marketing team, set up the function (budgeting, reporting, planning, partnerships etc), produced high quality and attention-grabbing assets, and - most importantly - led us through a strategic review of our brand so that we produced better articulation of our value proposition and messaging.
It’s likely that Di’s professionalising of MTM’s marketing function may have had a bearing on us attracting the attention of various potential investors including our actual buyers
”