A 30-45 day fractional CMO foundation engagement at $2M-$20M ARR B2B SaaS. Validates ICP, personas, positioning, brand voice, and the three-layer messaging house with evidence not opinion. Sequenced across six phases: pre-engagement setup, day-one data collection, internal interviews + GTM survey, strategy workshop, customer validation, and foundation finalization + activation runway.
Confirm system access, stand up the working environment, capture the baseline metrics, map stakeholders, and establish time-tracking transparency before kickoff so the first two weeks are not spent waiting for credentials.
Five activities, all completed before kickoff, so day one is a working day.
Confirm system access and observability
Get read access to the CRM, marketing automation, analytics, and call-recording stack before kickoff so the first two weeks are not spent waiting for credentials.
Stand up the working environment
Shared drive, Slack channel, project tracker, weekly leadership sync, biweekly steering committee. All running on day zero so day one is a working day.
Capture baseline metrics
CAC, ACV, ARPU, NRR, GRR, MQL→SQL, pipeline coverage, win rate, sales cycle, SaaS Magic Number. Without this "before" snapshot we cannot prove the foundation work delivered anything.
Map stakeholders + lightweight RACI
Who decides ICP. Who signs off on positioning. Who has veto on brand voice. Uncomfortable on day one, impossible on day forty.
Establish time-tracking transparency
Hours, not heroics. Both sides log time from day zero. This sets the standard for how we operate together.
Send the day-one customer-list request, schedule the product demo, audit content + tech stack + channels, and pull pricing + deal-review notes. Customer scheduling has the longest lead time in the phase, so it has to start on day one.
Five activities run in parallel during week one. Customer list and demo scheduling go first — they have the longest lead time.
Send the day-one customer-list request
Internal-leader interview list, product demo contact, customer shortlist segmented across closed-won / closed-lost / churned / expansion, plus three to five candidates for win-loss interviews. Customer scheduling has the longest lead time.
Schedule the product demo for week one
Founder or head of product paired with a sales engineer who can walk through a live deployment. We are looking for the gap between how the team explains the product and how customers actually use it.
Run a content + asset audit
Website, sales deck, one-pagers, case studies, testimonials, video library, demo recordings, blog backlog, analyst coverage. Inventorying what exists, not judging it. This is the input for the messaging exercise later.
Audit the tech stack + TTM channel performance
Paid search, paid social, organic, email, partner, outbound, events, direct. The shape of historical performance tells us where the company has and has not earned the right to invest.
Pull pricing + last six months of deal review notes
Pricing tells you who the company thinks the customer is. Deal notes tell you who the customer actually is. The gap is where most foundation work lives.
Run 1:1 leadership interviews, the team-wide GTM Compass survey, sales-call review, and NRR + churn cohort analysis. Synthesize a workshop pre-read with patterns, contradictions, and convergences. No surprises in the room.
Five activities across two weeks. The pre-read at the end is the bridge into the workshop.
Run 1:1 leadership + frontline interviews
Every workshop participant + CRO + head of CS + head of product + two or three frontline reps. 30-60 min each. Surface individual conviction before group dynamics flatten it.
Run the team-wide GTM Compass survey
Anonymous survey to all GTM employees, not only leadership. The variance across roles and tenure is more diagnostic than the averages.
Review 15-20 recorded sales calls
Across stages and outcomes. Patterns in objections, language, and silence are the cheapest customer research available. If recordings do not exist, that finding alone goes in the report.
Pull NRR cohort + churn reason codes
The expansion pattern and the churn pattern are the two most underused inputs into ICP work. Both are in the system already and rarely surface in workshops.
Synthesize the workshop pre-read
Patterns from 1:1s + survey, top three contradictions across leadership, top three convergences. Goes out 48 hours before the workshop. No surprises in the room.
One-day on-site or two half-day virtual session. Morning diverges (ICP candidates, persona drafts, value-prop hypotheses), afternoon converges into a shortlist with explicit assumptions to be tested. Output is hypotheses, not conclusions.
Four workshop activities. The reframing of "hypotheses, not conclusions" is the single most important shift.
Run the strategy workshop
One-day on-site or two half-day virtual. Morning diverges (ICP candidates, persona drafts, value-prop hypotheses). Afternoon converges into a shortlist with assumptions to test.
Pain-Claim-Gain + JTBD persona drafts
Pain-Claim-Gain scaffolds the value prop thesis. JTBD frames the personas. Output is one to three persona hypotheses with explicit jobs to be done, not a single persona declared on conviction.
Brand voice — inside-out + outside-in
Inside-out lens: leadership aspirational voice. Outside-in lens: verbatim language from testimonials, support tickets, review sites. The gap between the two is the brand voice strategy.
Identify two or three quick wins
Run in parallel while foundation work continues. Quick wins are scoped so they will not be wasted regardless of where ICP lands.
Eight to twelve customer interviews segmented across closed-won, closed-lost, churned, and expansion. Switch interviews surface trigger + consideration set + verbatim language. Five-Test gate validates each persona before sign-off.
Five activities run across three weeks. Each segment teaches a different lesson.
Run 8-12 customer interviews across four segments
Closed-won validates the persona. Closed-lost reveals the consideration set. Churned exposes the promise-vs-experience gap. Expansion accounts predict where the next dollar of ARR comes from.
Use the Switch JTBD interview technique
Surface the trigger event, the consideration set, the moment of choice, and the language used at each step. This produces the verbatim quotes that go directly into messaging.
Dollarize the pain in every interview
Ask what the problem cost the customer per quarter, in dollars or in time, before they bought. A persona that cannot dollarize its own pain is a persona that will not write its own check.
Apply the Five-Test ICP quality gate
Specificity, ICP fit, JTBD anchoring, dollarized pain, verbatim language. Any persona failing more than one test goes back into validation, not forward into messaging.
Run win-loss interviews as a separate workstream
The interviewer should not be the agency or the CMO. Third-party win-loss removes courtesy bias and gets honest answers about why deals close, why they stall, and what the competitor sounded like.
Lock the Foundation Document, build the three-layer messaging house, set 90-day targets against the Phase 0 baseline, sequence activation by asymmetric credibility, and document the assumptions still being tested.
Five activities to lock the document, sequence the runway, and hand off to phase two with intellectual honesty.
Lock the Foundation Document
Validated ICP, validated personas, positioning statement, value proposition by persona, brand voice strategy, and the messaging house. From this point forward this document is the input to every campaign, asset, and hire.
Build the messaging house in three layers
Corporate narrative at the top, persona-specific narratives in the middle, channel-adapted versions at the bottom. Most agencies stop at the middle layer. The bottom layer is where activation actually lives.
Revisit baseline metrics + set 90-day targets
Targets align to the T2D3 trajectory, not to industry averages. Without explicit targets the next phase becomes a content factory instead of a growth engine.
Define the activation sequence by asymmetric credibility
Invest in proof points (case studies, analyst coverage, customer councils, original research) that earn the right to spend on demand-gen, before scaling the demand-gen spend. The order matters more than the budget.
Document the assumptions still being tested
The foundation is validated, not finished. Naming what is still uncertain on day 45 is more useful than pretending everything is settled.
