Cedar Collaborative
Cedar Collaborative

Tag: fractional CMO

  • Marketing as Connective Tissue

    Marketing as Connective Tissue

    Too many companies still treat marketing as a silo: a function to make ads, write copy, or churn out a slide deck. The cost is real: money wasted, customers confused, growth stalled. I firmly believe that marketing only works when it is woven into the fabric of the company, connecting product, sales, finance, and leadership. Anything less and you get noise instead of momentum.

    This is also why companies need senior marketing leadership, even if only part-time. Contractors and junior staff can execute campaigns. But only someone with cross-functional authority can sit in a board meeting one day and a sales call the next, and turn both into a strategy that actually sticks.

    Marketing and product: building the bridge

    It’s not enough for marketing to polish presentations. The real work is bridging user needs, product realities, and market opportunities.

    At one client, our North America team realized our enterprise product could reach a whole new segment if we built a template following industry best practices. That insight didn’t come from a brainstorm: it came from sitting with the product team, understanding what they were experimenting with, and recognizing that those prebuilt templates could unlock new customers.

    In the process, we cut rollout time for clients, reduced implementation costs, and opened an entirely new market for the company. Everyone won. That shift came from marketing being in the room early, speaking product’s language, and building a bridge between engineers and customers.

    So what? When marketing works with product, rollout time drops and adoption rises.

    Marketing and sales: listening on the ground

    If marketing isn’t occasionally on the conference floor or in a sales call, it’s flying blind. Sales hears what excites prospects, what stalls deals, and what competitors are promising. When I join them, I’m not just observing: I’m selling too. It’s the fastest way to understand what works in the field and what language customers actually use.

    That perspective reshapes everything. Once, we turned our booth into a live demo so sales reps could show our platform in action rather than describe it. I saw firsthand what made buyers lean in, what lost them, and what surprised them. That insight flowed directly into our messaging and training.

    So what? When marketing works with sales (in the field, not from a distance), stories close faster, relationships deepen, and growth feels real.

    Marketing and finance: strange bedfellows, natural allies

    Finance isn’t just the team that says no: it’s the team that knows where every dollar lives. When I’ve partnered with finance, the goal hasn’t been to defend spend but to learn together. We’ve built dashboards that tie marketing metrics to renewals and revenue, creating a shared view of impact.

    But the real collaboration comes from looking forward. Marketing often sees shifts in the market, from buying behavior and pricing pressure to audience sentiment, before they show up in the books. When finance and marketing share those early signals, we can plan ahead: adjust budgets, time investments, and move proactively instead of reactively.

    So what? When marketing partners with finance, the data gets smarter, the timing gets better, and decisions start coming from insight instead of hindsight.

    Marketing and leadership: reality check and connector

    Leadership is where every ambition and constraint meets: the CEO’s growth goals, the CRO’s revenue targets, the product team’s new roadmap, and the CFO’s budget realities. It’s easy for each to be right in isolation but misaligned in practice. Marketing’s job is to bring them together, to translate vision into motion.

    That means helping leadership see the whole picture. I’ve had conversations where the CEO wanted to launch into a new market, the product lead wanted to double down on development, and finance wanted to freeze hiring. None of those instincts were wrong. But when we put the data, story, and goals side by side, a clearer strategy emerged: one that balanced speed with sustainability and gave everyone a stake in success.

    The best leadership partnerships happen when marketing is trusted to bridge those perspectives honestly. Sometimes that means saying “not yet.” Sometimes it means pushing for a bigger leap. Either way, the role is the same: keep the company moving in a shared direction while making sure every decision connects back to why the company exists in the first place.

    So what? When marketing works closely with leadership, vision turns into strategy and alignment becomes a habit, not an accident.

    Lessons from nonprofits

    These dynamics aren’t just for tech: nonprofits face the same silos. At Northwest Harvest, finance was focused on budgets, development on donors, advocacy on politics, and operations on logistics. Each was right in its own way, but pulling in different directions. Marketing became the connective tissue, listening across teams and shaping a unified plan. It wasn’t always easy, but the same principles applied: integration beats isolation, and clarity beats noise.

    The takeaway

    Marketing is not a department off to the side. At its best, it is the connective tissue across a company: aligning product, sales, finance, and leadership, and reminding everyone that they’re in it together. That’s why I often start by drafting a corporate manifesto, even if it stays tucked in a leadership drawer. It’s a reminder: the work is shared, the mission is shared, and the impact belongs to everyone.

    And sometimes, the most important marketing insight doesn’t come from a dashboard or a campaign. It comes from noticing the raised eyebrow in a sales meeting, or the way a volunteer argues with a development officer. Those little signals are where the real work begins.

    Looking ahead: The companies that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that stop treating marketing as a silo and start treating it as connective tissue. The sooner leaders recognize this, the sooner growth and resilience can emerge.

  • Why Founders Delay Marketing Too Long (and How It Costs Them in Q4)

    Why Founders Delay Marketing Too Long (and How It Costs Them in Q4)

    Every founder has heard the advice: start marketing earlier than you think. Yet in practice, marketing is often one of the last major functions in which most startups invest.

    I’ve seen it happen across SaaS, B2B services, and even nonprofits launching new programs. The logic seems sound at the time: focus on product, close early sales, stretch the burn rate, and “we’ll add marketing when we’re bigger.” By the time Q4 rolls around, the cracks show.

    The hidden cost of waiting

    McKinsey research shows that high-growth B2B companies spend over 20 percent more time on structured customer engagement compared to peers, often investing earlier and more consistently in marketing systems (McKinsey). That time compounds. A sales-led team can still win early logos, but the growth engine stalls when the founder is forced to be both chief marketer and closer.

    By Q4, when boards, investors, and internal teams all want to see momentum, marketing that started too late cannot deliver fast enough. Pipelines are thin. Sales cycles stretch. Deals slip into the next year.

    Why founders put marketing off

    When I talk to founders, a few themes repeat:

    • They see marketing as discretionary. In early stages, marketing looks like a cost center instead of a growth lever.
    • They rely on their network. Or their sales leader’s network. Personal credibility and word of mouth can carry early traction, but not scale.
    • They underestimate the lag. Even the best marketing takes months to build systems, refine messaging, and show results.

    By the time they realize they need it, it is often already too late to impact the current quarter.

    A smarter play: start lean, start early

    Founders do not need a full-time CMO on day one. In fact, the salary cost alone can be prohibitive. U.S. chief marketing officer salaries now average more than $275,000 annually. For many startups, that is not sustainable.

    Fractional leadership is a different story. Hiring part-time senior marketing expertise early allows founders to:

    • Build scalable systems before the crunch. CRM, messaging, and demand gen pipelines that will not collapse under pressure.
    • Keep the founder out of the weeds. So they can focus on product and fundraising while marketing runs in parallel.
    • Show investors readiness. A startup that can demonstrate pipeline, process, and messaging clarity stands out when raising capital.

    What this looks like in practice

    I worked with one startup where the founder had been the sole marketer and salesperson for almost two years. Early growth was solid, but as the product matured, leads slowed. By the time I stepped in, the pipeline was weeks away from drying up.

    We put in place foundational demand-gen campaigns, clarified positioning, and integrated a simple CRM system. Within three months, pipeline coverage improved by nearly 40 percent. But the founder admitted they wished they had started six months earlier. That lag had already cost them missed deals, added stress, and, for a new-parent founder, missed time with family.

    Closing thought

    Marketing is not a nice-to-have. It is the system that multiplies everything else you are building. The earlier you start, even in lean form, the more likely you will enter Q4 with momentum instead of scrambling.

    The lesson is simple. Do not wait for scale to invest in marketing. Start before you think you need it. That is how scale happens.

  • The Recession That Never Came, and the Prep That Paid Off

    The Recession That Never Came, and the Prep That Paid Off

    In 2018, recession fears were everywhere.

    You probably remember that the downturn never arrived. But you might not recall that the preparation from that era saved many of us just a few years later.

    Quiet work on budgets, tools, and communication kept teams upright when 2020 hit. It was not glamorous. It worked.

    That playbook is useful once again. The backdrop is noisy and uneven. Some sectors are holding. Others feel soft. Forecasts shift with politics and policy. In this kind of climate, leaders benefit more from scenario planning and disciplined readiness than from trying to predict a single outcome.

    What we did then

    We cut experiments that were not paying off and concentrated spend on channels with clear signal. We simplified the stack so teams could work faster with fewer handoffs. We built lightweight automations to reduce manual effort. We pressure‑tested budgets at a 50 percent cut and asked what would break first. We made sure everyone knew where the data lived and how to read it. None of that made headlines. It made us faster.

    What changed in 2020, and why it mattered

    Higher education, one of our core markets, lost its bearings. We were selling into teams that had just lost their playbook. Because we had already built for lean operation, we could keep shipping, keep communicating, and keep trust. The lesson was simple: If you invest in resilience before the shock, you can move when others freeze. You can be nimble, not panic. And you can keep investing in, and building, relationships while others make demands or disappear.

    Why it matters again in 2025

    Policy shocks and tariff moves now travel faster than most planning cycles. Confidence data wobbles. Hiring cools. Supply chains feel tentative. Leaders in the US feel it first, but the effects travel to Australia, Canada, and the UK through inputs, export demand, and funding flows. Treat that reality as a systems problem, not just a finance problem. Track the early indicators inside your own business and act on them before the headlines catch up.

    What to cut, and what not to cut

    Cut waste. Cut tool sprawl. Cut the habit of running five half‑measures instead of one strong motion.

    Do not cut your market presence to zero. The instinct to go dark is strong in uncertain markets. It feels safe, but it is rarely strategic. Across the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK, the companies that stayed visible in past downturns, even on modest budgets, recovered faster and often took share from competitors who disappeared. That visibility does not have to mean bigger budgets. It means spending with precision: doubling down where you already see signal and trimming the noise. Sometimes that is a targeted outbound sequence run by a fractional CMO instead of a full in-house team. Sometimes it is leaning into owned channels where your audience already trusts you, rather than chasing every possible lead source.

    Where to invest if you need to stay lean

    Fractional leadership over full headcount. Bring in a fractional CMO or RevOps lead to set direction, tune the system, and prove traction before you scale a team or after layoffs. This keeps strategy and sequencing strong without locking in fixed cost.

    Retention first. Strengthen service levels, build simple loyalty mechanics, and focus messaging on value delivered. In a soft market, protecting lifetime value offsets slower net‑new growth.

    Consistent visibility. Keep a steady baseline of content, email, and social presence so buyers do not forget you during the lull. Modest but consistent beats bursty silence.

    Smart automation. Use lightweight automation and analytics to run fewer, better motions. Automate reporting, routing, and follow‑ups. Free people for higher‑value work.

    Selective technology upgrades. If capital costs have eased, there can be a window to modernize critical systems before competition heats up. Lock in talent and tools during that window.

    Partnerships and co‑marketing. Pair with adjacent brands to reach audiences efficiently. Share the lift on webinars, content, or offers. It stretches budgets without going quiet.

    In 2025, there is also room for scrappy, fast-cycle experiments. Pilot small campaigns you can launch and measure inside two weeks. Test message variations with narrow segments before scaling. Build direct audience assets (newsletters, private communities, subscriber lists) that are not at the mercy of shifting ad costs or algorithms. Layer in signal-based outbound that reacts to actual buyer activity rather than static lists. These are the kinds of moves that keep teams sharp and adaptive, while avoiding the sinkhole of large, slow-to-launch projects in a volatile environment.

    A simple readiness plan

    1. Build scenarios. Model best, middle, and worst cases. Tie each to clear triggers, budget moves, and hiring rules. Revisit frequently (some say monthly, some say quarterly; the important thing is to think about it before you need it).

    2. Watch the right signals. Confidence data, pipeline health, new orders, renewals, cash flow, and DSO. Add soft signals like slower replies and extended decision cycles. Treat tariff and policy changes as near‑term operational risks, not just headlines.

    3. Tighten your system. Consolidate tools where duplication exists. Improve handoffs between marketing, sales, and success. Ship smaller experiments with tight feedback loops. If you’re experimenting (and I love experimenting), keep decisions tight: no six-month leash for an experiment that is failing over and over and hard to iterate. No more shiny AI tools that aren’t performing for the company.

    4. Keep the brand warm. Publish on a regular cadence. Lean into helpful, context‑aware content. In the UK especially, resist the pull toward only short‑term performance metrics.

    5. Fund the work with intent. Shift spend toward retention, message clarity, and channels with proven signal. Hold back on speculative bets until your indicators turn.

    Guidance by audience

    US startups. Trim the stack. Pick a CRM you will actually use (but make sure you have one – this isn’t the time to go back to a spreadsheet). Forecast worst‑case and pre‑approve the moves you will make if you hit those triggers. Have three low-cost retention plays ready.

    Midsize B2B teams. Automate internal processes that slow deals. Align marketing, sales, and success on the same definitions and dashboards. Get clear on the buyer’s job to be done and rebuild outbound messaging around it.

    Nonprofits. Run scenario budgets and diversify donors so US concentration or government reliance does not knock you off course. Invest in mission‑specific digital channels where your community already shows up, and work to identify partners that can diversify your audience.

    Australia, Canada, and the UK. Do not lean into the instinct to go dark. Maintain share of voice and keep brand work alive. There are powerful methods that make the highest impact in different regions: In Canada, lean on efficient digital channels and innovation to stay visible. In the UK, balance performance with creative that builds memory. In Australia, keep the discipline to protect brand investment even when the instinct is to cut deep.

    You do not need a crystal ball. You need a bias toward readiness. If the worst never comes, you will have a tighter, smarter system. If it does, you will be one of the few still moving.

  • Stability at Scale in Wholesale SaaS

    Stability at Scale in Wholesale SaaS

    Industry: Wholesale ordering SaaS

    Project Duration: Ongoing partnership

    Engagement Type: Fractional CMO

    The context

    When the client was acquired, the new ownership faced a daunting reality: no website, customer data living in Word docs, and marketing that had been left largely untouched for years. At the same time, aggressive, well-funded competitors were entering the wholesale ordering space. The new CEO needed to stabilize the business fast: protect existing customers, stop churn, and build a credible brand presence, with no room for a bloated team or slow experimentation.

    The approach

    I stepped into the engagement as both strategist and operator, standing alongside the CEO as a trusted advisor while putting systems in place the team could use immediately. The work balanced quick wins, a customer newsletter, sales collateral, a HubSpot cleanup, with foundational systems: CRM setup, retention workflows, competitor positioning.

    Underneath it sat a simple set of principles: react to real market moves instead of manufacturing content for its own sake, build materials that serve customers and prospects at the same time, design every deliverable to lay groundwork for what comes next, and favor building trust over generating noise.

    The breakthrough

    The real turning point was realizing retention and acquisition didn’t need to live in separate silos. Newsletters that retained existing customers could double as technical material for prospects, which meant every effort had multiple payoffs instead of one. From there, stability started to compound: HubSpot cleanup and contract renegotiation reduced costs while giving sales better visibility, competitor landing pages helped fend off new entrants, and a blog and SEO program put the client on the map for the first time. All of it fed the same engine: protect the base, then grow with confidence.

    Results

    By focusing on clarity and credibility first, the client bought the breathing room it needed for its next chapter: zero churn during the engagement despite heavy competitor activity, stronger brand credibility in prospect conversations and at trade shows, weekly new prospect conversations driven by collateral and web presence, HubSpot costs cut by roughly $350 a month through contract optimization, 3,200-plus new website users since April largely from new email campaigns, and early SEO traction of 100-plus organic search hits and 30-plus organic social hits within months of launch.

    What’s next

    With tariffs shaking customer budgets across the industry, the client made the deliberate call to pause a full-scale growth push and invest in product improvements that help their own customers save money. Marketing never stopped through that shift, it moved to holding ground and building credibility while the foundation strengthened. The partnership continues, with acquisition work resuming as conditions allow.

    What it taught

    Stability comes before scale, especially after an acquisition. Dual-use content multiplies return when resources are thin. And a CEO under pressure needs a partner who can move between strategy and execution without needing a handoff every time the ground shifts.

  • What Local Soccer Gets Right on Brand

    What Local Soccer Gets Right on Brand

    Ballard FC and Salmon Bay FC aren’t just playing soccer. They’re investing like brands, building scalable identity on limited budgets, with strategic sponsors and design-forward merch that gives them a playbook most startups could learn from.

    The result shows up in small ways that add up. Fans who double as brand ambassadors. Merch that pays for itself instead of draining the budget. A sense of identity that no billboard could buy at any price.

    Most B2B companies treat merch as a cost, the stress ball or branded pen handed out at a booth and forgotten by the parking lot. These clubs treat it as a revenue stream. Limited-edition scarves, kits, hats, shirts, often designed with local artists, sell out because owning one means something. Ballard FC’s flash drops feel like direct-to-consumer retail: local, specific, real, and profitable. The lesson isn’t “sell merch.” It’s that merch tied to real identity behaves completely differently than merch tied to nothing.

    The local specificity is what makes it travel. These clubs bake their actual place into the design: cultural symbols, local materials, references only someone from Seattle would fully get, and somehow that specificity is exactly what makes someone wear the hoodie on a plane or mention it on Reddit halfway across the country. The instinct in B2B is usually the opposite: sand off anything that feels too specific in order to appeal to a broader market. It’s the wrong instinct. The most portable brands are usually the most rooted ones, not the most generic.

    Sponsorship works the same way. One of Ballard FC’s sponsors, Dick’s Burgers, throws wrapped burgers into the crowd every time the team scores. It’s a small thing, and it’s the difference between a sponsor and a logo on a banner nobody reads. A sponsorship that does something gets remembered. One that just buys visibility doesn’t.

    None of this required a large budget. It required treating brand as a place to invest rather than a line item to cut when things get tight, which is usually exactly when competitors pull back and specificity starts to matter more, not less.

    Local soccer clubs aren’t just playing. They’re quietly writing a brand playbook that scales further than their size would suggest, and it has very little to do with the size of the check behind it.

  • Billboards in Minnesota

    Billboards in Minnesota

    Industry: SaaS search solutions

    Role: Director of Marketing (the role that became the foundation for fractional CMO work)

    Duration: 2017–2021

    Note: Director of Marketing was the senior marketing seat, in Australian usage. The CEO’s title was Managing Director, not CEO, which is the usual source of confusion. This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.

    The starting point

    When I joined Funnelback, marketing barely existed. A partner had once helped craft a core brand and some collateral, but the effort was brief and dated. Sales carried most of the weight: a talented salesperson moonlighted as a copywriter, but without design or marketing support, her work had no chance to scale.

    Leadership was skeptical that marketing could drive revenue. It was seen as a cost center, if it was seen at all. Still, the mandate was clear. Australia was increasingly saturated, the UK team was faltering, and North America was the real bet. Success meant proving marketing could create focus, credibility, and growth.

    Building it from scratch

    I stepped into a hybrid role: strategist, operator, team builder. I was the first US-based marketing hire, joining a tiny Seattle office full of good ideas shipped over from Australia that didn’t quite fit the American market. Positioning, sales collateral, and the partner approach all needed rethinking.

    Higher ed became the breakout vertical. We pitched the product team in Canberra on building a higher-ed template, cutting implementation time and giving sales a running start. Around that same push, targeted account-based campaigns made Funnelback look far bigger than it was: enough that one sales engineer came back from a prospect meeting convinced we had billboards in Minnesota. There were no billboards. The account had simply been hit with ads, email, and content everywhere it turned.

    Instead of spending heavily, Funnelback invested in trust with higher-ed associations like HighEdWeb, showing up every year even on a small budget, which earned the credibility to outlast better-funded competitors. Underneath it, we migrated off a patchwork of SugarCRM, Mailchimp, and spreadsheets and onto Salesforce and Marketo, so sales and marketing could both actually see what was happening instead of walking into prospect calls blind.

    The team itself was built the same way: generalists first, specialists added only when the work actually demanded it, with enough shared ownership that designers, copywriters, and martech staff covered for each other rather than working in separate lanes.

    When the pandemic hit, the technology got repositioned as a crisis-communication channel. Customers moved to all-digital fast, industry partners got support, and the company doubled down on community at exactly the moment competitors pulled back.

    What it produced

    The higher-ed template became a repeatable engine for new business. The ABM approach gave a small company outsized visibility and credibility it hadn’t earned through size alone. Customers and partners stayed loyal through a genuinely disruptive stretch. And the growth was real and attributable to the work, not just to a good market.

    The merger

    Funnelback was acquired by Squiz during this period, which was both validation and a real trial. It proved the marketing had built something worth acquiring. It also meant colliding with a different culture and a different system, at a moment when teammates were anxious, leaders were stretched thin, and pandemic uncertainty made everything harder than it needed to be.

    As the de facto senior marketing leader through the transition, the job became keeping communication open, steadying morale, and making sure what Funnelback had built actually carried into Squiz rather than getting lost in the integration. Messy as the transition was, the practices held up well enough to strengthen Squiz’s North American business afterward.

    What carried forward

    Scrappy ABM works: smart targeting can make a small brand look much larger than it is. Tool sprawl is worth avoiding on principle, not just for cost, since a stack that scales with the team beats one that needs replacing every eighteen months. Credibility comes from steering strategy and still showing up on the conference floor, not one or the other. And in a crisis or a leadership inflection point, retention and credibility are what buy you the time to figure out what’s next.

    Funnelback was the training ground for what I bring to Cedar Collaborative clients now: building marketing where none exists, standing up systems under real pressure, running ABM that punches above its actual size, and getting leaders and teams through turbulence without losing what they built.