Keith Hubert and Gary Frank | Fractional CMOs & The 90-Day Win
This video is a podcast interview with Keith Hubert and Gary Frank discussing the role and strategies of fractional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in achieving significant business wins within the first 90 days of engagement.
Conclusion
Fractional CMOs emphasize the importance of evaluating business strategies, understanding financials, and achieving early wins to build momentum. They focus on aligning marketing strategies with business goals, leveraging customer insights, and maintaining clear communication to drive growth and ensure long-term success.
Key points
🔍 Evaluating Business Strategies: Understanding the company’s business model, financials, and customer base before diving into marketing strategies.
📊 Financial Assessment: Analyzing the company’s P&L and sales data to determine the most effective marketing spend and identify areas for improvement.
🗣️ Consistent Messaging: Ensuring consistent and clear messaging across all channels to build a strong brand presence and avoid confusion.
📈 Early Wins: Focusing on quick wins, such as optimizing email flows and ad spend, to demonstrate value and build trust with clients.
💡 Customer Insights: Conducting thorough customer research to understand their needs and how they perceive the brand, and using these insights to refine marketing strategies.
🤝 Team Collaboration: Working closely with internal stakeholders to align strategies and improve overall effectiveness.
🚀 Execution and Resources: Developing realistic and executable marketing plans with measurable goals and ensuring the necessary resources are in place.
👥 Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging key stakeholders early on to ensure alignment with the company’s vision and strategy.
🧠 Marketing Education: Educating clients on the importance of strategic marketing and the iterative nature of positioning.
📋 Long-term Objectives: Establishing both short-term and long-term goals to guide marketing efforts and ensure accountability.
Summary
- Introduction: The podcast introduces the topic of fractional CMOs and their impact within the first 90 days.
- Gary’s Approach: Gary discusses his approach as a fractional CMO, focusing on business strategy and understanding the financials and customer base before diving into marketing efforts.
- Common Issues: Keith and Gary highlight common issues such as misaligned expectations and the need for clear success metrics to avoid misunderstandings.
- Identifying Key Problems: Both guests emphasize the importance of identifying key problems early on, such as low return on ad spend and ineffective marketing strategies.
- Early Wins: Keith discusses the importance of achieving early wins by optimizing email flows, ad spend, and conversion rates to build momentum and trust with clients.
- Customer Research: Conducting customer interviews and analyzing feedback to refine messaging and better target the right audience.
- Strategic Planning: Building a strategic narrative and detailed marketing plan to guide efforts and ensure long-term success.
- Consistent Messaging: Ensuring consistent messaging across all channels, including the website, online ads, and sales communications, to avoid confusion and build a strong brand presence.
- Sales Alignment: Aligning the sales team with updated messaging to ensure they understand the benefits and value propositions.
- Red Flags: Identifying red flags, such as a company lacking sufficient budget or readiness for a fractional CMO, to avoid unproductive engagements and ensure mutual success.
Quotes
- 00:07: “There’s a lot of variety in how they kick off a new client engagement and in fact, there’s so much variety it’s valuable to just listen to what opportunities they look for or what they tackle first.” – Dean Waye
- 00:58: “Quite often, the reality is I had to pull back into my learnings from business strategy and help companies figure out how they make money.” – Gary Frank
- 01:26: “Before they really should be figuring out how much should I invest in marketing, I need to go through what their P&L looks like, where their sales are coming from, who their customers are and are not, and what the market is.” – Gary Frank
- 02:05: “I’ve had to pivot my direction and have kind of altered my agency to focus on fractional CMO plus business strategist.” – Gary Frank
- 02:55: “I like to personally know what their breakeven return on ad spend is just so they have their warning zone kind of in place.” – Keith Hubert
- 03:45: “If they have a low return on ad spend, I look to see what they’re doing in their emails and their other marketing channels to make sure it’s a holistic view.” – Keith Hubert
- 04:25: “A lot of brands just kind of do whatever is in place at the startup level, so I try to help them understand the strategy behind it.” – Keith Hubert
- 05:12: “I like to make sure they’re optimizing around conversion because I have seen brands optimize around video views or likes or engagements, which are all good, but at the end of the day we care more about the revenue that the ads are driving.” – Keith Hubert
- 06:30: “I do deep customer insights, looking through their social, email, talking to their customers, talking to their frontline staff, talking to the key stakeholders, and learning about their customers as much as I can.” – Gary Frank
- 07:28: “A lot of brands have several revenue channels. Which ones are the most profitable? Which ones maybe are a waste of time or they’re losing money on?” – Gary Frank
- 08:55: “It’s like showing up to help your friend paint and then you realize, oh, I needed rollers, I needed brushes. How much paint do I need? How much marketing do I need?” – Dean Waye
- 09:38: “The most challenging meeting I ever had was a meeting where we didn’t add anything to our list; we only crossed things off that the data or sales said did not matter or had very little impact.” – Gary Frank
- 10:50: “People do business with people they know, like, and trust.” – Gary Frank
- 11:40: “It’s important to know where we are today so that we know how we can move forward tomorrow.” – Keith Hubert
- 12:30: “The role of the CMO is to say, ‘Here’s all the different tools we should be using to optimize and help you achieve those goals.'” – Keith Hubert
- 13:20: “If you bring on a fractional, you need to be transparent and share sales data, any insights you have, and clearly define what success looks like and what the goals are.” – Gary Frank
- 14:00: “The best way to waste money is to try and do everything well because nobody does everything well.” – Gary Frank
- 14:48: “If you make a lot of right turns and do not build momentum, you will not be successful.” – Gary Frank
- 15:32: “Digital is not a strategy. Content is a strategy. If you develop great content that people care about and engage with, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to turn that into organic social or paid advertising.” – Gary Frank
- 16:30: “Clients sometimes don’t understand that just because the CMO understands it doesn’t mean they’re the person to execute it.” – Keith Hubert