Blogs
Short pieces on fractional CMO leadership, B2B tech GTM, SaaS demand generation and loyalty programs. Written the way I work: plainly, practically, and without pretending marketing is rocket science.
Most GTM plans I see are just a calendar pretending to be a strategy — launch, webinar, press note, paid burst. Busy, but not convincing. A real go-to-market is four decisions: who exactly, why now, how they buy, and what you'll stop doing to pay for it. Get those right and the rest writes itself.
Most founders hiring their first CMO are really hiring hope: a senior title that will magically fix pipeline, positioning, hiring and that one dashboard nobody trusts. A fractional CMO fixes the sequencing instead — one quarter, three priorities, a number attached to each. Start with the marketing P&L, not the org chart. If your marketing spend can't be traced to pipeline, no title fixes that.
Week one, I read everything: plans, spend, CRM hygiene, win-loss notes. Week two, I talk to sales — they always know what's broken and are rarely asked. Week three, we kill work nobody can defend. Week four, we publish a plan a CFO can read without a translator. No rebrand. No offsite. Just a shorter list, owned by named humans.
No founder wakes up thinking "I need a fractional CMO." They wake up thinking "why isn't marketing working" — same problem, different clothes. You don't need one if you haven't found product-market fit, or if the strategy is fine and you simply need more hands. You probably do if founder-led marketing has hit its ceiling, spend is climbing while pipeline isn't, you're about to enter a new market or category, or sales and marketing are quietly blaming each other.
Every founder asks this with half a spreadsheet already built. Let's fill in the rest. A full-time CMO with real seniority — 10+ years, category experience, a checkable track record — typically runs ₹50–75 lakh a year in fixed pay alone, before ESOP, benefits and the 2–4 months it takes to find and close someone good. A fractional engagement is usually a retainer, commonly ₹3–5 lakh a month for a defined scope and days per week.
The title has grown popular enough to stop meaning much. Some people wearing it have owned a marketing P&L for a decade; others added it to a headline after one advisory call. Ask the boring questions: show me a marketing P&L you owned, misses included; what did you kill in your last engagement and why; walk me through your first 30 days at your last two clients.
"Hope this finds you well" followed by three paragraphs about your Series B is not prospecting, it's cardio for the delete key. What works: a narrow list, one observable trigger, one sentence of relevance, one ask. We rebuilt outbound for a SaaS team around 40 accounts instead of 4,000 and reply rates went up 3x — mostly because we finally sounded like a person.
Everyone wants new logos; the growth is usually sitting inside the ones you already have. Map the accounts by whitespace, not by revenue. Give CS a marketing motion — exec briefings, business reviews, adjacent-team campaigns. In one APAC portfolio, expansion plays contributed a meaningful slice of new ARR at roughly a third of the cost per opportunity of net-new.
A booth is not a strategy, and neither is a co-branded webinar with a partner whose buyers don't exist. Pick events by the meetings you can pre-book, not by footfall. Pick partners by overlap of buying committee, not by logo size. Then measure the boring thing: qualified meetings within 30 days. Everything else is hospitality.
Points are a liability with a smile. Designing a program without modelling breakage, accrual and redemption cost is how a marketing win becomes a finance problem two years later. Before you add another tier, run the financial health review: earn-burn ratio, liability ageing, margin per redeemed point. Generosity is great — funded generosity is better.
Members don't chase rewards, they chase progress. The most profitable design decision in most programs is where you place the threshold and how visibly you show the gap. Designing Trident Privilege and running SPG in India taught me that recognition beats discounting: people forgive a smaller reward far more easily than being treated like a stranger.
Strategy is a series of decisions about what you will not do, written in language your buyer already uses. Most B2B brands are three adjectives away from being interchangeable. The test I use: can a new SDR explain who you're for, what you replace, and why now — in two sentences, at a noisy conference, without a deck? If not, we have work to do.
If any of these ideas resonated, I'd love to hear what you're building. Drop me a note — and if you're in Bengaluru, let's meet in person and argue politely about marketing over a 'dabara' of piping hot filter coffee. I promise not to bring a slide deck.
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