A fractional CMO who walks into a company without a structured onboarding plan will spend the first month collecting information that should have been ready on day one. This checklist lives on the expert side of the engagement — it is what a fractional CMO does in their first five days to earn credibility and produce the first meaningful deliverable. The early days are about listening and diagnosing: understanding where demand comes from, where the customer journey drops off, and what the marketing team''s current capacity looks like. The goal is not to arrive with answers — it is to arrive with the right questions, and the structure to answer them within thirty days. Week-one priorities include getting read access to analytics and CRM data (Google Analytics 4, Mixpanel, or equivalent), mapping the customer journey from awareness to conversion, reviewing the last ninety days of marketing spend by channel and attributed pipeline, and identifying the two or three experiments with the highest leverage. The questions asked in early stakeholder conversations determine whether the next six months produce a coherent marketing strategy or expensive random activity. Do not give advertising spend authority until week six at earliest — that requires trust and context about the business that takes time to build. The goal by end of week two is a written assessment of where demand generation is working, where it is breaking down, and what to fix first.
A fractional CMO who walks into a company without a structured onboarding plan will spend the first month collecting information that should have been ready on day one. This checklist lives on the expert's side of the engagement — it's what a fractional CMO does in their first five days to earn credibility and produce the first meaningful deliverable. The early days are about listening and diagnosing: understanding where demand comes from, where the customer journey drops off, and what the marketing team's current capacity looks like. The goal is not to arrive with answers — it's to arrive with the right questions, and the structure to answer them within thirty days. Week-one priorities include getting read access to analytics and CRM data, mapping the customer journey from awareness to conversion, reviewing the last ninety days of marketing spend by channel, and identifying the two or three experiments with the highest leverage. The questions asked in early stakeholder conversations determine whether the next six months produce a coherent marketing strategy or expensive random activity.
Week 1 — Access & Discovery
- Access CRM and pull MQL → SQL → closed-won funnel data
- Download last 6 months of campaign performance from ad platforms
- Review website analytics (top pages, traffic sources, conversion rates)
- Read last 5 sales calls or customer interviews (recordings or notes)
- Inventory all active campaigns, content, and brand assets
Week 1 — Key Questions
- What is the company's biggest marketing challenge right now?
- What channels have worked and which have been abandoned and why?
- How does marketing currently hand off leads to sales?
- What does the CEO consider a successful marketing outcome in 90 days?
- What is the current cost of customer acquisition by channel?
Week 2 — First Deliverable
- Produce a marketing funnel audit with conversion benchmarks
- Identify 3 highest-leverage opportunities (quick wins)
- Propose 2 channels to double down on and 1 to pause
- Deliver proposed OKRs for the next quarter
- Map the content gaps vs. buyer journey stages
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