The 90-day
playbook
What a fractional CMO should actually deliver, week by week, in the first 90 days.
The first 90 days of a fractional CMO engagement are where the operating cadence either gets installed — or doesn't. Three phases: Diagnostic (weeks 1-4) — sit in meetings, read the data, talk to lost deals. Install (weeks 5-8) — put the operating cadence in motion. Traction (weeks 9-13) — first metric movement should be visible. CEOs who don't see all three phases hit on schedule should re-scope or end the engagement.
Why most engagements fail in the first 90 days
Three failure modes account for ~80% of broken fractional CMO engagements I've seen in Brazilian mid-market.
Failure 1: jumping to execution. The fractional CMO arrives, hears "we need pipeline," and starts launching campaigns in week 2. By week 6 they realize the funnel is leaking before the campaigns even hit. By month 4 they've burned R$200K on pipeline that wasn't going to convert anyway, because the qualifying stage was broken. Failure 2: never finishing diagnostic. The fractional CMO spends 12 weeks "understanding the business." Beautiful slides. Stakeholder maps. SWOT. Maturity matrix. Day 90 arrives. The CEO asks "so what changes Monday?" and the answer is "we still need to align on positioning." The CEO disengages mentally. The renewal happens out of awkwardness, not conviction. Failure 3: install without traction. The cadence is in place by day 60. Weekly war rooms running. Monthly review installed. But the metrics don't move. CAC is the same. Pipeline stagnant. Sales still complaining about lead quality. The CMO blames "long sales cycles." The CEO starts looking for an exit.The playbook below is structured to avoid all three. It assumes the engagement is a Full (15-25 hours per week) into a R$30M-100M Brazilian B2B company. Adjust intensity for Light or Interim engagements.
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Phase 1: Diagnostic (Weeks 1-4)
Week 1: Sit in the meetings, don't talk
The first week, the CMO is silent in your meetings. They sit in:
- The sales weekly forecast call
- The leadership weekly
- A customer success 1:1
- A finance close meeting
- One product roadmap review
The output of week 1 is observed reality. Not opinion. Not framework. Observed reality.
By Friday of week 1, the CMO sends the CEO a 1-page summary:
- Three things that work, observed not assumed
- Three things that are broken, observed not assumed
- One question the CMO needs answered before week 2
The CEO reads it in 90 seconds and either trusts the diagnostic or doesn't.
Week 2: Read the data — really read it
In week 2, the CMO opens the spreadsheets. Not dashboards. Spreadsheets. Specifically:
- The last 12 months of marketing spend, line by line, channel by channel
- The last 12 months of pipeline by source, by stage, by month
- The last 12 months of CAC by segment
- The last 12 months of customer revenue, by segment, by tenure
This work cannot be delegated. Junior analysts produce summaries. The CMO needs to see the raw data to find the leaks.
The output of week 2 is a 1-page map of the leaks: where money goes in, where money comes out, and which gaps the analytics doesn't show.
Week 3: Talk to won deals and lost deals
In week 3, the CMO does the most underrated work of the entire 90 days.
They interview:
- 5 customers who won in the last 6 months (find pattern)
- 5 prospects who lost in the last 6 months (find anti-pattern)
The questions are dead simple:
- When did you first realize you had a problem we could solve?
- Who else did you consider? Why?
- What almost made you not buy?
- What's the hardest thing about being a customer of ours?
The CMO doesn't ask the sales team about deals. They ask the customer. The gap between what sales says and what customers say is where 60% of marketing strategy lives.
Week 4: One-page diagnostic
By end of week 4, the fractional CMO produces a single page. Not a deck. A single page.
The page has 5 sections:
- What's working (3 bullets, observed, with the metric)
- What's broken (3 bullets, observed, with the metric and dollar impact)
- The thesis (1 paragraph: where the company is on the maturity curve, and what changes to expect)
- What changes by month 2 (3 bullets, concrete actions)
- The ask of the CEO (what the CEO needs to back: budget, hires, kills, conversations)
If by Friday of week 4 the diagnostic is more than 1 page, the CMO is buying time.
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Phase 2: Install (Weeks 5-8)
Week 5: The Smarketing war room
The first piece of operating cadence to install is the weekly meeting between marketing and sales. Call it Smarketing, war room, alignment, whatever. The mechanics are non-negotiable:
- Cadence: weekly, same day, same time. Wednesdays 10am works for most B2B Brazil teams (post-Tuesday review, pre-Thursday/Friday client meetings).
- Duration: 45 minutes hard cap. If it bleeds, the format is broken.
- Attendees: CMO + Head of Sales + 1 sales rep on rotation + 1 marketing operations person. No one else.
- Agenda fixed: 10 min metrics review, 15 min funnel diagnosis, 10 min pipeline by stage, 10 min next-week priorities.
- Output: 1 written summary sent within 4 hours of the meeting, owned by marketing ops, read by CEO and Head of Sales.
The CMO chairs this meeting for the first 8 weeks, then rotates the chair to the Head of Sales by week 9 to test institutional ownership.
Week 6: The monthly leadership review
The second piece is the monthly review with the leadership team. This replaces or restructures whatever quarterly review existed before.
- Cadence: last Tuesday of each month, 90 minutes
- Attendees: CEO, CFO, Head of Sales, CMO, optionally COO
- Agenda: 30 min KPI review, 30 min strategic decisions to make this month, 30 min discussion of one strategic question
- Format: the CMO sends a 3-page memo 24 hours before — not a deck. Memo has KPIs, narrative explanation of variance, and the 1 strategic question.
The reason for the memo is to force pre-reading. CEOs and CFOs who walked into the meeting cold spend the first 30 minutes catching up. Memos eliminate that.
Week 7: The quarterly with finance
The third piece is the quarterly planning session with the CFO, before each quarter starts.
- Cadence: 2 weeks before quarter start, 2 hours
- Attendees: CMO + CFO + 1 marketing analyst
- Output: approved next-quarter marketing budget by channel, with assumed CAC, payback period, and kill criteria for each channel test
The most underrated function of this meeting is that it gives the CFO co-ownership of the marketing math. Once the CFO has signed off on the channel-by-channel CAC assumptions in writing, marketing has institutional cover when something doesn't hit.
Week 8: The customer feedback loop
By week 8, the CMO installs the simplest underrated practice: a monthly review of customer interviews. The mechanics:
- 5 customer 30-min interviews per month, rotating between recent wins, recent losses, and current customers
- The CMO does at least 2 of them personally — the others can rotate to the head of sales or product
- The output is a 1-page synthesis sent monthly to leadership: themes, surprises, language to use in messaging
This is the closest thing to a competitive moat in B2B marketing — most CMOs at mid-market level stop talking to customers within 6 months. The CMO who keeps this discipline has 12-month-ahead market intelligence the rest of the team doesn't.
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Phase 3: Traction (Weeks 9-13)
By week 9, the operating cadence is running. The question shifts from "is this installed?" to "is this working?"
Week 9-10: First metric movement should be visible
Three things should start moving in this window:
- Pipeline volume trending up week-over-week, even modestly (5-15% over 4 weeks of baseline)
- CAC drift down or flat, not spiking — campaigns running on the new operating cadence shouldn't be more expensive
- Sales sentiment improving — the head of sales stops bringing lead-quality complaints to the leadership meeting
If after 4 weeks of cadence none of those three are moving, the cadence is performative. The CMO needs to diagnose: is the cadence happening but the decisions aren't following from it? Is the sales team participating but not changing behavior? Is the messaging the same as before, just with new ceremonies around it?
Week 11: The first kill or pivot
By week 11, the fractional CMO should have killed at least one channel or pivoted at least one campaign decisively. This is the most visible signal of operator behavior to the CEO and CFO.
Examples of acceptable kills/pivots in the first 90 days:
- "We're stopping LinkedIn paid for Q2. Audience overlap with organic is killing CAC. Reinvesting in podcast sponsorships."
- "The webinar program isn't producing pipeline. We're pivoting to bespoke executive roundtables, smaller audience, higher conversion."
- "The agency we inherited is producing volume but not quality. We're cutting their scope to content production only and bringing demand gen in-house."
Each kill or pivot has a written rationale, signed off by the CFO, with what to expect over the next 60 days. If by week 11 nothing has been killed or pivoted, the CMO is too tentative.
Week 12: First strategic hire decision
Mid-market companies almost always have a marketing team that's slightly understaffed in 1 specific role. By week 12, the fractional CMO should have made one of three calls:
- "We need to hire {role} in the next 60 days. Here's the JD and the budget."
- "We need to let {team member} go in the next 30 days. Here's the plan."
- "The team is fine for the next 90 days, but here's the trigger that would change my answer."
This is rarely comfortable. It's necessary. The CMO who avoids this decision in the first 90 days is signaling they'll avoid it forever.
Week 13: The 90-day review
The 90-day review is a formal, standalone meeting between the CEO, CFO, and the fractional CMO.
- Duration: 60-90 min
- Format: the fractional CMO presents 3 documents:
The CEO and CFO have three options at this meeting:
- Renew at current scope. The cadence is in, metrics are moving, the relationship works.
- Re-scope. The cadence is in but priorities need to shift. Common: from awareness to pipeline, or from acquisition to retention.
- End. The cadence isn't in, metrics aren't moving, the fit isn't right.
A senior fractional CMO walks into this meeting prepared for any of the three outcomes. They don't try to "save" the engagement if it shouldn't continue.
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What CEOs should look for at day 90
The simplest checklist a CEO can use to judge a fractional CMO at day 90:
✅ One-page diagnostic delivered in week 4 — yes/no ✅ Weekly war room running for at least 6 weeks — yes/no ✅ Monthly leadership review installed and running — yes/no ✅ Quarterly with CFO done at least once — yes/no ✅ At least 1 channel/campaign killed or pivoted with written rationale — yes/no ✅ Hire/fire decision made on at least 1 team member — yes/no ✅ Pipeline trending up over the last 4 weeks — yes/no ✅ CAC trending down or flat — yes/no ✅ At least 5 customer interviews completed personally by the CMO — yes/no
5 out of 9 means the engagement is on track. 7+ means it's healthy. Below 5, the engagement is at risk and the CEO should re-scope or exit.
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Why the order matters
The most common mistake CEOs make is reversing the phases. They want traction in week 1, install in week 6, diagnostic by week 12. This never works because:
- Without diagnostic, the install is generic
- Without install, the traction is theatrical (campaigns without an operating system supporting them)
- Without an operating system, traction doesn't compound — it's a one-shot
The right order is diagnostic → install → traction. Trust the order. Hire a fractional CMO who follows the order. Fire one who doesn't.
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FAQ
What should happen in week 1 of a fractional CMO engagement?
The CMO should be silent in your meetings — sales weekly forecast call, leadership weekly, customer success 1:1, finance close, product roadmap review. The output is observed reality, not opinion. By Friday of week 1, a 1-page summary: three things that work, three things that are broken, one question for week 2.
When should the operating cadence be installed?
By week 8 of the engagement. The Smarketing weekly war room starts in week 5. The monthly leadership review installs in week 6. The quarterly with finance is set up in week 7. The customer feedback loop is installed in week 8.
What should be visible by day 90?
Three things: pipeline volume trending up week-over-week (5-15% over baseline), CAC drift down or flat, and sales sentiment improving. If after 4 weeks of cadence none of those three are moving, the cadence is performative.
What's the 90-day review meeting?
A formal standalone meeting between CEO, CFO, and the fractional CMO. The CMO presents three documents: the original 1-page diagnostic from week 4, what was promised vs. delivered, and what changes for days 90-180. Three options: renew at current scope, re-scope, or end.
Marcelo Russo
Fractional CMO and founder of Meu Departamento de Marketing (MDDM) since 2016. 24+ years in B2B marketing across JWT/WPP, XP Investimentos, BRF, Carrefour, Península Participações, BW8 Martech.
Top 100 Marketing Professionals in Brazil 2024 (Revista Cloudez). Author of Marketing Estratégico de Elite. Writes the bi-weekly newsletter "CMO Marcelo Russo on Marketing" on LinkedIn and Substack.
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