Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: Annual Planning for the Marketing Executive

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

As we inch closer to Q1 2022, many of us are putting the finishing touches on our annual marketing plan. Whether you're a CMO, VP, or Marketing Director, this document is a critical one for you to... help craft.In this paid partnership series with CMOx, Tod speaks with Casey Stanton about all the components of annual planning in a marketing context.MORE INFO: http://becomecmo.comOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to another Weekend Edition. This time I'm back with Casey Stanton. After working in a marketing agency for almost a decade, Casey set up the premier fractional CMO education and support company, CMOX. And in this paid partnership with CMOX this month, we're talking about annual planning. Hello, Casey. Hey, hey, Todd. Thanks for having me back on. Not at all. So what role does the CMO have in annual planning? Yeah, so if you're listening to this here in Q4 in December, you have to consider that the CMO's job is to support the executives in making their dream come true. That's how I see that. The CMO's job is to make the executive's dream come true. So they need to lay out.
Starting point is 00:00:42 It's the executive's role to lay out what an outcome goal needs to be for the next year. So if you listen to this in 2021 in December, what do they want by the end of 2022? They should be able to define definitively with measurable outcomes what must be true on December 31st, 2022 for them to be satisfied with the growth of the business. That's the first thing that has to happen. Some organizations, they have a CEO, but that CEO lacks that foresight. They lack this ability to think thoroughly throughout the whole year and what needs to be true. They're not being very CEO-ish. So first, the marketer has to consider, is their CEO leading with a strategy or not?
Starting point is 00:01:21 If they're not, the CMO, I encourage you to ask the CEO what the outcome goal should be. They may give them to you. They might give you some kind of platitudes. They might just say, just grow the damn business. It's kind of a crapshoot on what you're going to get from that. But then your job as the CMO is to take that and break it up into actual achievable measurable outcomes. So if the CEO says, well, we want to grow and we want to acquire a company and we want to be more profitable, your job is to ask questions and say, what does more profitable look like? What's our current profitability rate?
Starting point is 00:01:59 What's our margin? What do you want to increase it to? When you say grow, what do you want to grow? Total number of new customers, repeat customers? Okay, by what percent? What actually makes sense? And you need to look back historically and kind of predict into the future what you think you can do. And your goal is to start to kind of come up in your mind with what these key outcome goals need to be, and then work kind of diligently behind the scenes to put together your forecasts for that. Does that make sense, Todd? It makes sense. I'm wondering, though,
Starting point is 00:02:30 if there's a role for the CMO to push back on the CEO. Like if the CEO says, what I want to do is, I don't know, reduce customer attrition or grow first-time customers or something like that. And the CMO thinks that's not really, based on the data that I've got, that's not the strategy that I would recommend. How does one carefully, politically approach that with the other executives in the C-suite? Yeah, great question.
Starting point is 00:02:57 So in the end, I think that there should be just a couple goals. There should be a couple KPIs that define the success of the business. I think three, maybe six, but it really should just just a couple goals. There should be a couple KPIs that define the success of the business. I think three, maybe six, but it really should just be a couple. And one of those is probably new customers. The other one is the cost to acquire a customer. Another one is the number of repeat customers or the repeat rate of purchase. Another one could be the number of traffic sources you test. And as we kind of add more in, they feel less and less valuable. Because at the
Starting point is 00:03:31 end of the year, all you really want is new customers and you want your old customers to stick around and keep paying. And you might want to introduce a new product line or something like that. So if a CEO tells me that they want me to reduce customer attrition, I have to take that first of all as kind of like an order from the CEO. They said that that's what they want. I have to believe them that that's really what the business needs. But then it's my job to review it and see, like, is that real? Like, what happens if I hit that number? What happens if I reduced attrition but I didn't increase the number of new customers?
Starting point is 00:04:03 Or if I didn't increase the MQLs or the SQLs or whatever the other metric is, does the attrition really move the needle? Or are they just saying attrition and then silently saying, but also we need double the leads and triple the sales, right? So it's your job to suss that out and figure it out. So just start at the top. The most important thing is new customers. Peter Drucker says the most important thing in a business is to get and keep a customer. So can you get the customers and then can you keep them? What are your numbers around that? How do you have metrics that show that you did it? You don't want to get to the end of the quarter or the end of the fiscal year and say, hey, guys, I did it and have to tell the story.
Starting point is 00:04:40 You just want to say, hey, the number was 5% conversion rate. And I said we were going to increase it by 50%. We're number was 5% conversion rate. And I said we were going to increase it by 50%. We're now at 8% conversion rate. I won. I did it. I did everything I said I'd do. So you want to be so clear that there isn't room for emotion or room for interpretation, but instead it's just clear and exacting. And then it's going to be your job as you move through the year to figure out the subordinate KPIs or campaigns required to actually achieve those outcome goals. With technology changing as much as it is and the marketing scene landscape changing as much as it is, you know, I mean, just in the past year, we saw the emergence of AR, the emergence of live stream commerce,
Starting point is 00:05:19 or I guess the maturation of those two technologies. We saw iOS 14.5 all but destroy marketing metrics. In that kind of a world, you know, the fast-paced world that we work in, is an annual plan even really like something? Like, is that even an achievement? Is that something we should be going for? Or should quarterly be as far out as we look? Like, I guess I'm asking, like, are things going too fast these days for an annual plan,
Starting point is 00:05:46 or is that the reason we need an annual plan? Just a really great distinction. And I think the answer is that an annual plan is really set to maybe at some level kind of onboard and even pacify HR and budgeting, the finance department, because you need to define your budgets for the year and you need to come up with a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. But you're totally right. You have a plan and then you get punched in the face. And you don't know what's going to happen in Q2. Really, you should consider your annual planning in December as a quarter one plan and a general idea of what's going to happen throughout the year. You're going to say, once we hit these tripping events, once we have X number of customers, then we're going to need to hire this new staff person in the marketing department, and we're going to pay them $80,000 a year.
Starting point is 00:06:37 So we need to have that in the budget, and we have to have finance team approve that. We are going to want to increase, let's say, 20% month over month or quarter over quarter our Facebook ad budget. So you're going to pencil that in. And you're going to kind of predict this stuff. But you're right. It's all a prediction. It's a wild ass guess. We don't know what's going to happen. And you can't really predict much more than a quarter out. So I think that the annual plan should serve as a starting point for your budget, a starting point for the staff that you're going to need, a starting point for the major campaigns that you're going to focus on, and for clarifying the outcome goals. But how you get there,
Starting point is 00:07:15 that's going to change on almost a day-to-day basis. And I think as we talk, I'm just thinking, it's quite possible people in here who are listening may not even know what goes into an annual plan. So can you kind of walk us through what's included in an annual plan? Yeah, yeah, great. So to me, the annual plan needs to have a few things, it needs to have the outcome goal, like what are you going for? How do you measure it? Again, super simple. It should be a couple numbers that you can write on post it notes,. This should not be a sentence. It should not be convoluted. It should be crystal clear. We need to have 10,000 new customers in 2022. That could be an annual goal. Then how do you break that apart? Do you get 25% each quarter, or do you get more like 10% the first quarter, 15% the second quarter, 30% the
Starting point is 00:08:02 next quarter, and then the remainder of the next quarter. You kind of swell as you go through the year. That might be what you have to do if you're testing and drafting new campaigns. The annual plan needs to consist of your outcome goals, your budget, the major marketing campaign initiatives that you want to do, any technical builds that you want to have, and you should kind of have a gant of it, a gentle gant. You don't have to have it down to the exact day or the timeline, broken down into hours spent. But you should have an assumption of what it is. Hey, in Q1, we're going to get an RFP from a tech company. And then my belief is it's going to take us at least a quarter to deploy it.
Starting point is 00:08:41 So we'll say mid Q3, it'll be fully done and deployed. That kind of ganting is really helpful too. So that, again, like, you know, finance understands how the money's going to be spent and when it's going to be spent. Is it all going to be at the first of the quarter? Is it going to be, you know, evenly throughout the quarter? It helps them kind of manage cash flow in that way. So the annual plan is your best guess of kind of like the rough outline of how the year is going to go. And your job is to stay in line on that as much as you can, though quarter to quarter, you should be updating your annual budget as your quarterly budget, as you predict it changing. Maybe you had to hire someone earlier. Maybe you found someone offshore
Starting point is 00:09:22 and they were a lower rate, so you saved some money. You could put it somewhere else. Maybe you find that Facebook CPM jumps up dramatically in the summer for some reason, and you're now getting less leads, so you need to double down on your Facebook ad budget to get the same leads that you predicted previously. So the annual plan, again, is your best guess of what's going to happen from a high level and not the specificity of exactly how, because you just can't plan for that. I'm speaking with Casey Stanton. He runs the premier fractional CMO education and support company, CMOX. And while you're listening, you can pop open a browser and get more information at his website, which is becomecmo.com. Casey, as I hear you talk, I'm wondering if this document, the annual plan, is this something when you write it, you should lock it down and it's sacrosanct and you use that as your hard guides because we need kind of that consistency?
Starting point is 00:10:15 Or is this a living document that we adjust as things change in the reality of the business? I think of it as an exercise, not as a holy document that we hold up and we have to execute it perfectly. It's the best that we can do based on the vantage point that we have. And if you're going to hire someone, let's just say, for example, you're going to hire a content manager and you've never had a content manager in the company before
Starting point is 00:10:44 and the whole company has just kind of been queuesing the work as part of just like the day-to-day that content manager might come in in q2 and take over qc'ing and then they're going to kind of rethink the customer journey and you don't even know what great ideas they're going to come up with you don't know the ebooks or the audio books or the email series that they want to put together. So you can't put that in the budget. It's impossible to do that. So it's a starting point. It's a place for you to reflect on what could be possible. And it'll also help you become more realistic of the outcomes. If your executive says that they want to get a thousand new customers and you know that that's just impossible, it's really helpful to say, that's unlikely unless we're able to do this thing. So, for example, in some ways, you're defending your team in this way, the marketing department in this way, by saying, okay, our current cost to acquire a customer is $100 and you want 1,000, but you're only giving us $20 per customer to acquire
Starting point is 00:11:45 them. We simply can't do that. Even with CRO, it's not possible. So the annual plan backs you into something that you believe is realistic. You don't fully know how you're going to deploy it, but you kind of get it. It's like saying, Hey, you're in New York and you got to get to LA and you got to drive this car. And the boss says, I need it done in a day. You say, that's not possible. Thinking through it, it's going to take, you know, it's 2,500 miles. And then I have to do this many overnights. And what if the car breaks down? And you have to think through all of those what if scenarios from a high level, but you don't know day to day, if you're going to hit a roadblock or a down tree or hit a deer on your way. So you have to plan for all of that from a high level and then have some kind of contingency plan, some buffer in time, buffer in budget, so that you're able to do your best to
Starting point is 00:12:30 achieve that outcome. But it would be foolish for the executive just to be like, hey, it's impossible for you to have a fully thought through annual plan, so screw it. Let's just wing it. Let's be cowboys and just do it live. They won't accept that, right? They need to have something that they can bet on. They need to know how much cash you're going to need for your marketing tests and campaigns and tools and things like that. So even just coming up with a budget and saying, all right, we want to lock in two grand a month is what we're going to spend on tools. You could probably operate inside of that, especially if you think of that great book, Profit First. If you haven't heard of it, it's a book that says that most businesses look at profit as the outcome of revenue minus
Starting point is 00:13:12 expenses equals profit. And in the book Profit First, they say it's actually revenue minus profit equal expenses. And the difference here is that you remove profit first, and then you have to figure out how to get to that solution with what's left over. So when you're limited on your budget, when you have constraints and guardrails, you're creative. I think of it like a chef. You bring a world-class chef in to a supermarket, and you say, hey, we're having dinner for eight people tonight. Go ahead and get anything you want. It's kind of tough, right? But if, like on MasterChef or one
Starting point is 00:13:45 of those cooking shows, they say, hey, you have to make dinner for eight people. You have these 80 ingredients that you can use and you have to use squid ink. It dramatically changes their creativity because they're forced inside of the guardrails of something that they have to operate inside of. And they're forced to be creative. So if you limit the team to only having $2,000 in tools a month, well, are they going to use ClearScope? Are they going to use Screaming Frog? Are they going to be on A-Refs and SEMrush? Or are they going to only be on one of those tools?
Starting point is 00:14:12 It just forces some creativity. And I think through that, it's where our best ideas come from. You've taught me that it's pronounced SEMrush. All this time I've been saying S-E-M-rush. Maybe it is S-E-M-rush. Maybe it is S-E-M-rush. Well, I don't know if A-Ref is right. It must be. There's been a tweet that said, is it pronounced A-Refs or A-Refs?
Starting point is 00:14:32 That's why I go with Moz because no one can screw that pronunciation up. Yeah, it's helpful. So walk us through the process here, Casey. How does someone develop an annual plan? What does that workflow consist of? Yeah, so the first thing is to have a scorecard. Marketing should have a scorecard. If you lack a scorecard, like a single document scorecard, maybe you want to build it out in Google Data Studio or Power BI, or you've got Tableau or
Starting point is 00:14:57 something really fancy. That's all cool, but you have to start somewhere. I start on a Google sheet. And you have to have a weekly scorecard. If you're doing webinars, you have to have total invites, total accepted, total RSVPs, total show up, show up rate, who sticks around to the end, who saw the offer, who bought. You need to have that every single event. Can we just quickly explain what a scorecard is? These are top line metrics that only take like a minute or two to fill in every week, essentially. Is that right? Exactly. And if you think of like all the moving pieces in marketing, you need to be able to see that a snapshot of it. You need to be able to say, oh, we are running 10 different campaigns and I need to check the health of them all from a
Starting point is 00:15:36 single document. So all of that data needs to be dumped into a scorecard and it's a Google sheet and it's a column, you know, on the lefthand side, and column A, it's all your definitions. One might be organic traffic, new sessions, et cetera. The other one might be Facebook impressions, clicks, click-through rate, CPM, CPC, CPL, and then you'll go down to your landing pages, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to see all of that data in one place. So for your annual plan, the first thing that I instruct CMOs to do is to look through your KPI scorecard and get rid of anything that isn't helpful. There's plenty of data that you can collect. Is it useful? Does it actually create an insight that's useful in the business? If it doesn't, then get rid of it. So now you've got, you're down to a quality scorecard that has really good actionable
Starting point is 00:16:26 information. It's telling a story that you can kind of believe or kind of identify a problem that exists in the business based on the data that's in the scorecard. Once you have that, then you need to talk about what those numbers need to move to. So again, these are those key outcome goals. Three of them, maybe six of them, key outcome goals. And then from there, break down those outcome goals to marketing campaigns. So this model that I have, we call it slice of pie. So how do you slice the pie? You want a thousand new customers? How are you going to get them? Well, you're not going to get 250 a month. That's probably not likely. Again, you might get a hundred in the first month, 150 the next
Starting point is 00:17:06 month, 300 the next month, and then the rest of the following month because it kind of swells over time. So the question is, what has to happen as a marketing campaign to bring in those leads? If you have no control, no marketing campaign that's currently driving leads, you got to build one. So in Q1, you're thinking, shoot, we got to build landing pages. We have to build the ad campaigns, we have to set up ad accounts, we have to get a company credit card, right? We have to hire a designer or use a resource like 99designs or Dropkick ads to come up with the ads for it. So you have to think through those constituent campaigns or parts that deliver on that outcome goal. And then you need to start ganting them out throughout the year. So the annual plan looks like campaigns listed,
Starting point is 00:17:53 the timeline, the cost, expected vendor costs. And you can have rough ranges in there if you haven't done an RFP and got a proposal on it. You might say, oh, for this development, it's going to be between $10,000 and $15,000. And then for this development, it might be between $50,000 and $80,000. So you put all of that stuff into a plan, and it's your best guess of what's going to happen for the year and the things that you need to do to make that come true. You may also want to use a marketing budget, like an ad spend as a percentage of sales. So I think this is kind of a novel idea and one worth really kind of internalizing that your marketing budget can be thought of two ways. One is that it's a fixed budget, where your executive or the HR team,
Starting point is 00:18:37 or excuse me, the finance team says, you've got $100,000 to spend on ads this year, or a million dollars to spend on ads this year. That's one way to do it. Or they can say you have 10% of new customers, like 10% of all sales you get as a marketing spend. So if you increase sales, your marketing spend can increase as well. Is that something you have to wait for the CEO?
Starting point is 00:19:00 Is that something that you can propose in the annual plan? I think you have to propose in the annual plan, especially if the organization doesn't have a CFO or someone leading that budget. You have to lead that conversation. But bifurcate that and actually do both. Say, I want money to spend and test and I might lose it. I hate to say it. I don't want to be a guy that loses money, but marketing is testing. So I want 100 grand in tests. I want 25 grand a quarter in tests. I might blow it all and maybe nothing happens. I mean, we'll learn from it, right? But I want a hundred grand in tests. And then on top of that, I want 10% of sales as the marketing budget. That way you're covered for tests. You're covered for taking a new campaign live and some
Starting point is 00:19:41 new plays say, Oh, I want to run a Twitter campaign. You know, you can go put a $2,500 Twitter campaign together. And in the next quarter, you can do another campaign on Reddit or wherever. And it doesn't take away from your day to day spending. So you want to have a budget that is kind of burnable, and then a budget that is scalable. And what is the format of this? Is this a five page executive summary document? Is it a 100 page bound with tabs? Is this a five-page executive summary document? Is it a 100-page bound with tabs? Is this a 20-slide PowerPoint? What's the best way to show this document? Or is it multiple versions of that? Because you're the CMO and you're not the agency, even if you're a contractor, contracting as a fractional CMO, you're not pitching. So you don't need to put together a fancy slide deck with quotes and about us and all that other kind of like wasted slides. You just need to put the meat together.
Starting point is 00:20:30 So I just do Google Docs. I keep it really simple. And you have the outcome goals. This is what we're committed to. These are the campaigns required for each of these individual outcome goals. Here's the cost for each of these things. Here's the new hires that we need. And then a Gantt that kind of shows over time what we think is going to happen. That's really what the team wants. That's what the marketing team wants to kind of get it. That's what the executive team needs to understand what the outcomes are going to be or the effort's going to be and what the expense is going to be. You're listening to a weekend edition of Today in Digital Marketing.
Starting point is 00:21:00 I'm Todd Maffin. This is Casey Stanton. He leads the premier fractional CMO education and support company CMOX, which you can learn more about at becomecmo.com. Casey, how long should it take? All of this sounds like a whole lot of work, and I don't have time for it. How long can I expect that this is going to take to put one of these annual plans together. So this is not light work. This is a big problem. One of the things that we say at CMOX is that our job is to solve bigger problems. So I want this to be something that feels meaty, feels kind of heavy, because it's important.
Starting point is 00:21:40 We're talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in budget. When you think of all of the team that you're leading as the CMO, maybe you have five direct reports and the average person brings in 50, 60, $70,000 a year. I mean, that plus ad spend plus infrastructure, you're managing a lot of money here. So you need to be a fiduciary of that money and make sure that you're doing a great job. So it should take some time. And there's a process, I think, to make it easier. And inside of the CMOX Accelerator, our members, I coach them through building the annual plan for their clients. So we get together and do it. They do some homework. They bring their scorecard in.
Starting point is 00:22:13 We mail them a workbook. We all get together and do it together. It's really fun, but they're able to produce a unique annual plan that's custom for their client, and it's not 100% done. You cannot produce a 100% annual plan in's custom for their client, and it's not 100% done. You cannot produce 100% annual plan in a vacuum. You have to then go and present it to the executive team and say, hey, I've been working on it. It's not complete. Let's get together. I'd love to hear your feedback. Because when you get the feedback from the executive, you get their buy-in. And even if you fully bake the cake and all they do is come over and put a little frosting on it,
Starting point is 00:22:44 they feel like they were part of it, and they're going to buy into it more. So your whole plan should be to produce an annual plan. And it might take you a couple of days to put it together. And my work style is if I was starting this brand new with a client, never worked with them before, I'd have to invent the scorecard, which we have templates for inside the CMOX accelerator. Once you have the scorecard, you have to understand the team, their capacity, capabilities. You have to understand the current budget, what's happened before. We call that a past marketing campaign snapshot. So there's all these individual things that are really helpful to get you up to speed. But then the actual production year after year and quarter after quarter of a quarterly and
Starting point is 00:23:23 annual plan, it should only take a couple hours because you should know what it's going to take for something to happen. You know it's going to be a tech build. You don't know the cost of it exactly, but you can guess within a range of $10,000 or $20,000, approximately what it should cost. So over time, you get better, and it shouldn't take you all that long once you have some momentum with a client. What happens after it's built? How do you track it? Great question. So everything needs to be tracked down to a KPI.
Starting point is 00:23:55 And a KPI could be the completion of something. So rewrite all the copy on the website and launch a brand new website. That could be one of your outcome goals by the end of Q1. So once that's complete, that's checked off. And if that's a quarterly goal, that's kind of subordinate of the annual plan, that quarterly goal can just get checked off. It literally gets crossed off the list. So that's how you check in with it. And then every single week as the CMO, you should be leading the team and saying, hey, guys, don't get bogged down in the detail of the task that you're in. Remember that this is the big picture.
Starting point is 00:24:31 We're going to L.A. We're driving from New York to L.A. That's the big picture, okay? So how do we get there? Just zoom out. And you're encouraging everyone to kind of step back and just not be so single-minded and focused on a problem, but instead the bigger outcome. Because oftentimes, when we get stuck with a small problem, the big solution might be to hire a vendor or hire a consultant to come in who is an expert at that one thing or pay for
Starting point is 00:25:01 a training somewhere or send someone to a boot camp or whatever it is. Those are all different ways to solve a problem instead of what we often do, which is just muscle through stuff. And this brings up to me an important reminder that as the CMO, your job is to lead. And you can't lead people who aren't learning. So if someone is just saying, hey, I learned everything I could learn in college and I I'm done learning, and I'm just going to do for the rest of my life, they might do really well on a farm, in a typical agricultural space, where it doesn't require being on the cutting edge. But for your team, you should be leading them. You should be encouraging them to consume new content. You should be sending them books. It's crazy how an organization, someone can't order a book. They can't sign up for
Starting point is 00:25:48 a $200 course on Udemy or something, but they can pull together an hour-long meeting with the entire administrative team. And if you think about the hourly rates of all these people, they can go burn $1,000 on a meeting that is wasted, or they could go spend 20 bucks, 30 bucks, a hundred bucks on a book or a course and produce so much more value. So just be the person that solves the bigger problems and leads the people by encouraging folks for the annual plan to actually like develop themselves, get better at something, own an outcome, figure out who the best in the business is at it and have them get mentored by that person. I have this rule, which we call the $200 rule. And it's this rule that no one turns down 200 bucks. If you called someone up and said, hey, you're the best I've ever met at LinkedIn ads, at Facebook.
Starting point is 00:26:38 I love what you're doing on social media. You guys are killing it in SEO, whatever it is. I got 200 bucks. Can I buy an hour of your time? I'm going to put together a bunch of questions. I want to record the call and I want to ask a bunch of, I want to ask you a bunch of questions about this. Can you do that? People are flattered by that. And they're going to say yes. So for 200 bucks, you just opened up all of the potential for your organization because you were previously stuck on something. And now you've got an expert that came in for 200 bucks that solved it all. That's how you have to think as the CMO. How do I free people up the most? How do I pull in an offshore laborer who's going to cost us 1200
Starting point is 00:27:13 bucks a month, and they're going to work 40 hours a week, and we're going to give them a great livelihood where they live. And they're going to now take off all of the repetitive tasks that our team kind of is getting beaten down by so they can elevate inside of your own organization. Like this is the role of the CMO and what you need to be considering through the annual plan. Well, the timing is perfect, of course, given that we are just a couple of weeks away from the new year. So good for planning and so forth. Casey, tell me a bit about CMOX. What is the program?
Starting point is 00:27:42 Yeah, great question. So I started off as a fractional CMO, and I loved the work. And before long, I found that I needed some support. So I hired an assistant, and I've been working with my assistant, Raphael, for four years now. And Raphael is a killer support person for me. He took the things that I was doing and created processes for them so that I could go execute the processes instead of kind of reinventing them every time. Before long, with word of mouth and with marketing, I became in demand and I had more people wanting to work with me than I could serve. It's a good problem to have. And I also had all of this great content, great processes. We had SOPs.
Starting point is 00:28:22 And with that kind of confluence, I decided to teach other marketers how to be in demand, fractional CMOs. They don't work for me. I helped them build their own company. So I still serve companies as the, as their CMO, but also Raph and I and our team, we've built out our team. We support marketers who want to be fractional CMOs who want to elevate to the top position in marketing, which is the role of the CMO. And then they want to serve multiple clients for two reasons. One, because they can make a bigger impact, make a bigger income. And two, because it's safer. The CMO role is the shortest live C-suite title, meaning a CMO doesn't last
Starting point is 00:29:01 for very long at a company. I've seen great CMOs get canned for some reason that doesn't necessarily mean that they did a bad job. So by having multiple clients as a CMO, you get the best of both worlds. You get the high prices of a marketing consultant, but you get the long-term relationships of a CMO. And that's why the fractional CMO, I think is so exciting. So we have folks that are inside of our accelerator, and I personally teach them how to attract, convert, and serve clients as a fractional CMO, adding in $10,000 a month in recurring business and more. We have a member, she joined us about six weeks ago, and she just closed her first recurring $10,000 a month client. We have someone else who just closed a $7,500 half-day console.
Starting point is 00:29:45 Really exciting stuff. And these people have never sold outside of a traditional agency model before where they would manage ads or build websites, or maybe they were in-house CMOs or VP marketing. We've even had people who are just marketing technicians, people who are really good at marketing, who are just sick and tired of doing the labor. And they just want to move up a level because they know they're good enough to. They want to delegate to other people. So they become a fractional CMO. And they're appreciated by the people that are subordinate to them, their direct reports, because they've been in the game. They've been gritty. They've built the website. They understand what an HT access file is, or they've deployed a WordPress org before. These companies are looking for
Starting point is 00:30:31 CMOs to lead the organization, but not necessarily a full-time in-house. They want the protection of a CMO, but they don't want the full-time cost. So that's what we provide. We provide the training and support and help marketers be able to build their own business as a fractional CMO. Casey Stanton is with CMOX. You can find out more at becomecmo.com. Casey, thank you for joining me. Thanks, Todd. Really appreciate it.

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