A part-time Chief Marketing Officer who provides strategic marketing leadership, builds revenue attribution, and makes your marketing team accountable for pipeline. Kamyar Shah does not run campaigns. Kamyar Shah makes sure your campaigns are worth running.
Schedule a Conversation →A fractional CMO is a part-time chief marketing officer who provides strategic marketing leadership without the cost of a full-time executive hire. Working typically 10 to 20 hours per week, a fractional CMO delivers the same strategic capabilities as a full-time CMO — marketing strategy, demand generation, brand positioning, team leadership, and revenue attribution — at a fraction of the cost.
Engagements are structured to address the specific challenges of your organization. Scope is defined collaboratively at the outset and adjusted as priorities evolve.
A marketing director executes within a defined strategy. A fractional CMO owns the strategy, the budget allocation logic, the team structure decisions, and the accountability system that connects marketing activity to revenue outcomes. Most companies between $3M and $30M have no one in that role. They have execution capability without strategic ownership.
A fractional CMO removes the CEO from marketing decisions without removing the CEO from marketing visibility. Every significant allocation, every channel priority, every agency relationship has an accountable executive owner. The CEO receives a dashboard, not a pile of decisions.
The first 90 days are a diagnostic and infrastructure phase. The objective is not to launch campaigns. It is to establish what is actually working, stop what is not, and build the attribution infrastructure that makes every future marketing decision measurable. Most companies discover in this phase that 30 to 50 percent of current marketing spend has no traceable connection to pipeline.
By the end of month three, lead definitions are formalized, attribution tracking is rebuilt, the marketing calendar is restructured around pipeline goals rather than activity goals, and agency performance standards are written and communicated. The company has a marketing function that knows what it is producing.
The right time to engage a fractional CMO is when your marketing spend exceeds your ability to evaluate it. You are spending more than $20,000 per month on marketing and cannot produce a clear number for what that spend is generating in qualified pipeline. Your sales team is consistently skeptical of marketing leads. Your CEO is still making day-to-day marketing channel and budget decisions.
Many companies use a fractional CMO as the first step toward a full-time hire. The fractional engagement builds the systems, defines the function, and establishes the performance metrics that will be used to evaluate the full-time candidate. This approach reduces the risk of a full-time mis-hire by ensuring the function is defined before the candidate is selected.
A 30-day audit of current spend by channel, agency and vendor relationships, tech stack, and sales-to-marketing handoff friction. Most companies discover in this phase that 30–50 percent of spend has no traceable connection to pipeline.
Start Here →Build the system that connects marketing activity to qualified pipeline. Lead definitions formalized, attribution tracking rebuilt, marketing calendar restructured around pipeline goals, agency performance standards written.
Learn More →Ongoing strategic marketing leadership: strategy ownership, budget allocation, team structure decisions, and agency accountability. The CEO is out of daily marketing decisions. Revenue is the metric.
Get Started →A fractional CMO provides strategic marketing leadership without the full-time cost. Kamyar Shah sets strategy, builds revenue attribution, aligns marketing with sales pipeline, structures the marketing team, and holds agencies accountable for business outcomes rather than deliverables.
Fractional CMO engagements with Kamyar Shah are scoped individually based on marketing complexity and hours required. Significantly less than a full-time CMO salary. A conversation is the fastest way to establish scope and pricing.
A marketing agency executes campaigns. A fractional CMO provides strategic leadership above agency execution, evaluating performance against pipeline targets and connecting spend to revenue. Most fractional CMO engagements include oversight of existing agency relationships.
A fractional CMO is the right answer when your marketing budget is between $20,000 and $100,000 per month, your strategy needs to be built or rebuilt before it can be scaled, and you need executive-level judgment without the full-time overhead and equity cost.
A revenue attribution infrastructure, formalized lead definitions and qualification criteria, restructured agency relationships with measurable performance standards, and a marketing calendar built around pipeline goals rather than activity volume. By day 90, the company knows what its marketing spend is actually producing.
Most marketing problems are not budget problems. They are strategy and accountability problems. A 20-minute conversation is enough to identify where the highest-leverage change is.
Schedule a Conversation →Bringing Consulting to You — Where Strategy Meets Execution — Kamyar Shah