90-day marketing plan
A 90-day marketing plan is the smallest unit of marketing strategy a leadership team can credibly commit to and review against.
Operator definitions
Glossary
Concise, operator-grade definitions for the terms that come up most often inside fractional CMO engagements: fractional CMO, ICP, GEO, LLMO, AI Overviews, and the rest of the modern vocabulary.
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the discipline of treating named accounts as the unit of work: sales, marketing.
AI-readiness audit
An AI-readiness audit measures how visible, accurate, and citable a brand is across AI answer engines, and where the gaps are versus competitors.
Annual Contract Value (ACV)
ACV is the average annualised value of a single customer contract; the lever that decides how many logos the pipeline must produce to hit ARR targets.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
ARR is the normalised annual run-rate of recurring contracts, used to size a SaaS business, compare growth, and trigger stage-based operating moves.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the same operating discipline as generative engine optimization (GEO): becoming the brand AI engines cite when buyers ask category questions.
Brand Grounding
Brand grounding is the verified-facts layer an AI engine uses to anchor what it says about your company, name, category, leadership, products, and proof, before it generates an answer.
CAC payback period
CAC payback period is the number of months of gross profit it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer.
Category design
Category design is the deliberate creation, reframing, or renaming of a market category so the company defining it becomes the default brand inside it.
CMO-as-a-service
CMO-as-a-service is the productised form of fractional CMO leadership: defined scope, defined deliverables, defined cadence.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC, or customer acquisition cost, is the all-in cost required to acquire a new customer.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A CDP is the system of record for unified customer data; the foundation that attribution, lifecycle marketing, and AI personalisation all sit on top of.
Customer retention
Customer retention is the company’s ability to keep customers active, paying, and expanding over time.
Demand generation
Demand generation is the operating system for creating, capturing, and qualifying B2B demand.
Embedded operator
An embedded operator is a senior leader who works inside the team’s tools, cadence, and reporting, not from a slide deck on the outside.
Executive Cadence
Executive cadence is the weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythm that turns marketing strategy into accountable operating work the CEO can rely on.
Fractional CMO
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive embedded into a company part-time to set strategy, call priorities, and run the marketing operating cadence.
Fractional marketing leader
A fractional marketing leader is a senior marketing operator placed into a company on a part-time basis to own the plan, cadence, and execution system.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a brand visible, accurate, and citable inside AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results, compressing the traditional SERP into a synthesized.
Growth diagnostic
A growth diagnostic is a fixed-scope assessment that identifies where revenue growth is being constrained: pipeline leaks, fuzzy positioning.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An ideal customer profile, or ICP, is the description of the customer type a company can win, expand, and retain efficiently.
Incrementality
Incrementality is the answer to one question: did the marketing dollar create demand that would not have happened otherwise?
Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV, or lifetime value, is the gross profit a customer is expected to generate over the life of the relationship.
LLM Optimization (LLMO)
LLM optimization (LLMO) is the operational discipline of becoming the brand that large language models cite, summarize, and recommend in their answers.
Marketing attribution
Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit to marketing touchpoints so a team can understand what influenced pipeline, revenue, or conversion.
Marketing pipeline
Marketing pipeline is the dollar-weighted forward view of qualified opportunities marketing has sourced or influenced, measured in value, stage, and conversion likelihood.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
An MQL is a lead marketing has scored as sales-ready against the ICP and intent threshold the two teams agreed; the contract between marketing and sales.
Media-mix modeling (MMM)
Media-mix modeling (MMM) is a statistical approach for estimating how different marketing channels contribute to revenue, planned at portfolio level.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
OKRs are a quarterly operating cadence that pair a directional objective with measurable key results; the executive accountability layer marketing must own.
Operating cadence
An operating cadence is the weekly and monthly rhythm of reviews, decisions, and reporting that converts strategy into shipped work.
Positioning
Positioning is the explicit answer to three executive questions: who are we for, what do they hire us instead of, and why is that change worth the cost.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market motion where the product itself becomes the primary lever for acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion.
Sales Development Representative (SDR)
An SDR is the dedicated outbound and lead-qualification role that turns marketing pipeline signals into sales-accepted opportunities.
Sales-Led Growth (SLG)
Sales-led growth (SLG) is the go-to-market model where outbound and inbound demand feed a quota-carrying sales team that owns conversion to revenue.
Speakable schema
Speakable schema is a Schema.org property that marks specific sections of a page as suitable for voice and AI assistants to read aloud.
Structured data
Structured data is the machine-readable layer of a webpage, usually JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa, that tells search engines and LLMs what the page is about.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
TAM is the upper-bound annual revenue opportunity if a product captured 100% of every viable buyer in its category; an operating ceiling, not a forecast.
Unit economics
Unit economics describe whether the marginal customer is profitable on a contribution basis, and how that profitability scales with volume.