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) concentrates sales, marketing, and product around a finite list of named accounts a company has decided to win.
AI-readiness audit
An AI-readiness audit measures how visible, accurate, and citable a brand is across AI answer engines, and where it trails competitors.
Annual Contract Value (ACV)
ACV is the average annualised value of one customer contract, and it sets how many logos the pipeline must close to hit an ARR target.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
ARR is the normalised annual run-rate of recurring contracts, used to size a SaaS business, compare growth, and time stage-based moves.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the same work 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 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: fixed scope, fixed deliverables, and a set meeting rhythm.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC, or customer acquisition cost, is the all-in cost to acquire one new customer, counting media, sales, content, tooling, and overhead.
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 a company's ability to keep customers active, paying, and expanding over time, measured by gross retention, net retention, and churn.
Demand generation
Demand generation is the discipline of creating, capturing, and qualifying B2B demand so the right accounts reach a buying decision.
Embedded operator
An embedded operator is a senior leader who works inside the team's tools, weekly rhythm, and reporting, not from a slide deck on the outside.
Fractional CMO
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive embedded part-time to set strategy, call priorities, and run the rhythm marketing reports against.
Fractional marketing leader
A fractional marketing leader is a part-time senior marketer who owns the plan and execution for a company, sized to whatever is actually broken.
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 atop some search results that compress the SERP into one synthesized answer with a few cited sources.
Growth diagnostic
A growth diagnostic is a fixed-scope assessment that finds where revenue growth is constrained: pipeline leaks, fuzzy positioning, wasted spend.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the customer type a company can win, expand, and retain efficiently, set by evidence rather than ambition.
Incrementality
Incrementality answers one question: did the marketing dollar create demand that would not have happened without it, or just claim it?
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 work of becoming the brand that large language models cite, summarize, and recommend when buyers ask questions.
Marketing attribution
Marketing attribution assigns credit to marketing touchpoints so a team can see what influenced pipeline, revenue, or conversion, and decide accordingly.
Marketing pipeline
Marketing pipeline is the dollar-weighted forward view of qualified opportunities marketing has sourced or influenced, measured by value, stage, and likelihood to close.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
An MQL is a contact marketing scored as sales-ready on fit and intent, against a threshold sales signed off on; the handoff line to sales.
Media-mix modeling (MMM)
Media-mix modeling (MMM) estimates how marketing channels contribute to revenue using aggregate data, so budgets get allocated at the portfolio level.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
OKRs pair a directional objective with measurable key results each quarter, the executive accountability layer marketing is expected to own.
Operating cadence
An operating cadence is the weekly and monthly rhythm of reviews, decisions, and reporting that turns marketing strategy into shipped work.
Positioning
Positioning answers three executive questions: who you are for, what they hire you instead of, and why the change is worth the cost.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market motion where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion before sales steps in.
Sales Development Representative (SDR)
An SDR is the outbound and qualification role that turns marketing's pipeline signals into sales-accepted opportunities and booked meetings.
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 page sections 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 if one product captured every viable buyer in its category: a ceiling on ambition, not a forecast you can bank.
Unit economics
Unit economics measure whether the next customer you acquire is profitable on a contribution basis, and whether that profit holds as volume grows.