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. It translates strategy into a…
Operator definitions
Glossary
Concise, operator-grade definitions for the terms that come up most often inside fractional CMO engagements — from fractional CMO and ICP to GEO, LLMO, and AI Overviews.
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the discipline of treating named accounts as the unit of work: sales, marketing, and product coordinate around a finite list…
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. It is not…
CAC payback period
CAC payback period is the number of months of gross profit it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer. The clean version is: customer acquisition…
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. It is…
CMO-as-a-service
CMO-as-a-service is the productised form of fractional CMO leadership: defined scope, defined deliverables, defined cadence. It gives a company access to…
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC, or customer acquisition cost, is the all-in cost required to acquire a new customer. A real CAC number includes paid media, content production, sales…
Customer retention
Customer retention is the company’s ability to keep customers active, paying, and expanding over time. It is not just “low churn”; it is the operating proof…
Demand generation
Demand generation is the operating system for creating, capturing, and qualifying B2B demand. Creation builds preference before a buyer is in-market; capture…
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. In marketing, an…
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. It is…
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a brand visible, accurate, and citable inside AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude…
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, weak conversion…
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. It is not the customer type the…
Incrementality
Incrementality is the answer to one question: did the marketing dollar create demand that would not have happened otherwise? It separates caused conversions…
Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV, or lifetime value, is the gross profit a customer is expected to generate over the life of the relationship. It is not total revenue, contract value, or…
LLM Optimization (LLMO)
LLM optimization (LLMO) is the operational discipline of becoming the brand that large language models cite, summarize, and recommend when buyers ask…
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 opportunity value, stage…
Media-mix modelling (MMM)
Media-mix modelling (MMM), also called marketing mix modeling, is a statistical approach for estimating how different marketing channels contribute to…
Operating cadence
An operating cadence is the weekly and monthly rhythm of reviews, decisions, and reporting that converts strategy into shipped work. In marketing, it defines…
Positioning
Positioning in marketing is the explicit answer to three executive questions: who are we for, what do they hire us instead of, and why do we win when they…
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-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. It is…
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. In practical terms…
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…
Unit economics
Unit economics describe whether the marginal customer is profitable on a contribution basis — and how that profitability scales with volume. Put simply…