The quality of a fractional CMO proposal is set by the brief you send, not by the person writing it. Give every candidate one six-month outcome, your current numbers, and a capacity budget in days per month, and you’ll get proposals you can actually compare.
Send a loose brief and you get back a plan that would fit any company, which tells you nothing about whether this person can fix yours.
I’m Lillian Pierson, a fractional and interim CMO and a licensed Professional Engineer who’s spent more than 20 years driving growth for tech companies. I write these proposals, so this piece runs through what I ask for before I’ll scope one, what I put inside it, and how to score mine against anyone else’s. When I ran 90 days with Maistro, I built the ICP, the offer ladder, and the messaging system before anyone touched a channel. They landed their first paying customer in week one of the first channel going live, and that customer was an exact match to the ICP I’d defined. That order of operations is what a good proposal is really selling you.
What belongs in your brief
Four inputs. Anything less and the person writing your proposal is filling gaps with assumptions.
One six-month outcome, tied to revenue. A destination, not a tactic. “Run LinkedIn ads” is a path. “Cut CAC from $7,500 to $5,000 while holding MQL volume” is an outcome, and it’s something a proposal can be held to.
The gap, in your real numbers. Fill this in before the first call. If you can’t source a row, say so, because that’s information too.
| Metric | Today | Six-month target | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly MQLs from ICP | 50 | 70 | CRM, qualified against your ICP |
| Average sales cycle | 90 days | 60 days | CRM |
| Customer acquisition cost | $7,500 | $5,000 | Finance and ad platforms |
| MQL-to-SQL conversion | 15% | 25% | CRM |
| Pipeline coverage | 1.5x | 3.0x | CRM or forecasting tool |
What your team can actually ship in a week. Titles tell me very little. If your growth marketer launches one campaign a month, you are buying a different engagement from the one you’d buy if that person wrote copy, built workflows, and shipped landing pages every week. List your in-house people, freelancers, and agencies, then say what each one produces in a normal week. Name your CRM, automation, and analytics tools, and flag messy data early rather than letting it surface in month two.
What you already tried, including the misses. Every major effort, what it cost, how long it ran, and what happened. Be blunt about the failures. A campaign that burned cash and a messaging project that never shipped are the two most useful things you can hand me, because they rule out whole branches of the plan before I write it.
Put reporting lines in there too. If demand gen, product marketing, content, and RevOps report to four different people, that shapes the proposal more than your budget does.
Scope it in days per month, and know which model you’re buying
Price senior marketing leadership by days per month. One positioning call I make on a Tuesday can shape two quarters of your pipeline, and an hourly rate prices that like task work.
- 10 days a month for one workstream
- 15 days a month for two
- 20 days a month for near-full-time coverage
Decide before you shortlist whether you want leadership only or leadership plus execution. Buy leadership only and you get strategy, GTM architecture, mentorship, and budget ownership. Buy leadership plus execution and I also ship the work. Blur those two and you get scope fights in month two.
Your other decision is interim versus fractional, and most founders I talk to use the words interchangeably. They describe different things. Interim describes the timeframe you’re buying: a fixed 3 to 6 months, specific deliverables, and a written exit plan. Fractional describes the time allocation you’re buying: part-time, typically 3 to 10 hours a week, often running 18 to 24 months or longer. Ask me for the wrong one and your scope will feel wrong no matter how well I write it.
On budget, my own interim engagements run $10,000 to $30,000 per month depending on complexity, urgency, and how many playbooks run in parallel. Back-pocket coaching starts at $1,000 per month, and it’s your fit if you’re under $25,000 MRR and you can execute yourself. Your external spend on ads, content production, and tools sits outside both. Full detail is on my rate card and on my fractional CMO services page, and you can see the range other providers quote in my reviews of fractional CMO companies and fractional CMO services.
What I put in a six-month proposal
Six things. If a proposal you receive is missing any of them, the diagnostic work behind it was thin.
Your growth gap, restated in your numbers. Your CAC, your conversion rate, your target. A proposal that describes your situation in generic language means the candidate didn’t hear you on the call.
A 30-60-90 day plan that ladders to the six-month outcome. This is the structure I work in. I diagnose and position first, build systems next, and scale last. That order matters more than the tactics I pick, which is what the Maistro sequence above was really about.
One named owner per KPI. “We’ll improve pipeline” is not a commitment. “Pipeline velocity, owned by the CMO, tracked monthly in your CRM” is.
What is explicitly out of scope. The unowned edges are where your engagement quietly fails. I’d rather argue with you about this in week zero than in month three.
Exact days per month and response times. That includes the meeting rhythm, such as weekly tactical and monthly strategic.
The access I need from you on day one. Your CRM, automation, analytics, and board materials. Vague access requirements cost you three weeks at the start of the engagement.
Separately, there are terms worth demanding from anyone you’re considering, me included. Structure your six months as two 90-day terms with a decision point between them, so your first quarter’s data tells you whether the second one happens. Ask for a 30-day termination clause in your first term. If day 30 arrives and there’s still no written diagnostic, that clause is what lets you act instead of waiting out the quarter.
Score every proposal the same way
Run two or three of us through the identical brief and score us on the same lines, from 1 to 5. Without a fixed scorecard, the most confident writer wins your decision, and that’s a different thing from the most accurate diagnosis.
| Criterion | What a 5 looks like | Score | Evidence | Still unanswered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome clarity | Restates your gap in your revenue numbers | |||
| KPI specificity | One or two primary metrics with targets and an owner | |||
| Feasibility | The 90-day plan fits the team and stack you described | |||
| Stage experience | Track record at your ARR and funding stage | |||
| Availability | Exact days per month and response times | |||
| Scope coverage | States what is not included | |||
| Exit terms | 30-day clause and a written handoff plan | |||
| Total cost | Clear retainer, no hidden fees, no unbroken lock-in |
Weight outcome clarity and feasibility above everything else. If I score 5 on availability and 2 on outcome clarity, I’m selling you presence rather than leadership.
Be careful with the cheapest proposal you get. A low retainer sometimes reflects efficiency, and it more often tells you the person skipped the diagnostic work needed to scope your role properly. You pay that back later in scope fights and missed quarters.
When a proposal misses your bar
Ask me for a revision before you sign, and say exactly which line failed. How any of us handles that request tells you what your next six months will feel like.
Most weak proposals you’ll get trace back to one of three things. You stated your goal as a symptom rather than a cause, so the plan addresses the wrong layer. You left your scope boundaries undefined, so nobody owns the edges. Or your decision rights stayed fuzzy, which is the quiet killer: if an existing leader stays in place and your reporting line is vague, your team routes around your new CMO and you’ve bought a title with no authority.
If you’re still deciding whether this is the right hire at all, I’ve mapped the timing signals that mean you’re ready for a fractional CMO and the full-time versus fractional versus agency cost comparison.
FAQs
How long should my process take?
Two to four weeks from your brief to your signature. Most of that is yours: assembling your baseline numbers and the history of what you’ve already tried. Once I have a real brief from you, my proposal takes a few days. If your process drags past a month, your brief was usually incomplete and everyone is still negotiating what the job actually is.
How many candidates should I brief?
Two or three. Fewer gives you no comparison, and more turns into a job you don’t have time for. The point of more than one proposal is to see how differently smart people diagnose the same gap, which is the fastest read on who actually understands your business.
What if I don’t have clean baseline numbers?
Send me what you have and label your gaps. Your missing data is a finding, and anyone worth hiring will treat instrumentation as part of your first 30 days. Waiting until your reporting is perfect before you start the process usually costs more than the imperfect numbers would have.
What if a candidate won’t write me a proposal without a paid discovery?
That’s reasonable at larger scopes, and it should still leave you owning something. A paid diagnostic that hands you a written plan, your numbers, and a recommendation is a fair trade even if you don’t proceed. A paid discovery that hands you a sales pitch is not worth your money.
