Mario Neto: Let’s start talking about what draws you into being a fractional CMO.
Welcome Read: Being a fractional CMO is interesting because you get to see so many different types of businesses and accelerate your experience in terms of learning different approaches to marketing and different funnel structures. As opposed to working in one type of company for an extremely long amount of time, where that’s the only marketing you’ve been exposed to, the fractional approach is interesting because you very quickly get to understand how different businesses operate, and the different structures and demand generation approaches they all have.
Mario Neto: Yeah. There’s one thing that I really love about being a fractional CMO, and I’m not sure if you relate to that, but I love the idea of getting into a business — and usually the businesses that hire fractional CMOs and need fractional CMO work are starting out. They’re early stage. If you take a late-stage or well-established business, they already have their marketing functions internally. They already have a full-time CMO in there. And the idea of being able to go in and build something from scratch, because they usually don’t have anything marketing-wise, is what draws me in. We need to build everything from scratch: going in, starting out, doing the audit, doing the steps, getting to learn the business, and saying, okay, these are the lanes we can go, these are the approaches we can take, this is the go-to-market plan that’s going to work best for you. And sometimes it doesn’t work. Marketing is a lot of that — it’s testing, it’s building, it’s understanding, it’s getting data, getting feedback, and then putting it back into new actions, new initiatives, turning them into results. So that’s one of the most interesting things about being a fractional CMO. Do you relate to that?
Welcome Read: I definitely agree with that. I come from an entrepreneurial background — my whole family has started up businesses. That’s always what I wanted to do, so being a fractional CMO is super interesting in that sense because you get to experience that at scale. You get to see a bunch of different ideas, a bunch of different businesses, and be able to be on the ride along with those people, and then help build everything from the ground up. I think that’s a really interesting thing because jumping onto a proven GTM and just doing it over and over again isn’t super exciting. Being able to piece together the puzzle is the really challenging part of marketing, but also definitely the most interesting part — really trying to build it from the ground up.