# Fractional CMO Client Onboarding: The Complete Guide | Crank Source: https://wearecrank.com/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding Fractional CMO client onboarding sets the foundation for every strategic decision. Learn the audit process, 90-day plan, and operating norms that make engagements succeed. --- Fractional CMO Onboarding # Fractional CMO **Client Onboarding.** Why client onboarding is the most consequential phase of a fractional CMO engagement — and how to get it right from day one. [Talk to WeareCrank ](/contact) On this pageContents 1. [Why Client Onboarding Is the Most Consequential Phase](#why-client-onboarding-is-the-most-consequential-phase-of-a-fractional-cmo-engagement) 2. [The Onboarding Philosophy: Earn the Right to Lead](#the-onboarding-philosophy-earn-the-right-to-lead) 3. [The New Client Audit: Diagnosing Before Prescribing](#the-new-client-audit-diagnosing-before-prescribing) 4. [Auditing the Inherited Agency Roster](#auditing-the-inherited-agency-roster) 5. [Building the 90-Day Operating Plan](#building-the-90-day-operating-plan) 6. [Establishing Operating Norms: Cadence, Access, and Escalation](#establishing-operating-norms-cadence-access-and-escalation) 7. [Start Every Engagement on a Foundation That Holds](#start-every-engagement-on-a-foundation-that-holds) TL;DR Fractional CMO client onboarding sets the foundation for every strategic decision that follows, making it the phase where engagements are won or lost. * Onboarding is where a fractional CMO establishes credibility, context, and working relationships simultaneously. * Poorly structured onboarding leads to misaligned priorities, wasted budget, and early disengagement from stakeholders. * A rigorous onboarding process shortens the time to meaningful output and reduces friction across the engagement. * The first 30 days define how the CMO is perceived internally — and that perception is difficult to reverse. * Onboarding is not administrative; it is strategic and should be treated as billable, structured work. ## Why Client Onboarding Is the Most Consequential Phase of a Fractional CMO Engagement ![Why Client Onboarding Is the Most Consequential Phase of a Fractional CMO Engagement](/images/fcmo/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/01.png) A fractional CMO engagement is not a retainer where an agency runs the same deliverables on repeat. This is an embedded leadership role. And whether that leader can actually lead — from day one — comes down almost entirely to how onboarding is handled. Get it wrong, and the next six months become a slow recovery from a bad start. Get it right, and the CMO arrives with the context, relationships, and clarity to make decisions that actually move things. Consider what the incoming CMO has to absorb in the first few weeks: the company's full marketing history, what's working and what isn't, the internal team's dynamics, the CEO or founder's commercial priorities, and where the business needs immediate help versus longer-term structural change. That's a lot of ground to cover. Without a deliberate framework, most of it gets missed — and we see this constantly during onboarding reviews. The consequences don't always show up immediately. They surface later. A CMO who hasn't mapped the existing tech stack makes decisions that compound existing problems rather than solve them. One who hasn't taken time to understand the sales and marketing relationship builds campaigns that sales quietly ignores. One who hasn't established a clear reporting rhythm loses stakeholder confidence before a single result lands. #### Related reading * [What Does a Fractional CMO Actually Do?](/fractional-cmo/what-does-a-fractional-cmo-do) * [How to Set Goals for a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo/how-to-set-goals-for-a-fractional-cmo-engagement) * [Fractional CMO vs Marketing Agency: Which Do You Need?](/fractional-cmo/fractional-cmo-vs-marketing-agency) * [How Long Does a Fractional CMO Engagement Last?](/fractional-cmo/how-long-does-a-fractional-cmo-engagement-last) * [The First 90 Days: A Fractional CMO Roadmap](/fractional-cmo/fractional-cmo-first-90-days) So what does a common mistake look like here? Usually it's treating onboarding as a formality. A kick-off call, a shared Google Drive folder, a round of introductions — and then straight into work. That approach works fine when someone is joining to execute a predefined plan. A fractional CMO is joining to _define_ the plan. The onboarding process has to reflect that difference. It needs to be built around discovery, diagnosis, and alignment. Not just access. There's also a trust dynamic specific to fractional engagements. A full-time hire has weeks of hallway conversations and informal relationship-building ahead of them. A fractional CMO is typically on-site two or three days a week — which means every interaction carries more weight. The first questions asked, the first priorities named, the first meeting run. All of it shapes whether the internal team and leadership will actually follow this person's direction. Onboarding is where that credibility gets established. Or doesn't. The tricky part is that credibility lost in the first month is genuinely hard to recover. Internal teams form impressions quickly, and fractional engagements rarely allow enough time to rebuild from a poor start. Companies that invest in structured onboarding see faster output and a clearer return on their fractional CMO spend. Companies that hand a new CMO a login and wish them luck tend to spend the first quarter asking why nothing has changed yet. ## The Onboarding Philosophy: Earn the Right to Lead ![The Onboarding Philosophy: Earn the Right to Lead](/images/fcmo/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/02.png) A fractional CMO arrives with credentials, a track record, and a mandate. None of that automatically earns trust. Authority has to be built. And the onboarding phase is where you either lay that foundation properly or spend the rest of the engagement fighting for credibility you never established. The most effective fractional CMOs treat onboarding as a structured process with a clear purpose: understand the business deeply enough to lead marketing decisions with confidence, and give the team enough visibility into how you work to trust your direction. Fractional CMO client onboarding Fractional CMO client onboarding is the structured process through which a part-time or contract chief marketing officer establishes working relationships, gathers business intelligence, and sets the strategic foundation for a marketing engagement. This distinction matters more than most CMOs realise going in. Onboarding isn't a discovery call and a 30-day plan. It's a deliberate sequence of actions designed to compress the ramp-up period, surface the real constraints on marketing performance, and establish how decisions actually get made going forward. A common mistake we see: fractional CMOs underestimate how much political and cultural intelligence they need in the first few weeks. Who holds informal influence? Where did past marketing efforts break down — and why? What does leadership actually want from marketing, versus what they say they want? That gap is often more useful than any audit output. #### Trust Is Built Early The relationships and working patterns established in the first four to six weeks of a fractional CMO engagement tend to define the entire contract. Poor onboarding creates friction that rarely fully resolves. There's also a pace question. Move too fast and you're making calls without enough context — confidence in your judgement erodes quickly. Move too slowly and the client starts wondering whether they needed a senior hire at all. Good onboarding sets a visible tempo: regular communication, early wins, clear milestones. It signals competence without overreaching. The tricky part is that all of this has to happen while you're also being asked to produce things. So what does getting it right actually look like? It means demonstrating that you understand the business, respect the people already in it, and can move at pace without creating chaos. That's not a soft skill. It's a strategic discipline. > In our experience working with fractional CMOs and their clients, the engagements that fail rarely fail because of strategy. They fail because the CMO never properly onboarded — they skipped the trust-building phase and went straight to execution, which created resistance that compounded over time. Good intentions aren't enough. Getting onboarding right means approaching it with the same structure and intentionality you'd bring to any marketing programme. The process needs a framework. ## The New Client Audit: Diagnosing Before Prescribing ![The New Client Audit: Diagnosing Before Prescribing](/images/fcmo/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/03.png) A fractional CMO who walks in and immediately starts issuing directives is working blind. Before you can set any meaningful direction, you need to understand what you're actually dealing with — what's working, what's broken, and which assumptions have never been tested. That clarity doesn't come from a kick-off call. The new client audit is how you get there. Think of it as a diagnostic phase: structured, time-boxed, and deliberately kept separate from execution. Its job is to surface the information you need to make sound decisions — not to produce a glossy strategy document that sits unread in a shared drive. #### Related reading on fractional CMO engagements * [What Does a Fractional CMO Actually Do?](/what-does-a-fractional-cmo-do) * [How to Structure a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo-engagement-structure) * [Fractional CMO vs Full-Time CMO: Which Do You Need?](/fractional-cmo-vs-full-time-cmo) * [How to Measure Fractional CMO Performance](/fractional-cmo-performance-measurement) Most businesses seeking a fractional CMO have accumulated years of marketing decisions made under pressure — with limited data, by people who have since left, or based on assumptions no one has revisited. The audit draws a clear line between inherited guesswork and informed strategy. Without it, you risk absorbing someone else's problems while appearing to endorse them. ### What the audit actually covers A thorough audit during fractional CMO client onboarding touches four areas: commercial context, marketing infrastructure, team and capability, and data integrity. **Commercial context** means understanding the business model, revenue mix, sales cycle, and where growth is actually expected to come from. You cannot set a direction without knowing whether the business makes money through volume or high-value accounts — and what the founder or board considers a win. **Marketing infrastructure** covers everything that already exists: channels, tools, campaigns, content, spend. This isn't about judging past decisions. It's about knowing what you're inheriting and, crucially, what's actually active versus what someone _thinks_ is active. Those two lists are often very different. **Team and capability** means mapping who owns what, where the gaps are, and where you'll need external resource. Fractional CMOs rarely walk into a full in-house team. What's there — and what's missing — shapes your entire operating model from day one. **Data integrity** is usually the most uncomfortable part. We see this constantly during onboarding audits: analytics that are set up but not trusted, CRM data that's inconsistent across the pipeline, attribution models that bear no resemblance to how deals actually close. You need to know this before you start making decisions based on numbers. #### New Client Audit: Core Areas to Cover * Review business model, revenue streams, and growth targets * Map current marketing channels and active campaigns * Audit marketing technology stack and integration points * Assess analytics setup and data reliability * Review CRM data quality and lead-to-close reporting * Interview key stakeholders across sales, product, and leadership * Identify team structure, roles, and capability gaps * Document existing brand guidelines, messaging, and positioning * Review competitive positioning and market context * Establish what has been tried, what worked, and what didn't ### How to structure the audit phase The audit doesn't need to drag on for months. Two to three weeks, done properly — structured, visible to stakeholders, and ending in a clear written output that feeds directly into your first strategic recommendations. The tricky part is resisting the pressure to skip it. Founders often want to move fast. But the audit _is_ moving fast — just in the right direction. #### Fractional CMO New Client Audit: Phase-by-Phase Days 1–3 #### Access and orientation Secure access to analytics, ad accounts, CRM, and marketing tools. Review any existing strategy documents, brand assets, and recent campaign reports. Get the lay of the land before asking questions. Days 4–7 #### Stakeholder interviews Speak with founders, sales leads, and any existing marketing team members. Ask about goals, frustrations, past failures, and what they believe is true about the market. Conflicting answers are useful data. Days 8–10 #### Data and infrastructure review Audit analytics configuration, attribution setup, and CRM data quality. Identify where the numbers can be trusted and where they can't. Flag gaps that will need to be closed before reliable reporting is possible. Days 11–14 #### Findings and synthesis Pull together what you've found across commercial context, infrastructure, team, and data. Identify the two or three most important problems to solve, and the quick wins that will build confidence early. Day 15 #### Findings presentation Present the audit output to key stakeholders. This isn't a strategy pitch — it's a shared understanding of where the business stands. Alignment at this stage is what makes the strategy phase faster and more effective. ### The output that matters The audit produces two things: a shared picture of reality, and a prioritised list of where to focus first. The shared picture is often more valuable than the list. When a leadership team sees their marketing situation written down clearly — gaps, inconsistencies, and all — it tends to remove the ambiguity that slows down every decision that follows. A common mistake we see is treating this as a formality. It isn't. It's often the first time anyone in the business has looked at all of this in one place. So what comes next? From here, fractional CMO client onboarding moves from diagnosis into direction. But without this phase done properly, every strategy decision is built on assumptions rather than evidence. The audit isn't overhead. It's the foundation. ## Auditing the Inherited Agency Roster When you step into a fractional CMO role, you rarely walk into a blank slate. Most businesses already have agencies, freelancers, or retainers in place — some delivering real value, some coasting, and some hired by a predecessor for reasons nobody can clearly articulate anymore. Working out what you've actually inherited is one of the first practical tasks in [fractional CMO client onboarding](/fractional-cmo/client-onboarding). This isn't about culling agencies to make your mark. It's about establishing whether the existing roster can actually execute the strategy the business needs right now. Move too fast and you signal insecurity. Move too slowly and you signal indifference. Neither is a good look in the first 30 days. That distinction matters more than most people expect. #### ⚠ Replacing Agencies Too Quickly New fractional CMOs sometimes replace incumbent agencies in the first few weeks to assert authority. This disrupts live campaigns, damages supplier relationships, and wastes the institutional knowledge those agencies hold. Audit before you act. Start with deliverables, not relationships. Pull together everything each agency or supplier is currently contracted to deliver — not the pitch decks or the original scope documents, but the actual outputs. Reports. Content. Paid media account structures. Technical work. Businesses evolve; scopes often don't, and that gap is usually where the problems live. For each supplier, four questions matter: * What were they hired to do? * What are they actually doing? * Is there measurable evidence it's working? * Does that work connect to where the business needs to go? #### SEO Agency Scope Drift A B2B SaaS company had retained an SEO agency for 18 months. The original scope covered technical SEO and content. By the time a fractional CMO arrived, the agency was primarily producing top-of-funnel blog content with no link between it and pipeline metrics. The scope had drifted, the reporting had become vanity-focused, and neither side had flagged it. The audit surfaced a straightforward realignment conversation — not a termination. We see scope drift constantly. It's not usually anyone's fault. It happens when a business changes direction and nobody updates the brief — and left unchecked, it means budget going towards work that doesn't connect to anything that actually matters commercially. So what do you do once you have a clear picture of current deliverables? Map them against the strategic priorities you've identified in the wider client audit. You're looking for three things: gaps (needs that nobody is covering), overlaps (two suppliers doing variations of the same thing), and misalignments (work being done that doesn't connect to commercial goals). Check contract terms and notice periods during this phase. You don't need to make decisions immediately — but you need to know your constraints. A 90-day notice clause on a retainer that isn't working changes your timeline significantly. Not a detail to discover later. #### Related Reading * [What Does a Fractional CMO Actually Do?](/fractional-cmo/what-does-a-fractional-cmo-do) * [How to Structure a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo/how-to-structure-a-fractional-cmo-engagement) * [Fractional CMO vs Full-Time CMO: Which Do You Need?](/fractional-cmo/fractional-cmo-vs-full-time-cmo) * [Setting Goals in a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo/setting-goals-fractional-cmo-engagement) Document your findings and share them with the business owner or leadership team before drawing any conclusions. Your job at this stage is to bring visibility, not deliver a verdict. A structured summary — agency name, current scope, actual output, performance evidence, strategic fit — gives leadership something concrete to respond to. It also establishes you as someone who assesses before acting. That's exactly the credibility you need early in an engagement. The output of this process usually isn't a list of agencies to cut. More often it's a set of conversations: with agencies about refocusing their scope, with internal stakeholders about how agency work is actually being used, and with leadership about whether current spend is going to the right places. That's what a thorough agency roster audit delivers — clarity, before any commitment. ## Building the 90-Day Operating Plan The audit is done. Now you stop observing and start moving. The 90-day operating plan turns diagnostic work into something the business can actually act on — a shared document that sets priorities, aligns stakeholders, and gives the marketing function a clear direction for the quarter. This is not a strategy deck. Nobody needs another slide presentation that looks impressive and gets ignored. Three questions drive the plan: what needs fixing now, what needs building over the next 90 days, and what does success look like when you get there? Getting those answers right depends entirely on the quality of the audit that came before. Diagnose the business accurately — revenue model, pipeline health, team capability, agency relationships — and the plan almost writes itself. Skip steps, and you are making assumptions. Those assumptions will cost you credibility. #### How to Structure a 90-Day CMO Plan 1. Week 1–2: Finalise audit findings and present a prioritised problem list to the leadership team. Separate urgent fixes from structural improvements. 2. Week 2–3: Define three to five primary objectives for the quarter. Each objective should be measurable and tied to a commercial outcome the business already cares about. 3. Week 3–4: Map the initiatives required to hit each objective. Assign owners, set deadlines, and identify dependencies — especially where agency partners or internal teams are involved. 4. Week 4: Present the full 90-day plan to the CEO or founder for sign-off. Treat this as a contract, not a suggestion. Both sides need to agree on what success looks like. 5. Ongoing: Build in a weekly review cadence so the plan stays live. A 90-day plan that gets filed away is worthless. ### Setting Objectives That Actually Land Vague objectives are one of the most common mistakes we see at this stage. "Improve brand awareness" or "fix the content programme" are not objectives — they are directions. A well-formed objective looks more like: reduce cost per qualified lead by 20% before day 90, or launch a revised homepage and paid search campaign by week six. Specific, time-bound, owned. Objectives also need to connect directly to what leadership already tracks. If the board cares about pipeline value, your objectives should speak to pipeline. If the CEO is focused on reducing churn, at least one objective should touch retention marketing. Misalignment here creates friction for the rest of the engagement. Worth getting right before anything gets signed off. #### Turning Audit Findings into Executable Priorities 1 #### Categorise by impact and effort Sort every finding from the audit into a simple matrix: high impact versus low effort wins you can action immediately, and high impact versus high effort items that need a longer runway. This stops the plan becoming an unmanageable list. 2 #### Assign a commercial value to each priority For each initiative, be explicit about what it is expected to deliver commercially. This does not need to be a precise forecast, but it does need to be a directional answer. Why does this matter enough to prioritise over everything else? 3 #### Confirm resource availability before committing Check that the people and budget required to execute each priority actually exist. A plan built on headcount or spend that the client cannot access is a plan that will fail before it starts. 4 #### Get written sign-off from the leadership team Present the prioritised plan and ask for explicit approval. Written confirmation protects the fractional CMO if priorities shift mid-quarter and creates shared accountability across the business. ### Communicating the Plan Internally The plan only works if the people executing it understand what they are being asked to do — and why. That means running a proper kickoff with the marketing team, briefing retained agencies on what is changing, and making sure sales understands how marketing priorities are shifting. This step gets skipped constantly. It feels obvious, so people assume it will happen naturally. It does not. Teams that receive a new plan without context will either ignore it or interpret it in whatever way makes sense to them. Neither outcome serves anyone. Translating strategy into clear team-level briefs is part of the fractional CMO's job during onboarding — not a nice-to-have. #### More on Fractional CMO Engagements * [Why Client Onboarding Is the Most Consequential Phase of a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding) * [The Onboarding Philosophy: Earn the Right to Lead](/fractional-cmo-onboarding-philosophy) * [The New Client Audit: Diagnosing Before Prescribing](/fractional-cmo-client-audit) * [Auditing the Inherited Agency Roster](/fractional-cmo-auditing-agency-roster) ### What the Plan Is Not The 90-day plan is not a commitment to fix everything the audit surfaced. Some problems need budget that does not exist yet. Some need hires that have not happened. Some sit entirely outside marketing's control. Being explicit about what is out of scope in the first quarter matters just as much as defining what is in it. A fractional CMO who over-promises and under-delivers loses trust fast. One who sets a realistic plan and hits it consistently builds the credibility to expand scope over time. The difference usually comes down to how honestly the plan was scoped in the first place. The 90-day plan is the foundation. Get it right, and the rest of the engagement has something solid to stand on. ## Establishing Operating Norms: Cadence, Access, and Escalation Once the 90-day operating plan exists on paper, the next job is making sure everyone knows how the engagement actually runs. This is where [fractional CMO client onboarding](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding) either holds together or starts to fray. Without clear operating norms, a fractional CMO defaults to reacting. Answering Slack messages at odd hours, joining calls without context, getting pulled into decisions that should have been made independently. That is not a sustainable model — and it erodes the strategic value the client hired you to provide. Three things need to be nailed down: how often you communicate and in what format, what access you need to do the work, and how decisions get escalated when something requires your input urgently. Get these agreed in writing during onboarding. The ambiguity that makes fractional engagements feel chaotic almost always traces back to skipping this step. ### Meeting Cadence Map every recurring touchpoint first. A typical engagement needs at minimum a weekly check-in with the marketing team, a fortnightly or monthly meeting with the CEO or leadership, and a quarterly business review. Beyond that, be explicit about what does not require a meeting. If every question triggers a call, your four or eight hours per week disappear fast. Define format as well as frequency. Async updates via a shared document or project management tool reduce interruptions without losing visibility. If the client runs a free-flowing communication culture — and many do — this takes coaching. Set the expectation early. Trying to shift it three months in is a much harder conversation. #### Establishing Operating Norms Across the First 60 Days Week 1 #### Agree the communication rules Define meeting frequency, preferred channels, and response time expectations. Get these confirmed in writing by the main client contact before any substantive work begins. Week 2 #### Confirm system and tool access Ensure you have the correct permission levels across analytics, CRM, ad platforms, and project management tools. Flag any access gaps to the client immediately — blocked access delays the audit and the operating plan. Week 3–4 #### Run the first structured check-in Use this meeting to review what is working about the operating rhythm and what is not. Adjust meeting formats or frequency before they become entrenched habits. Week 5–6 #### Establish the escalation protocol Clarify which decisions you own, which require client sign-off, and what the process is for genuinely urgent issues. Document this and share it with all relevant stakeholders. Week 7–8 #### Review async communication effectiveness Audit whether the agreed async tools are being used correctly. If the client is still defaulting to ad hoc messages or calls, address the behaviour directly rather than accommodating it. ### Access Requirements A fractional CMO cannot audit, direct, or report on performance without proper system access. This sounds obvious. But access issues are one of the most common sources of early-engagement friction we see — and they are almost always avoidable. You need: * Admin or analyst-level access to web analytics, paid media accounts, the CRM, and marketing automation platforms * Access to the team's project management tool * Historical performance data — not just current dashboards That last point matters. The pattern of what happened over the last 12 months is often more useful than last week's numbers. #### ⛔ Do not start work without confirmed access Beginning an engagement without the correct system access forces you to rely on secondhand data and client interpretation. This compromises your audit findings and weakens your credibility before you have had a chance to establish it. Make access a precondition of week one, not an item to chase through week four. Document what you have requested, what has been granted, and what is still pending. Chase outstanding access formally and note it in your status updates. If access is being withheld — even accidentally — that tells you something about the client's internal culture worth understanding early. ### Escalation Paths The tricky part is calibrating what you own versus what needs sign-off. Fractional engagements work best when the CMO has a clear mandate and can make day-to-day marketing decisions without approval for everything. But some decisions do require escalation: budget commitments above a certain threshold, messaging changes that touch brand positioning, hiring decisions, or anything that crosses into another function's territory. Define those thresholds explicitly. Agree on who the decision-makers are for each category and what the expected turnaround is. If you submit a campaign brief on Tuesday, when can you expect approval? If a media opportunity needs a response within 24 hours, who do you call? These questions sound procedural. They are actually what determines whether the engagement runs at the pace the business needs. The escalation protocol also runs the other direction. The client needs to know when to involve you — not just when you need to involve them. A common mistake we see: a founder runs a product launch campaign through a personal contact without looping in the fractional CMO. That is a failure of escalation, not just communication. And it usually produces results that are harder to fix than if you had been consulted in the first place. #### Related reading * [Why Client Onboarding Is the Most Consequential Phase of a Fractional CMO Engagement](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding) * [The Onboarding Philosophy: Earn the Right to Lead](/fractional-cmo-onboarding-philosophy) * [The New Client Audit: Diagnosing Before Prescribing](/fractional-cmo-new-client-audit) * [Building the 90-Day Operating Plan](/fractional-cmo-90-day-operating-plan) ### Putting It in Writing All of this — cadence, access, escalation paths — belongs in a single document that both parties sign off on during onboarding. Call it an operating agreement, a ways-of-working document, whatever fits the client's culture. What matters is that it exists. ### Start Every Engagement on a Foundation That Holds WeareCrank works with businesses to structure fractional CMO engagements that deliver from day one — with the onboarding rigour, audit process, and operating norms that make the difference. [Talk to WeareCrank about your engagement](/contact) You might also find helpful [ What Does a Fractional CMO Actually Do? A practical breakdown of the fractional CMO role, responsibilities, and how it differs from other marketing leadership arrangements. ](/fractional-cmo/what-does-a-fractional-cmo-do) [ How to Set Goals for a Fractional CMO Engagement How to define objectives that are measurable, commercially grounded, and set the engagement up for success. ](/fractional-cmo/how-to-set-goals-for-a-fractional-cmo-engagement) [ Fractional CMO vs Marketing Agency: Which Do You Need? Understanding the difference between hiring a fractional CMO and working with a marketing agency — and when each makes sense. ](/fractional-cmo/fractional-cmo-vs-marketing-agency) [ How Long Does a Fractional CMO Engagement Last? Typical engagement lengths, what drives duration, and how to structure contracts that reflect your actual needs. ](/fractional-cmo/how-long-does-a-fractional-cmo-engagement-last) [ The First 90 Days: A Fractional CMO Roadmap A phase-by-phase guide to the first quarter of a fractional CMO engagement, from audit through to execution. ](/fractional-cmo/fractional-cmo-first-90-days) ## Ready to **structure your engagement properly?** WeareCrank helps businesses get fractional CMO onboarding right — so every engagement starts with clarity, credibility, and a plan that actually holds. [Talk to WeareCrank ](/contact) [Learn about fractional CMOs](/what-is-a-fractional-cmo) [Back to Fractional CMO hub](/fractional-cmo) ## In this section [New Client Audit & Baseline PackEstablish a commercial, channel, data, vendor, and asset baseline.](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/new-client-audit)[90-Day Operating PlanSequence diagnosis, stabilisation, learning, and evidence-based scaling.](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/90-day-operating-plan)[Audit Inherited AgencyDiagnose incumbent underperformance before keeping or replacing partners.](/fractional-cmo-client-onboarding/audit-inherited-agency) ## More on Fractional CMO hub [What Is a Fractional CMOThe complete buyer guide to the fractional CMO model.](/what-is-a-fractional-cmo)[Fractional CMO Operating SystemOne coherent model for strategy, decisions, delivery, and evidence.](/fractional-cmo-operating-system)[Fractional CMO FieldcraftTacit portfolio-CMO operating knowledge made explicit.](/fractional-cmo-fieldcraft)[The CMO Command CentreA decision system and cross-client executive control plane.](/fractional-cmo-command-centre)[Make the NumberWork backwards from a growth target into pipeline, demand, and investment.](/make-the-number-marketing-model)[Scale a Fractional CMO PracticeIncrease leverage without becoming the delivery bottleneck.](/scale-fractional-cmo-practice)[Practice InfrastructureOperational hygiene that protects scope, continuity, and client control.](/fractional-cmo-practice-infrastructure)[Growth Squad PodOptional execution layer under the fCMO when capacity is the constraint.](/growth-squad-pod)[Partner Case StudiesDelivery evidence that reduces partner-selection and reputation risk.](/fractional-cmo-partner-case-studies)