Strategy & Solutions

You've tried to diagnose it. You've tried to fix it. The pipeline is still flat. The problem is that you're too close to it.

A fractional CMO sits in your leadership meetings, works alongside your team, and stays accountable to the outcome. The plan is part of it. So is the execution.

Send me two sentences about your marketing  →

Most companies that call me have already tried the obvious things. They hired another marketer. They ran more campaigns. They rebuilt the website, the messaging, the deck. And the pipeline stayed flat, or grew inconsistently, or still depended entirely on founder relationships that don't scale.

The problem is rarely effort. In four consecutive senior marketing roles, I walked into organizations where marketing was active, funded, and not producing, and nobody inside could tell the leadership team why. What I found, every time, was the same pattern wearing a different costume: a positioning built around what the company believed about itself rather than what the buyer needed to hear. Or a sales and marketing relationship so fractured that leads were being generated and quietly ignored. Or a strategy that was really just a calendar of campaigns with no through-line connecting it to how buyers actually make decisions.

The cost of leaving it undiagnosed compounds in ways that don't show up on a marketing dashboard.

Not just the campaign budget. That's the visible cost. The compounding one is harder to see: the quarters of flat pipeline that become a pattern your board now expects you to explain. The sales team that stops pulling from marketing because the leads have never converted at a rate worth their time. The marketing team that keeps executing because nobody has told them clearly what's not working or why. And eventually the founder who starts wondering whether marketing is a function worth investing in at all.

It compounds further when your own data is giving you false confidence. Three years of sales records can show you exactly who has been buying and tell you almost nothing about who could be. If your marketing has been concentrated in one vertical for three years, of course most of your customers come from there. That's where all the activity went. Past sales data reflects past marketing decisions, not market potential. The ICP built from that data confirms the existing cycle rather than breaking it.

What I actually do

Start with the diagnostic.

Every engagement begins with a structured assessment: where your marketing sits today, where the gaps are, and what's most likely driving the disconnect between activity and results. I talk to your team. I look at what you're building and how you're positioning it. I map where the handoffs between marketing, sales, and product are breaking down. And I tell you plainly what I find, including the parts that are uncomfortable.

The diagnostic is where the work starts and where most consultants flinch. They validate strategies that aren't working because saying what they actually see is uncomfortable. I don't do that. The diagnosis has to be accurate before the plan has any chance of being right.

Then we rebuild, and I stay in it.

Depending on what surfaces, the engagement might focus on repositioning: getting clear on what you do, who you do it for, and why that matters to buyers more than the alternatives. Or on building the infrastructure your current team doesn't have the bandwidth or experience to build alone. Or on the sales and marketing relationship, which is often where the real breakdown lives.

I stay in the work. I don't hand you a slide deck and leave. I sit in the leadership meetings, work alongside your team, and stay accountable to the outcomes we agreed on at the start. The goal is always the same: build something that functions after I'm gone.

The MINDSET diagnostic framework

Every engagement runs through the same six-part diagnostic. Not because frameworks make good consulting, but because broken marketing breaks in recognizable places, and naming the right one changes everything about what you build next.

MI
Market Insight

Your team is marketing to a customer you've described from the inside. Your buyers' actual beliefs about their own problem, before they've heard of you, are different from what you've assumed. That gap is where positioning goes wrong.

N
Narrative

Your sales team can't explain what you do the same way twice without a slide deck. Nobody outside the building would know from your website what problem you actually solve. Narrative isn't branding. It's the infrastructure everything else runs on.

D
Discipline

Your marketing calendar is full. Your pipeline isn't. Resources are spread across everything that seemed important six months ago, which means nothing is getting enough attention to work.

S
Strategy

Your marketing strategy is a channel plan. It describes what you will do, not why your specific buyers make the decision to buy and what has to be true for them to choose you.

E
Execution

Your team is capable. They're executing against a direction that isn't clear, a structure built for a different stage of the company, or both.

T
Team

The right people may be in the wrong roles. Or the right people are in the right roles with no clear direction and no one willing to make a decision that sticks.

The diagnostic identifies which of these is broken. Most companies find two or three. The engagement is built from there.

At one point in my career, I inherited a marketing team of twenty professionals where every senior leader in the building used the same word to describe them: sensitive. What I found wasn't a sensitive team. It was a capable team that had been told what to do for so long they had stopped trusting their own judgment. Before I touched the brand or the go-to-market strategy, I spent the first weeks doing one thing: asking each person what they would do, then backing their answer publicly. The team found its footing. Then we rebuilt the brand narrative, the go-to-market rhythm, and the relationship with sales. The result was a marketing function actually contributing to revenue growth, and a team that no longer needed someone to tell them how.

Who this is for

Growth-stage B2B companies, typically from early revenue through Series C, where marketing needs to become a real growth function rather than an activity that runs alongside the business.
Companies navigating a transition: new market, new product, new leadership, or a go-to-market model that worked at one stage and breaks at the next.
Organizations that have tried the junior marketing hire and discovered that what they needed was senior strategic leadership in the room.
Leadership teams that know something is wrong and haven't been able to diagnose it clearly from inside.

What the engagement produces

The deliverable isn't clarity for its own sake. It's what a CEO would actually report to their board:

01

Marketing-sourced pipeline as a measurable, growing percentage of total pipeline. In one B2B SaaS engagement, that number grew from 28% to 42% while closed annual contract value grew 90% year over year.

02

A positioning and messaging foundation the sales team uses without being asked, because it finally reflects what buyers respond to.

03

A go-to-market structure the team can execute without weekly intervention, built for the stage the company is actually at rather than the one it was at eighteen months ago.

04

A marketing function the rest of the organization treats as a growth lever, and brings into conversations earlier rather than later.

Engagement formats

Fractional CMO retainer

Ongoing senior marketing leadership, structured as a defined number of hours per month with executive-level access and full team integration.

Strategic marketing advisory

A focused engagement on a specific problem, whether that's positioning, go-to-market strategy, messaging architecture, or organizational design.

Marketing diagnostic

A structured assessment of your current marketing function delivered as a clear analysis with prioritized recommendations and a sequenced roadmap.

A note on proof

The companies I've worked with haven't all given permission to be named publicly. That's common in B2B, especially where leadership transitions are sensitive and competitive intelligence matters. What I can tell you is the pattern: marketing functions that were spending without producing, diagnosed and rebuilt to become genuine revenue contributors. The two testimonials below are from people who saw the work directly. The numbers above came from the work, not from a spreadsheet built to support a claim.

If you want to speak with someone I've worked with before you decide, I can arrange that.

Over 200 people responded with interest and through an extensive process, Gina emerged as the top candidate. Her performance during the interview process indicated I might have uncovered a star, and it did not take long for me to realize that was certainly the case. Her marketing expertise fits very well within her general understanding of business. Gina is valued across organizational lines for her judgment and expertise.
Chris Koeneman,  CRO, Aware Inc.
Her skills in the understanding of what it takes to drive exposure, return on investment, and communicate brand message are well beyond your average marketer. Not a single detail gets by or unaccounted for.
Chris Wheeler,  Owner, Ignite Design & Advertising

To start a conversation

I work with a small number of companies at a time.

Send me two sentences: what your marketing is doing right now, and what it's not producing. That's enough to start. I read every one of these myself and respond personally.

Email me at gina@makeitwithmindset.com
Get in touch

Start the conversation

Send me two sentences: what your marketing is doing right now, and what it's not producing. That's enough to start.

Prefer email? Reach me directly at gina@makeitwithmindset.com.