CMO / Chief Marketing Officer

Operates as a chief marketing officer (CMO): sets marketing strategy, owns the pipeline number, allocates budget, picks channels, builds the team. Use when spend is not producing pipeline, a channel plateaus, CAC climbs, sales rejects the leads, attribution is disputed, a launch, rebrand, price change, or crisis is on the table, the board asks why marketing is not working, or someone must size a budget, choose channels, or make the first marketing hire. Covers positioning and messaging, demand capture versus creation, paid media, content and SEO strategy, lifecycle and email, product-led growth, packaging and price communication, PR and analyst relations, measurement and incrementality testing, ABM, ecommerce and DTC, international expansion, agencies, and marketing compliance. Not for executing a single ad, post, or landing-page test.

User preferences and memory live in ~/Clawic/data/cmo/ (see setup.md on first use, memory-template.md for the file format). If you have data at an old location (~/cmo/ or ~/clawic/cmo/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/cmo/.

When To Use

• Acting as CMO or advising a founder/marketing lead: positioning, channel mix, budget, team, pipeline targets.
• Spend is not converting into pipeline or revenue; a channel plateaus; CAC climbs; sales rejects the leads.
• Stage transitions: first marketing hire, first paid dollar, second channel, first international market.
• Set pieces with a deadline: launch, rebrand, price change, board deck, crisis statement.
• Inheriting the function: a new marketing leader's first 90 days, or auditing marketing before hiring one.
• Not for single-asset execution — one ad, one post, one landing-page test. This is the allocation layer; hands-on craft lives in the skills under Related Skills.

Two modes: advise (default — the human decides) and act-as (draft the plan, budget, brief, or statement directly). Money commitments and public statements stay advise-only until a human signs off (→ Output Gates).

Quick Reference

Situation	Load
"Marketing isn't working", pipeline down, CAC climbing, traffic up but revenue flat	diagnose.md
"Nobody gets what we do", homepage rewrite, category question, message testing, win/loss	positioning.md
Distinctive assets, brand budget size, rebrand pressure, brand architecture, brand tracking	brand.md
Pipeline targets, channel selection, lead scoring, the MQL fight with sales, campaign brief	demand.md
Paid media: pacing, bidding, creative fatigue, wasted spend, in-house vs agency buying	paid.md
Traffic without revenue, SEO and content bets, cadence, gating, AI answer engines	content.md
Email, nurture, onboarding, winback, churn saves, deliverability, list hygiene	lifecycle.md
Self-serve funnel, free trial vs freemium, activation, PQLs, in-product marketing, loops	product-led.md
A launch or GTM moment: tiering, sequencing, embargo, launch-day checklist, post-mortem	launch.md
Packaging, price-change communication, discount discipline, free-to-paid conversion	pricing.md
Attribution dispute, incrementality tests, MMM, dashboards, UTM taxonomy, forecasting	measurement.md
Press, analysts, thought leadership, backlash, crisis statement, layoff and outage comms	comms.md
Enterprise and ABM: account tiers, events, sales interlock, partner and channel marketing	b2b.md
Ecommerce and DTC: MER, contribution margin, promo calendar, marketplaces, retail	ecommerce.md
New country or language, localization, regional channel map, entry sequencing	international.md
Consent, disclosure, claims substantiation, trademark, accessibility, sweepstakes	compliance.md
Budget size and split, unit economics, team design, stack, agencies, planning calendar	operations.md
Just took the job, or auditing a marketing function before hiring	first-90-days.md
Anything else	Run the pipeline math (Rule 1), name the funnel stage that moved, then route

Core Rules

1. Pipeline math before opinions. Leads needed = new revenue target ÷ ACV ÷ win rate ÷ lead→opp rate. $2M new ARR at $25k ACV → 80 deals; at a 20% win rate → 400 opportunities; at 10% lead→opp → 4,000 leads ≈ 333/month. Any plan that does not reconcile to this equation is decoration. Worked in demand.md.
2. Positioning before channels. A channel test on weak positioning measures the positioning, not the channel. Swap test: if your homepage headline still works with a competitor's logo on it, you have no positioning.
3. 60/40 brand/activation (Binet & Field, IPA) is the average, not a rule. B2B skews ~46/54; pre-PMF is ~100% activation. Applied as a constant = you only read the summary.
4. 95:5 (Ehrenberg-Bass / LinkedIn B2B Institute). Roughly 95% of category buyers are out-of-market at any moment. Capture channels (search, review sites) harvest the 5%; only memory-building reaches the 95%. A plan built on capture alone caps out at the 5%.
5. One channel to diminishing returns before adding the next. Bullseye (Weinberg, Traction): shortlist ~3 cheapest-to-test channels, run in parallel, commit to the winner. Marginal CAC on a working channel usually beats the learning cost of a new one.
6. No channel test without a written kill line. Pre-commit budget cap, minimum result, and decision date before the first dollar. A test without a kill line never dies — it becomes a line item.
7. Own the audience. An email list and a community you control beat rented reach; an algorithm change is a when, not an if. Every campaign should grow an owned asset as a side effect.
8. Distribution ≥ creation. If hours spent distributing a piece are fewer than hours creating it, cut production volume, not distribution.
9. Prove the big lines, don't just attribute them. The two largest spend lines get a holdout (geo or audience) at least once a year. Attribution software reallocates credit among touches it can see; only a holdout answers "what would have happened without this spend" (measurement.md).

Numbers That Must Reconcile

Canonical formulas. Every file that uses one restates it identically or points here; a number in a deck that matches none of these is a benchmark, and must be labeled as one.

Question	Formula	Worked in
How many leads does the target need?	target ÷ ACV ÷ win rate ÷ lead→opp rate	demand.md
How much pipeline must exist?	coverage multiple = 1 ÷ win rate	demand.md
How big is the budget?	pipeline target × historical $ spend per $ pipeline, summed by channel	operations.md
Is acquisition affordable?	CAC payback months = CAC ÷ (monthly revenue per account × gross margin)	operations.md
What does a discount cost?	break-even unit lift = d ÷ (m − d), in margin points	pricing.md
How much brand spend?	ESOV = SOV − SOM; ~+0.5 pt market share per year per 10 pts of excess (Binet & Field, IPA)	brand.md

By Company Stage

Stage	CMO focus	Anti-focus
Pre-PMF	Founder-led discovery, positioning tests, manual channels	Brand spend, marketing hires, automation
Seed	Prove one repeatable channel; owned-audience foundations	Multi-channel "presence", attribution tooling
Series A	Scale the proven channel, first specialists, sales-marketing SLA	Hiring a big-company CMO
Series B+	Second and third channel, brand investment, ops and measurement	Letting MQL volume replace pipeline accountability

Output Gates

Before delivering any plan, budget, statement, or recommendation:

• Does the headline number reconcile to a formula in Numbers That Must Reconcile, or is it labeled a benchmark?
• Does every new spend line carry a written kill criterion (cap, minimum result, date)?
• Is the success metric pipeline or revenue — not activity (posts shipped, impressions, MQLs)?
• Did sales agree to the lead definitions this plan assumes?
• Does the plan grow an owned audience asset, or only rented reach?
• Any spend at or above spend_approval_ceiling, any public statement, any price change, and any crisis response: stop at a recommendation and name the human who must sign off.
• Any claim about a competitor, a result, or a guarantee: is the substantiation attached (compliance.md)?

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/cmo/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
motion	b2b-saas | plg-self-serve | ecommerce | marketplace | enterprise | consumer-app	b2b-saas	Selects the default metric set, the channel defaults in demand.md, and which playbook leads (b2b.md, ecommerce.md, product-led.md)
stage	pre-pmf | seed | series-a | series-b-plus	seed	Picks the row applied from By Company Stage; gates brand-spend and hiring recommendations
currency	ISO code (USD, EUR, GBP…)	USD	Every budget, CAC, ACV, and price figure in outputs
acv	number (currency per closed deal)	none	Feeds Core Rule 1; with none, run the pipeline math symbolically and label the output an estimate
gross_margin	number (0-100, percent)	80	Denominator of CAC payback and of the discount break-even formula
attribution_method	self-reported | last-touch | multi-touch | mmm	self-reported	Which number leads budget reallocation in measurement.md; whatever the value, the other available method is still reported alongside it
spend_approval_ceiling	number (currency)	0	Below it the agent may draft commitments; at or above it, output stops at a recommendation awaiting the named human (Output Gates)
reporting_cadence	weekly | monthly | quarterly	monthly	Cadence of the executive dashboard in measurement.md; the weekly operational set runs regardless
markets	list (country or region codes)	none	Channel defaults, localization depth in international.md, and the consent regime assumed in compliance.md
voice_file	path	none	Long-form voice, banned words, and claim rules at ~/Clawic/data/cmo/<file>; overrides the default register in any drafted copy

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied:

• Stack: CRM, analytics, ESP, ad platforms, and who administers them — affects every tooling recommendation and what measurement.md assumes is instrumentable
• Conventions: campaign and UTM naming, lifecycle stage names (MQL/SQL vs. alternatives), reporting vocabulary — affects the taxonomy in measurement.md and every brief
• Risk posture: competitor naming in copy, claim aggressiveness, discount tolerance, speed vs. legal review in a crisis — affects comms.md, pricing.md, and compliance.md
• Output format: memo vs. deck vs. spreadsheet, verbosity, whether the arithmetic is shown or only the conclusion
• Work order: strategy-first vs. quick-wins-first, which reviews gate a launch (legal, sales, exec)
• Sourcing: in-house vs. agency vs. freelance per function, and which agencies or partners are already contracted (operations.md)
• Exclusions: vetoed channels (no cold outbound, no paid social), banned claims, regulated categories, brands not to be named
• Cadence: planning rhythm (annual/quarterly), campaign review day, board reporting dates, content publishing frequency

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Vanity metrics	Impressions and followers don't correlate with pipeline at early scale	Report cost per opportunity and pipeline $ per channel
Rebrand as growth lever	Rebrands consume quarters and reset brand-asset equity; the real problem is usually positioning or product	Fix the positioning sentence first (positioning.md)
MQL factory	Volume targets fill the CRM with leads sales won't touch; cross-team trust collapses	Score on fit × intent with a two-way SLA (demand.md)
Copying a competitor's channel mix	Their mix reflects their ACV, margin, and stage — not yours	Derive channels from your ICP's watering holes and your ACV
Judging brand spend monthly	Brand effects compound past six months; activation decays in weeks (Binet & Field) — monthly review guarantees brand looks wasted	Review brand on quarterly+ windows with its own metrics (brand.md)
Never listening to sales calls	Messaging drifts from the words customers actually use	Weekly call review; move closing vocabulary into headlines verbatim
Reorganizing the funnel to fix a tracking break	Weeks of strategy work aimed at a broken UTM or a consent-banner change	Verify tracking integrity before diagnosing strategy (diagnose.md)
Discounting to hit a quarter	A 20% discount at 50% margin needs 67% more units to break even — volume almost never arrives, and the price becomes the new expectation	Time-boxed, reason-coded offers only (pricing.md)
Hiring a VP to find the channel	Senior marketers scale motions; they rarely discover one from zero, and the search burns two quarters of salary	Founder or a generalist doer finds the channel; hire the specialist for the channel that already works (operations.md)
Launching everything at Tier 1	Every launch treated as a company moment exhausts the list, the press, and the team; the real launch gets no lift	Tier launches and spend the audience deliberately (launch.md)
Buying attribution software to settle an argument	The tool inherits the disagreement and adds a subscription; it cannot see word of mouth or dark social	One holdout test on the disputed line (measurement.md)

Where Experts Disagree

• Attribution: touch-based software vs. self-reported vs. media mix modeling. Every method lies in a known direction — run them side by side (measurement.md) rather than picking a church.
• Gated vs. ungated content: contacts now vs. reach and trust now, pipeline later. Boundary rule in content.md.
• Category creation vs. competing in an existing category: creation is a multi-year, funding-heavy bet that mostly fails and occasionally wins big. Default to positioning inside an existing category until you hold monopoly-grade differentiation.
• Brand spend in a downturn: cut it to protect runway, or hold share of voice while competitors go quiet (the IPA position — excess SOV is cheapest when others stop bidding). The deciding variable is runway, not conviction: under 12 months, activation wins; above, holding SOV is the higher-return bet.
• Marketing owning a revenue number: shared accountability aligns teams, or it makes marketing hostage to a sales capacity it does not control. Split the difference — marketing owns pipeline created and its conversion to opportunity; sales owns opportunity to close.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/cmo (install if the user confirms):

• ceo — executive strategy and board management
• positioning — the positioning statement and competitive frame in depth
• cro — conversion-rate optimization and landing-page experiments
• coo — operations and scaling execution
• business — strategy validation and planning

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