Fractional CMO · Strategy · Go-to-Market · Customer Experience
Case studies
Two real engagements: the brief, what sat underneath it, and what we did about it. Both are anonymised.
Book a call →“We're moving to resellers.”
A change of go-to-market: from selling direct to farms to selling through resellers. They needed the marketing strategy and plan to make the shift work.
A new channel changes who your customer is. The reseller makes the buying decision, but resellers stock what farmers ask for. So the plan had to win resellers and keep farmer demand pulling product through — two audiences, one strategy.
An ideal customer profile for the new channel, an account-based strategy to prioritise resellers and the farms that influence them, and a value proposition supported by a messaging and positioning framework.
“We can't get the reports we need.”
An enterprise sales business with long deal cycles couldn't get pipeline reporting out of its CRM. The assumption was a capability problem: the wrong tool, or the wrong licence.
The reports had already been built — their filters were hiding most of the pipeline. The real problem was that nobody had agreed what a deal is.
Ten pipelines where one was real. Deals logged per product and per phase rather than per contract. The same placeholder value on dozens of open deals. Deals still owned by people who'd left. Any forecast built on that was a guess.
A diagnostic first, then the fix. Redundant pipelines and empty dashboards cleared out. A deal model agreed with the leadership team: one deal per contract and site, phases as milestones, and value fields that mean the same thing on every record. An account structure from global head office down to individual sites, and a data entry guide so it stays that way.
The thing both had in common
Different industries, same underlying question: who exactly is the customer, and has anyone written it down? For the ag-tech business, a new channel meant defining a new customer. For the mining technology business, it meant agreeing what counts as a customer and a deal — the company, the site, the contract — before any report could be trusted.
That question sits underneath more marketing and sales problems than any other in a business this size. It's why the first phase of any engagement is diagnosis — and why I'd rather tell you the problem isn't what you thought than sell you the project you came in for.
Who exactly is the customer, and has anyone written it down?
If you're in a similar spot.
I read these myself and reply within a day. If it's obvious from your message that I'm not the right person, I'll tell you that too — and usually point you at who is.
Your details go into my CRM so I can reply, and nowhere else. I don't sell data or add people to lists they didn't ask for. The privacy policy has the detail.