Fractional CMO
Revenue is down 12%. Sales says marketing's leads are bad. Marketing says sales isn't following up. The CEO wants to cut the marketing budget by 20%. Paid acquisition costs are up 35%. A new competitor has entered the market. You have $1.2 million and six people.
Those are CMO decisions. The answer is rarely another tactic. It is deciding what matters, where to place the next dollar, what the team should stop doing, and how marketing and sales need to work together.
I help leadership teams work through those decisions.
The work
The job is not to produce more marketing. It is to understand the business well enough to decide what marketing should do next.
01
Where is growth actually coming from, and where is it leaking?
02
What do CAC, conversion, margin and payback suggest about where to invest?
03
Is the issue lead quality, follow-up, positioning, qualification or something else?
04
Where should the next dollar and the next hour go?
05
What should stay in-house, and what should be outsourced, stopped or delayed?
06
What changes when a competitor, new technology or channel shifts the assumptions?
Need focused strategic advice instead? Explore Marketing Consulting →
Experience
2008
Started the company as the Great Recession was reshaping marketing budgets, buying behavior and what businesses expected from every dollar they spent.
2010s
Every year added another channel, platform or dashboard. The harder part was deciding which ones deserved the budget.
2020
Managed marketing through a period when demand, customer behavior, budgets and channels could change almost overnight.
Today
People now ask a system for the answer instead of searching for a page. Businesses that were easy to find can be left out.
I have sat through budget meetings in a recession, a pandemic and several technology hype cycles. The question is rarely whether something is changing. It is whether the change matters enough to alter the plan.
More about Eric →Point of view
The essays are where I work out what I think about marketing leadership, AI, search, expertise, business and the decisions organizations make under pressure.
Leadership & Growth
Marketing & Technology
AI & Knowledge Work
Author
Forthcoming Winter 2026
A Detective's Guide to Generative Engine Optimization. Why brands with real expertise still disappear from AI-generated answers, and a practical way to investigate the evidence AI systems can find, retrieve and trust.
Speaking
I talk about the same problems I work on with clients, in conferences, podcasts, panels, interviews and workshops on marketing leadership, AI, search and building businesses through change.
Darby Digital
I lead the marketing decisions. When a client needs hands on the work, Darby can do it.
Darby Digital is the operating company I founded in 2008 and the home of much of the implementation work.
Contact
If you need senior marketing direction, tell me what is happening in the business, what has become difficult, and what decision you are trying to make.
Start a conversation →