Ep #142: Selling AI-First Fractional CMO Services

Transcript:

00:00
In this episode, I’m going to talk to you about what it means to be an AI first fractional CMO, why it matters and the right things to say so that you can win clients as a CMO. Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up.

00:29
and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOX.

00:58
the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms. All right, let’s dive into it. AI is here, right? You get it, you know it, but how do you articulate it in a way that gets clients to say, hell yeah, like I want what you got. I want you specifically to separate yourself from everybody else who claims to be a fractional CMO. And I want you to have like,

01:25
a rooted understanding of where this AI stuff fits in. The problem that most marketers make, CMOs make when they pitch fractional CMO work and their AI tinkerers is that they’re just talking about all of the possible stuff that they can do with AI. And it’s just, it’s just overwhelming. Like when a prospect hears it, the prospect might be like a long fact finder. They might like a lot of details. They might be technically curious or maybe even like a technical founder themselves.

01:55
They want someone that speaks the talk, right? Talks the talk. But then also you run the risk of like overwhelming someone who’s a low fact finder, who just wants the big picture, who doesn’t have the capacity in the given moment to really understand the depth. So then there you go, just kind of like spouting off like all of this AI stuff. And the person’s like, oh my God, like, what are you saying? So one risk is that you say too much. And the other risk is that you don’t say enough that actually shows that you’re qualified to really help lead the marketing department in the age of AI.

02:24
So how do you straddle these two extremes and find yourself in the position in the middle where you’re like effective, right? Like the Buddhist would call it the middle path. Like that’s where you want to be here. I think that a lot of people listening, you guys are probably falling in one or two camps. Camp one is, man, I’m so behind. Something happened in my personal life or I just wasn’t paying attention. And what is all this? Claude, code, co-work, dispatch, codex.

02:53
lovable, what is this stuff? I don’t even know. Like that’s one side of you. You’re like, I know how to like go to chat GPT and ask it to write some emails for me. But you don’t know beyond that. You’re feeling behind. I can think of one person in the accelerator who had like a medical problem and they were in the hospital for a while and they kind of came out and they kind of getting back to speed and they’re like, oh my God, kind of felt like I was asleep for, you a thousand years because of how far technology has progressed since like.

03:19
February 5th or for like super technical people probably since just before Christmas of 2025. There’s just been massive, massive shifts in the last, I don’t know, 100 days or so. You I’m kind of clocking it. Personally, I’ve seen the shift over the last nine or 10 weeks. It’s been big. So some of you whiplash, what the hell’s going on? How do I catch up? Ah! And then the other folks here, you’re just eating dessert all day long. Here you are just eating candy, eating ice cream. And what I mean by that is like,

03:49
You’re just playing in the AI tools and you’re having fun and you’re coming up with all these great ideas. And you’re like, man, you know that $29 a month SaaS tool I’ve been paying for? I’m going to vibe code my own version of it. And there you go. Couple days later, or maybe that same night, cause you stayed up all night, whatever. Like you have a functioning prototype that’s worth it. Cool. I’m excited for you. But then you don’t stop. Like then you don’t find like utility to make this AI stuff useful.

04:17
You just play and play and play. You’ve got more GitHub repos that you own than you’ve ever been on before. You’re kind of seeing yourself as a bit of a dangerous technologist who gets marketing. And I get it, it’s fun, but it really is dessert. Like none of you are gonna make it big, listening to this podcast and then vibe coding a SaaS tool for 29 bucks a month. It’s just not gonna do it for you. Not when you can go sell a client at 10 grand a month and to do fractional CMO work and like there’s really no risk in it.

04:47
Like there is risk in building tools and selling a bunch of people on a $29 a month program, ooh, 300 bucks a year. It’s just not worth it. So I want to state that like you have to find this middle ground of I know what’s happening with AI and maybe I’ve tinkered with it and I continue to tinker with it and whatever, but I’m like limiting it. You know, in college, man, I drank a lot. Probably not alone in that one. I remember a saying in college my sophomore year or freshman year.

05:16
If we drank as much as we drank outside of college, we’d be alcoholics. It was bad, it was bad. And like, as a result, as I kinda grew up and left college, I just don’t drink anymore. It’s not because I don’t like it, I really like to drink. But I just know that it’s a slippery slope for me and I have to create constraints in my life. That’s one. Another one, Xbox in college. I don’t know if you know this about me. My freshman year, first semester, I got a 1.0 GPA. Why?

05:44
Because Xbox Live came out and we could get four Xboxes with four guys in my dorm, networked, playing Halo 8 versus 8. Tell me a class that’s more important than killing the guys down the hall, right? It was super fun to play Halo. Ultimately, I had to get rid of the Xbox. I had to literally give it away. I just had to give it to someone and say, it out of my life. I can’t have this anymore. It was like a college buddy’s brother came to town and I said, hey, here’s a gift for you. Like I got to study. I had to turn my grades around the next semester so I didn’t get.

06:13
kicked out of college. My roommate, I’ll tell you, got a 0.0 his first semester. So I did marginally better than him. But it’s just like, it’s an addiction. You have it too. You likely have uh a personality that has some type of a draw and desire to do something that has like an addictive quality to it. Whatever it is, it’s scrolling, it’s watching uh certain types of shows on TV, it’s, know, substance, whatever the thing is. I fear that vibe coding is that too.

06:40
It gives you that dopamine of, I figured it out, I did it. But then at the end of the day, like, you’re not making money. Okay, so these are the two risks. And I think that you can’t just have dessert all day. You have to instead settle down and focus on building something useful and then turning to clients and selling your work to clients as a service-based business, not as a tool-based business. Again, Sam Altman says, we’re entering the fast fashion of SaaS, meaning anyone can build up a SaaS tool.

07:08
You know, they’re like, oh, let’s do the next JS with node.js and let’s throw on this authentication front end and this on the back and whatever. You’re going to build all of this stuff out. For what? Just to like abandon it in a month when like the dopamine wears off and you move on to the next idea. It’s akin to someone buying a bunch of domains and not doing anything with it. All right. So like, that’s a hard lesson here that you need to be listening to clearly, which is you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner. Eating your dinner is.

07:36
winning clients, having a pipeline, having optionality, having the ability to say, I don’t like working with you anymore. I’m going to go with another company because I’m talking to other people while I’m working with clients. And I just want to move on to this new project, this new challenge, this bigger opportunity, a client that’s more fun, that has a bigger budget, that has a marketing department that I can go lead. Not me be the whole marketing department. So how do you do this? How do you kind of position yourself? Well, I think the first thing that you have to know is that we’re in the era of six dollar Ubers.

08:07
Do you remember when Uber came out? Do you remember how revolutionary it was? To me, it felt like I had like a secret pass in life. You know, I didn’t have money. I was pretty broke. You know, it like after college. I remember I was seeing a mentor of mine, had an event in like the Boston area. And I remember just being like, oh, I gotta go from here to there. How do I do it? And someone’s like, have you heard of Uber? I was like, no. I downloaded it on my phone. I put it in a credit card. And I get across town for like six bucks. Blew me away.

08:36
Some dude rolls up named Keith, he’s got a Toyota Corolla, I hop in the back, we have a nice conversation, boom, right? $6 Ubers, was the cost of the Uber $6? No, my cost was six, but Keith had costs associated with it, there was platform costs, there was advertising costs, and who was paying for it? The venture capitalists. They were effectively paying for my ride, they were discounting my ride for me so that I became a customer. What’s happened now? Now I live in Philly, I live like, I don’t know how many miles.

09:04
I live on the northwest side of Philly. So to get down to the southwest side of Philly to the airport, it’s like a $45, $55 Uber ride or a Lyft ride. I don’t even know how to hail a taxi from my home. Do I walk up to a busier intersection and just wait and whistle? Nah. No? I could call a phone number, but I have to look it up. Is it a yellow cab? Is it a checker cab? I don’t even know. But I do know, Lyft, done. I open up the Lyft app, I find it, and I go.

09:32
Or if I’m being choosy, I open up Lyft and I open up Uber, see whose price is better, and I choose that one. We’re in the $6 Ubers in AI compute. That means that today, all the AI companies are trying to get you to use their software. Cloud Codes trying to get you to use it. know, as I record this, Cloud Opus 47 just came out. Then you’ve got Codex, which is ChatGBT. That’s like their platform for coding. Then you’ve got everyone else trying to spin stuff up. Z.AI.

10:01
GROK has got great stuff. And as you look at all of these different tools, you have to realize that compute will never be this cheap. It’s also better than it’s ever been, and it’ll never be this cheap. We are living in the $6 Ubers of compute, which tells me that you got to move fast with clients. Don’t tinker and dork around making your own SaaS tools. Go work with clients, solve their problems, and get paid as the CMO. I’m not encouraging you to be the technologist.

10:28
But you know how AI can help you. I’m gonna run through a couple of ideas on how AI can help you and your clients. But the big idea here is that AI gives us the ability to get more done in less time. But AI doesn’t have three things that you have, which is taste, discernment, and experience. Think of that, taste, you have taste. You know when you see something. Like I see copy, and I’m like, that sucks. My wife’s like, what do mean? It’s like, it’s fine. It’s like, no, it’s not. Like, why don’t I like it?

10:57
I have a taste for it. You have a taste for it too. You might have a taste for design, for landing page. You might have a taste for user experience. You have taste. You’ve experienced it and you were like, this sucks. Why is this so bad? It takes you a minute and you kind of figure it out, right? You have taste. You also have discernment. Like discernment is so critical. The new Opus 47 model literally states in the release notes that it has more discernment than before. It doesn’t have the discernment that a human has.

11:25
You’re able to discern what’s right and wrong. And then the last thing is experience. You have experience. Like your clients will get into a slop loop if there is not a leader in the marketing department who has taste, discernment, and experience who could say, don’t do that. Cause while that has the trappings of doing it right, you’re actually generating garbage. And then that’s going to precipitate garbage, which is going to precipitate garbage. It’s a slop loop that they get into. You can’t let your clients do that.

11:53
So you are there to help them get the wind faster and help them not get into a slop loop. A slop loop doesn’t look like a slop loop. Like it’s like the exponential knee of a curve. It looks like a linear growth until it’s not, until it like radically changes everything. When you start replacing people or stop running a certain thing and saying, we’re gonna get leads this way and we’re gonna run these kinds of campaigns, because that’s what the AI said. And the AI is right, you’re gonna get leads, but the AI was wrong that they were the right leads.

12:22
Because your experience, your discernment, your taste says, if we offer that, we’re gonna get crappy leads. I think at a company, Ripple, they had this big offer and they kind of continue to run it. It’s like, hey, CFOs, meet with our Ripple team and get a free Nintendo Switch. Get a free iPad, get a free whatever. And you just go meet with them and do a demo and then you’re like, can I have the iPad? They’re like, sure. And then they send it to you. Not a great experience. I’m sure they got a butt ton of calls booked.

12:52
from that. But how many that turned into like good deals and is that really like creating the goodwill in the industry? And maybe they have the numbers to suggest that it will, but that kind of feels like a slop loop. It’s like they’re going to get me to come in because my son’s Nintendo Switch broken. What, 30 minutes on a call to hear about a software that maybe I could use, but to guarantee I get a Nintendo Switch that I can replace it with? Not a big deal, right? You book that call. You’re never really going to be a customer. They share some stuff with you. You’re like, cool, I’ll think about it. And now they have like

13:22
the CRM that’s full of garbage leads that just came in for the door prize. We recently had a couple of our CMOs. We got some heavy hitters like in the subscription space and two women presented inside the accelerator and they were sharing their experience with creating promotion on the front end that get people in the door, but not so good that people get in the door and then cancel, receive the promotion and the company loses money. Like there’s magic to that, right? Taste and discernment, experience. Slop Loop says,

13:51
Come on in and you’ll get it for life. An example is like, there’s a bread company, get it wild grain, we get delivery bread to our house. And they were like, free croissants for life. Cool. It’s not like I’m gonna order that, give the croissants and it’d be like, I’m good, I don’t need your money, I don’t need your bread anymore. Like the free croissants for life isn’t worth keeping the first box of. But if you ordered something and you got like a major kind of benefit from it, buy a box of bread and get 10 pounds of meat too.

14:19
Maybe you do it, you cancel, you keep the 10 pounds of meat and you come out ahead. That’s like a slop loop because there’s no leader that’s there for taste, discernment and experience. That’s where you have to be. So high level, where does AI help you? AI can help your clients in a lot of different ways. They can do it for like content writing for like the website, social media, thought leadership, lead magnets. They can do email writing. You know that stuff. But like SEO and AIO analysis, ad creatives, generating text images.

14:44
competitor analysis, defining and managing split tests, website building, website updating, like a full CICD pipeline. You can do web app building. You can do reporting, benchmarking, live event support, like creating collateral and checklists, audio and video editing. You can have like a, just a backlog where you dump everything in one place, call answering services. I mean, just like a ton of stuff that AI can do. And if you’re the CMO that talks to a prospect and you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m really excited about AI. They’re like, cool, what do you do with AI? You’re like, well.

15:14
I do a thousand things with AI, figure out if any of these are useful to you. It’s a terrible way to talk to somebody. They’re be like, ah, shit, you’re just like saying too much, I can’t handle this, I’m gonna tune out. Like you’re smart, but you’re not focused. I think I’m gonna go with someone who’s a little bit more focused than you. No doubt you’re smart, right? No one will doubt your intelligence, they’ll doubt your efficacy. That’s the issue. So some of you are like begging clients to say like, you’re smart, you’re capable.

15:44
really what you want them to say is, you’re effective and I want to bet on you. Right. So AI tools are great. Just figure out the ones that you’re going to use with your client. That’s the big idea. Like what are the things that you would use and then like kind of promote that in your pitch. Say like, oh yeah, if we were to work together, I’d tackle like these three things probably early on to use AI tools so we didn’t have to hire people for that. That’s the idea. Very clear, very specific. Clients want to hear that kind of clarity. That’s going to give them a sense of confidence in the work that you’re doing.

16:14
So AI is critical right now. I think there’s a lot to be said about so many things here, like uh the downsides of AI. Data centers getting built and what that means for water supply and municipal energy and just the cost of energy. And do we even need it? Do we need Sora? No, we didn’t need Sora. That’s why Meta shut it down. Like video editing to make like spoof videos. Like we don’t need that compute happening. uh So environmental issues, obviously, that’s a big one. And then the second issue I would say here is that

16:42
it will remove the pipeline of like entry level to professional because why would you hire an entry level person when an AI can do more than an entry level person can do and they don’t have sick days and they don’t have their friend’s wedding to go to and that kind of stuff. So those are like some of the downsides. There’s plenty more, like the flattening of it, kind of the reallocation of wealth to a smaller class of people. All those things do exist, yes. And at the same time, we have to be mindful that

17:11
AI is going to allow our clients to get there faster, like to get to success faster, to maintain success, be early movers, to transform their business to be an AI powered business. And if you’re not the person helping them with that, they’re going to find someone who is. That’s the game. So if you’re not understanding how AI works, don’t feel like you have to go vibe code a Claude code project and maintain it and understand everything about GitHub. You don’t have to, no way. On the other side, if you’re a Claude code junkie and you’re like building out apps and staying up late and working on it.

17:38
Realize that you’re just eating dessert and you’re not really taking advantage of the opportunity, which is to sell fractional CMO services to clients that add AI functionality. There are so many teams that just like aren’t awake to this stuff where you’re like, whoa, guys, you’re doing all that manually? What if we just like did like an AI thing on this that had like a little, you know, an agent that kind of did that for us. People are like, that’s possible? You’re like, yeah, that’s possible. So then you hire someone to implement it. I’m not suggesting you’re the implementer. I’m definitely not suggesting that.

18:08
You’re the marketing strategist and marketing leader as the CMO, not the implementer. So go hire an implementer. We can find them. Diamond does it. I hired two guys on a project like, I don’t know, six, nine months ago. It felt innovative to me. Right now it feels kind of like kind of blase. Like it doesn’t feel like anything important, but at the time it was like, Whoa, this is an innovative idea. I want to build this thing out. And I went on Upwork and I found two guys, they were in Pakistan in Lahore. Super sweet, communicative, high conscientiousness.

18:37
did what they say they were gonna do, delivered a great product. I found bugs, they fixed them. The price was incredibly effective and they solved the problem for me. I I found like some of the smart, like, you know, smart 20 something year old guys in Pakistan and paid great rates for it and they worked at night and it worked for me. Cause it wasn’t like a daytime activity for me. It was like, ah, I’m finishing up work for the day. Oh, I wanna do this thing. And I messaged them and they messaged me back and we get on a quick call and off to the races. I think it took them a week to do a project.

19:06
that I was kind of stumbling over for, I don’t know, two weeks on my own, and I did for a couple hundred bucks. That’s what exists right now. So if you can’t do it, you can find someone who can do it. Someone is just like playing with AI tools day in and day out, and they’re begging for a client to work with. That could be your client once you get them. Like you win no privilege for like having built all of this stuff and having no client. Or like being the smartest marketer who doesn’t have a client.

19:36
Everything revolves around having clients, having pipeline. That’s it. Have clients, have pipeline. There are plenty of very effective CMOs. I think of probably the one at Allbirds. I don’t know if you read Allbirds, like the shoe company for like the VCs of the world. They just like pivoted to like an AI company. Smart CMO. Does that CMO know how to vibe code? Who cares? It’s about positioning. They’re solving bigger problems. I do think it’s

20:05
critical that you’re abreast to how AI can do things, but you don’t have to do it yourself. Further, I don’t think you should do it. And I think those that are leaning into vibe coding are probably shooting themselves in the foot, slowing down their ability to help clients because they get the dopamine from playing the AI coding game instead of like getting the dopamine from landing a bigger client that pays them more and gives them more financial freedom. That’s kind of a miss right there to me. Like, why would I play with something when I could

20:35
go sell something and make money and make my life better. And you know, like so many of you just think like, what would, what do you want in life? You want a new car? Cool. What’s a car note cost? 500 bucks a month, 900 bucks a month. Easy, like easy, hard to sell that at $27 a month for your AI tool, but go close a client. You know that the margin that you can kind of bump up a client. You have a client for seven grand a month.

21:03
Cool, your next one, you want a car? Great, sell it for 8,000 a month. You just got yourself the same amount of money plus a car payment on top of it. Easy, that stuff isn’t far from you. Oh, your kid wants to go to a private school? What’s the private school cost? Two grand a month? Oof, that’s steep. Okay, go charge three grand a month for your next client above what you’ve sold in the past. Force your rates up. Don’t go build AI tools and sell them and think that, you know, that Stripe account hitting $27 is gonna do anything valuable for you. All right.

21:32
Clients want you to be a fractional CMO. They want you to be a CMO. They want you to be a leader and a strategist. They don’t need you to be the implementer, not the good ones, right? Plenty of people want you to do everything and make all their dreams come true and work for free. But I don’t think that’s you, right? It certainly isn’t me. I want to increase my rates time and time again with every client that I work with and I want to get better and better. And that’s what we do in the CMOs accelerator. People come in and we focus on this stuff. I can think of two women I helped in the last week. One was on a pitch with a client.

22:00
She’s a senior marketer at a company that if I said the name of, you would know and probably have transacted with or someone in your family has. And she’s a killer marketer, very smart, very capable. And the client, the prospect, misremembered her price, said, oh, your price is 85 or 8,000, 8,500. And she’s like, no, I said it was like 10 to 12 or 12 to 15. And, you know, they were just kind of like playing some mind games with her. So I got in, I coached her and she was able to push her price back up and set her terms on it.

22:29
and make thousands of dollars more on the engagement. And that’s like just an hour and a half of me chatting with her and helping her get in position. That little bit of coaching, think about how much extra money that means for her forever. It’s not just for this client. It’s then for relationships that get referred to by the client. Plus it’s her new base. She won’t ever go below that number. She’s only gonna go above it. So yeah, I helped her make a little bit of money in the short term and over the course of next year.

22:57
enough money for it to definitely be worth the time to talk to me. Then beyond that, I mean, I really think it sets her up to make an extra, you know, couple hundred thousand dollars or more over the lifetime of her business, just from like a 90 minute conversation. Another woman is a fractional CMO with kind of a crappy contract and the CEO, like she wanted to renegotiate her contract and it was delayed because the CEO was stepping out and a new one was stepping in. Finally, the new one stepped in.

23:23
met with her and was like, I love you. You’re doing a great job. I want to make you a full-time employee. So here she is with a majority of her income coming from one client that she’s a fractional CMO for, but she’s doing too much for. And I’m coaching her on like, how do you drop your hours precipitously, keep your title as CMO and keep your pay the same? I mean, that’s going to free her up from working 30 hours a week to working 10 hours a week and making the same amount of money. And this is aligned with what the client wants. This isn’t like,

23:51
a magic trick we’re pulling or uh just trying to manipulate the client. It’s like, no, we are positioning ourselves so it’s a win for her, it’s a win for the client, it’s a win for speed, it’s a win for AI. It’s a win across the board. And that takes some massaging, it takes conversation. And so much of this is like, in the CMO’s head, in your head, there’s a reason you’re not doing something and you need the support of someone telling you what the market can bear to open your eyes to what’s possible.

24:19
and to coach you and push you and make you kind of, you know, step outside of your comfort zone and do something that’s a little bit bigger. So that’s what we do in the CMOS Accelerator. Help you win clients, serve clients, increase your rates, increase your impact, increase your term length. That’s what we’re looking for. And we do it with AI. But we do it first and foremost by helping you get clients and then serve those clients with AI tools and things like that, for sure. But uh don’t think that like I’ve gone off the deep end with AI. I don’t think AI is the solve for you.

24:48
Most of you are just a couple conversations away from winning a high ticket client. You just don’t know what to say. You don’t know how to position yourself. So we do coaching on that and support folks on figuring all this stuff out so they can build a real lasting business that they’re proud of and not a $29 a month CRM that if only we had thousand paying users, everything would be great. All right, obviously I care about this stuff. I care about you. I think that this is an important time.

25:15
to be a CMO because companies need our leadership more than ever before. There’s never been kind of like lower confidence because there’s so many directions someone can turn. It’s always kind of felt like a client’s at a fork in the road. Do I go left or right? And now they’re at a fork in the road, but there’s 3 million options and they don’t know where to go. They need someone with your intellect and experience and taste and discernment to step in and lead them. Let me help you do that. Booking a call with my team, cmox.co slash call. That’s it, cmox.co.

25:45
You’ll book in a call with my team. We’ll see if you have what it takes to be a fractional CMO that we think we can help and get to the next level. All right, have a great, uh I don’t know, week as you hear this, but I want you to hear in all of the AI stuff that comes out, that they’re just trying to sell you to use their tool to get your adoption because it’s the $6 Ubers. And soon that compute cost will go up dramatically. So we have to move quickly now to capitalize on kind of cheap compute.

26:14
so we can help our clients faster and help them establish a stronghold in the market. All right, I’ll see you soon, bye. Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com.

26:42
And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. Alright, go get em!