When you ask where a number came from, can anyone answer without marketing in the room? I’m a fractional CMO. I work across sales, marketing, product and customer success, and I stay long enough to find out whether the fix worked.
Four to six weeks. Fixed fee. You keep the deliverables either way.
Not because the reporting is bad. The numbers that matter are produced and explained by the same team whose budget depends on them looking good, and finance is slower to fund what it can’t check on its own. By the time it reaches the boardroom most have already made up their minds.
So the bias runs one direction. Performance marketing shows up inside the quarter. Brand reputation shows up quarters later and becomes the easiest line to cut.
Thirty years in B2B tech. I ran GTM at companies with good products and a real plan. When it worked, it worked almost flawlesly. When it didn’t, it was almost always because I didn’t give Finance enough to carry into a budget review without me in the room. Too often, the plug was pulled too early. I was ususally shown the door. Then someone else was brought in who told them what they wanted to hear. Lesson learned.
Now I work with leadership teams that want a sharper read on their model (the ones who already suspect what they’ll find, usually). If leadership isn’t willing to look at it honestly, don’t hire me.
I also write Achim’s Razor every week and co-host The Causal GTM Leader on LinkedIn with Mark Stouse, CEO of Proof CausalAI.
Four to six weeks inside your model with your team and your numbers (from kickoff, depending on how fast we get the interviews booked), looking at how go-to-market works and how AI is being used across it. You keep all three deliverables whether we work together after or not.
Where the model breaks, in writing, with the evidence it rests on and the evidence it’s missing.
The public map with your figures in it — your real cost of a hire, your agency quotes, your runway. Most rows get eliminated. The debate is over the few that don’t.
What to do next, and the evidence you check at day 90 — whether the changes happened, whether the assumptions still hold, and where each number comes from so finance can read it without you. Whether the plan worked takes longer than 90 days to know.
English-market expansion behind “Treasury That Moves You.” Acquired by Coupa.
Repositioned on financial advisors, then rebuilt the sales narrative to match.
Product marketing rebuilt around what the buyer was actually deciding. Acquired by Bullhorn.
Lieber Herr Klor — einen Beitrag zur Erfolgsgeschichte haben Sie ja ebenfalls gehabt, denn “Treasury that Moves You” ist immer noch in aller Munde ;-)
Maximizer continues to benefit from Achim’s contributions. The new positioning wasn’t just a new tagline; it was a promise to our customers.
Achim did a great job. His creative contributions and no-nonsense approach helped me grow MaxHire during a tough economy and 10x in four years.
Achim introduced me to a level of sophistication in B2B marketing that I had not appreciated before.
Achim contributed to major initiatives at ZIRO and helped move the needle. He’s a great guy and a positive attitude to have on your team.
Achim worked with MarketingProfs in a contractor capacity for many years. He was as vested in our success as we were.
Thirty minutes on your model, not my slides. Bring the number you defend most often and we’ll test whether you know it drives revenue or you’re guessing. If it isn’t a fit, I’ll say so on the call.
