The experienced marketing leader your team needs
Work directly with a senior, hands-on marketing leader: someone who can set the strategy, run the team, and stay in the work until growth is actually moving.
See if we’re a fit in just 45 minutes
Trusted by over 100+ SaaS businesses with their toughest growth challenges
The gap most early-stage SaaS teams are trying to fill
Gia hit the nail on the head for many SaaS CEOs when she tweeted this back in 2021. There’s a specific moment a lot of founders hit — somewhere between $1M and $5M ARR.
The product is working. Customers are paying. Word-of-mouth has gotten you this far. But now you need to grow faster — and you’re realizing that what got you here isn’t enough to get you to the next level.
You need someone who can own marketing. Someone who can look at the full picture, set a real strategy, and actually lead the team toward results. Someone who’s done this before for a company at a similar stage.
But you’re not ready to commit to a $250K+ CMO hire. Or you haven’t found the right person. Or you need results now, not in 6 months after a recruiting process.
That’s exactly the gap a Fractional CMO is designed to fill.
This isn’t just a slide deck. It’s real hands-on leadership
Listen — a lot of founders have been burned by “strategy consultants” who show up, build a deck, and disappear. That’s not what this is.
DemandMaven’s Fractional CMO engagement is active, embedded, and ongoing. Think of it as adding an experienced marketing leader to your team — part-time, but genuinely in it with you.
That means showing up to team meetings, reviewing performance with you every week, making real decisions about where to invest your marketing budget, managing service providers and freelancers, hiring the right people, and being the person who raises their hand when something’s not working and explains why.
The strategy matters. But so does the execution. A Fractional CMO doesn’t just tell you what to do — they make sure it actually happens.
Who is the Fractional CMO retainer for?
The Fractional CMO engagement is built for SaaS founders and CEOs who are dealing with one or more of these situations:
You don't have marketing leadership in place
Your team is executing tactics but nobody’s owning the strategy or the function
Marketing feels scattered
You’re running a lot of activities without a coherent system, and you’re not sure which ones are actually driving results
You have a marketing team but no one to lead it
There are people executing, but they need direction, prioritization, and someone to go to bat for the function at the leadership level
Marketing isn't your zone of genius
You’d so much rather be focused on product or hell — you’d rather even code if your engineering team would let you.
You're not ready to hire a full-time CMO
Either because of budget, bandwidth, or because you haven’t found the right person yet
What this retainer includes
The Fractional CMO engagement is a part-time, ongoing retainer — typically 20-25 hours per week with at least 6 months commitment — built around the specific needs of your company and team. The scope is defined together at the start of the engagement, but here’s what it typically covers:
Strategy & Direction
- Defining the marketing strategy and setting the direction for the function
- Setting KPIs and clear growth targets
- Identifying and prioritizing the highest-leverage opportunities across acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion
Team & Operations
- Leading weekly marketing team meetings and standups
- Managing service providers, freelancers, and agencies
- Supporting hiring decisions for full-time and contract marketing roles
- Building marketing operations infrastructure (project management, goal-setting, reporting)
Analytics & Insights
- Reviewing performance data to surface trends, opportunities, and inefficiencies
- Setting up dashboards for real-time visibility into marketing performance
- Gathering qualitative and quantitative insights to keep strategy grounded in what customers are actually doing
Stakeholder Alignment
- Attending company-wide leadership meetings
- Collaborating with product, sales, and engineering leaders to align marketing initiatives with company goals
- Reporting to the board where applicable
Execution Support
- Reviewing and providing feedback on campaigns, content, and messaging
- Guiding the execution of growth projects
- Creating documentation, deliverables, and artifacts to support the team
“Working with DemandMaven was the biggest sense of relief.”
“I got the clarity and confidence that I and my business needed. If you’re thinking about hiring DemandMaven, you should obviously do it. A weight is going to lift off your shoulders, and you’re going to do some amazing work together. Your business won’t be the same.”
– Luke Beard, CEO & Founder of Exposure
What makes us different
DemandMaven was founded by lead growth strategist and fractional CMO Asia Orangio in 2018. Along with her work here, Asia advises SaaS companies and VC funds all over the world. She’s also a TinySeed mentor, and served on the board at Moz before its successful acquisition in 2021.
Before starting DemandMaven, Asia worked for two VC-funded, high-growth startups in Atlanta, GA as head of marketing and head of demand generation.
☝️ All that is to say that when you decide to work with DemandMaven, you’re getting a team who really gets SaaS.
Experienced in both B2B and B2C markets
Understand GTM strategies for a variety of product-led growth and sales-led models and market segments including: freemium, self-serve, demo, and SMB / mid-market / enterprise
Battle-tested in both VC-funded and bootstrapped funding environments
Deeply experienced with proven SaaS frameworks that generate results
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from hiring a full-time CMO?
A Fractional CMO costs a fraction of what a full-time hire would ($250K per year on average for a SaaS CMO) — and you’re not paying for 40+ hours a week when you don’t need them yet. You’re also not going through a 3–6 month recruiting process.
The tradeoff is that you get a more experienced operator than you could typically afford to hire full-time at your stage, on a flexible commitment that can scale up or down.
What's the minimum commitment?
The engagement starts with a 6-month minimum, with a 90-day review point where either party can reassess. We’ve found that three months is the minimum time required to set direction, establish systems, and start seeing meaningful results — and the 90-day checkpoint creates a natural moment to recalibrate.
What does the onboarding look like?
We start with a deep-dive audit: reviewing your current marketing performance, talking to your team, getting a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t.
From there, we set priorities, define KPIs, and build the roadmap for the first 90 days. The goal is to move fast and start contributing value quickly — not spend six weeks building strategy decks before anything happens.
Can this evolve into a different kind of engagement?
Yes, absolutely! Some Fractional CMO engagements transition into project-based work once the strategy is set and the team is running.
Others grow in scope as the company scales. We’re flexible and build the engagement around what actually serves your company best.
How much does it cost?
The Fractional CMO retainer is $10,000/month with a 6-month minimum commitment, but we do offer reduced-scope retainers for those who need fewer hours.
Book a discovery call to talk through scope, fit, and whether this is the right model for where you are.
Your marketing function deserves real leadership
A Fractional CMO gives you an experienced operator who’s been in this seat before — someone who can set the strategy, lead the team, and stay accountable to results. Without the full-time price tag or the six-month recruiting process.
