Flagship · Digital Thakur
A CMO who owns the number, not an agency that reports on activity.
You get someone in your leadership meetings who sets the marketing strategy, manages the people executing it, and answers for the pipeline number — for about a fifth of what a full-time CMO costs in India.
6-month minimum · roughly 2–3 days a week · exit clause after month 3
Scope and investment are agreed after we have spoken. You receive a written proposal — no standard package, no pressure.
Whether this is the right engagement
Right fit if
- Marketing is a line item with no owner. It reports to you, or to sales, or to nobody.
- You are still the de facto CMO and it is eating a third of your week.
- You have two to four marketing people executing well with no strategy above them.
- You have been through an agency or two and still cannot say which one worked.
- You are between ₹5Cr and ₹100Cr revenue, or Series A to B.
Wrong fit if
- You want someone to run Google and Meta ads and report ROAS. A performance agency does that better and cheaper.
- You want a person in the office five days a week. Hire full-time — I will help you write the JD.
- You are pre-revenue with no clarity on who buys. Start with a Go-to-Market engagement instead.
What you actually get
Leadership presence
I sit in your weekly leadership call and your marketing standup. Not a monthly check-in.
Quarterly marketing plan
Tied to pipeline and revenue targets, not to impressions, followers, or content volume.
Team and vendor management
I directly manage your marketing hires, agencies, and freelancers. Performance reviews included.
Full-funnel instrumentation
By month two you can say which channel produced which opportunity and which one closed.
Hiring
Job descriptions, interview loops, and scorecards for the roles you actually need — usually fewer than you think.
A board-readable report
One page, monthly. Spend, pipeline generated, pipeline closed, what changes next month.
The work, broken down
Four workstreams run through the engagement. This is the full list of what happens inside each one.
Diagnosis
Before anything is built, we establish what is actually true about your marketing today.
- Twelve-month spend audit across every channel, agency, tool, and freelancer
- Structured interviews with your sales team, marketing team, three recent customers, and two lost deals
- Funnel maths end to end — traffic, MQL, SQL, opportunity, closed-won — with the drop-off quantified at each stage
- Tech stack and data quality review
- Competitive and category position assessment
- A written diagnosis presented to leadership, including the findings you will not enjoy reading
Strategy and planning
A plan tied to pipeline targets, not activity targets, that your team can execute without you.
- ICP definition and segment prioritisation, with named target accounts
- Positioning and messaging framework the whole company can repeat
- Quarterly marketing plan with a pipeline number attached to each channel
- Budget allocation with pre-agreed kill criteria for every test
- Marketing org design for the next six to twelve months
- Presented in a working session with your leadership team, not emailed as a deck
Team and vendor management
I manage the people doing the work, including the ones you are already paying.
- Chairing your weekly marketing standup and sitting in your leadership call
- Direct line management of in-house marketers
- Agency and freelancer management, with quarterly scorecards and renewal decisions
- Hiring: job descriptions, interview loops, scorecards, and reference calls
- Onboarding and ramp plans for new marketing hires
- Performance conversations, including the difficult ones
Measurement and reporting
Numbers you can make budget decisions from, in a format your board will actually read.
- Attribution instrumentation from ad platform through to closed-won
- Weekly pipeline dashboard shared with sales and leadership
- Monthly one-page report: spend, pipeline generated, pipeline closed, what changes next month
- Quarterly business review with the leadership team
- Board-meeting support and marketing slides when you need them
How the engagement runs
Audit
Every channel, every tool, every rupee spent in the last 12 months. Interviews with sales, marketing, and your three most recent customers. You get a written diagnosis, including the things you will not want to read.
Plan
Positioning, ICP, channel priorities, budget allocation, and the org chart marketing needs six months out. Presented to your leadership team, not emailed as a deck.
Build
Instrumentation goes in, the team gets reorganised around the plan, underperforming spend is cut, and one channel gets real investment.
Compound
Monthly operating rhythm. Test, kill, double down. This is where the returns actually show up.
What changes
- Attribution you trust enough to make budget decisions from.
- One channel producing predictable, forecastable pipeline.
- Your marketing team knows what they are doing on Monday morning without asking you.
- You get your week back.
Questions people ask before signing
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency sells you hours against a scope and reports on what it did. I own the outcome and manage the agencies. When an agency is not working, I am the one who fires them.
How many clients do you take at once?
Three. That is a hard cap, and it is the reason the engagement works. If I am not accepting new clients this quarter, the homepage will say so.
What happens when we want a full-time CMO?
That is the intended ending. I write the job description, sit on the interview panel, and run a 30-day handover. Several engagements have ended exactly this way.
Why a six-month minimum?
One full B2B sales cycle in India is 3–6 months. Anything shorter and we would both be reading noise.
Do you work with companies outside India?
Yes — mostly companies selling into India, or Indian companies going to the US and Gulf markets. Time zones are worked out before we start.
Start with a diagnosis, not a proposal.
Thirty minutes. Bring your numbers and your current plan. You will leave with a straight answer about whether this engagement solves your problem — including when the answer is no. A scoped written proposal follows within two working days.
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