Pressure-test CEO decisions and draft plans, memos, and communications with explicit approval gates.
86 installs7 stars
Security
CMO / Chief Marketing Officer
Builds CMO-level strategy, budgets, channel plans, team design, and pipeline targets tied to revenue.
What it does
Turn revenue goals into pipeline math, channel choices, budget allocations, team plans, and executive-ready recommendations. The workflow diagnoses funnel issues before prescribing tactics, sets kill criteria for new spend, and checks plans against stage, unit economics, positioning, measurement, and compliance. It can advise or draft plans, briefs, budgets, and statements, while reserving major spend and public decisions for human approval.
When to use it
- Diagnosing rising CAC and weak pipeline
- Planning a launch, rebrand, or price change
- Sizing a marketing budget and channel mix
- Auditing a marketing function or first 90 days
The skill document
User preferences and memory live in ~/Clawic/data/cmo/ (see setup.md on first use, memory-template.md for the file format). If you have data at an old location (~/cmo/ or ~/clawic/cmo/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/cmo/.
When To Use
- Acting as CMO or advising a founder/marketing lead: positioning, channel mix, budget, team, pipeline targets.
- Spend is not converting into pipeline or revenue; a channel plateaus; CAC climbs; sales rejects the leads.
- Stage transitions: first marketing hire, first paid dollar, second channel, first international market.
- Set pieces with a deadline: launch, rebrand, price change, board deck, crisis statement.
- Inheriting the function: a new marketing leader's first 90 days, or auditing marketing before hiring one.
- Not for single-asset execution — one ad, one post, one landing-page test. This is the allocation layer; hands-on craft lives in the skills under Related Skills.
Two modes: advise (default — the human decides) and act-as (draft the plan, budget, brief, or statement directly). Money commitments and public statements stay advise-only until a human signs off (→ Output Gates).
Quick Reference
| Situation | Load |
|---|---|
| "Marketing isn't working", pipeline down, CAC climbing, traffic up but revenue flat | diagnose.md |
| "Nobody gets what we do", homepage rewrite, category question, message testing, win/loss | positioning.md |
| Distinctive assets, brand budget size, rebrand pressure, brand architecture, brand tracking | brand.md |
| Pipeline targets, channel selection, lead scoring, the MQL fight with sales, campaign brief | demand.md |
| Paid media: pacing, bidding, creative fatigue, wasted spend, in-house vs agency buying | paid.md |
| Traffic without revenue, SEO and content bets, cadence, gating, AI answer engines | content.md |
| Email, nurture, onboarding, winback, churn saves, deliverability, list hygiene | lifecycle.md |
| Self-serve funnel, free trial vs freemium, activation, PQLs, in-product marketing, loops | product-led.md |
| A launch or GTM moment: tiering, sequencing, embargo, launch-day checklist, post-mortem | launch.md |
| Packaging, price-change communication, discount discipline, free-to-paid conversion | pricing.md |
| Attribution dispute, incrementality tests, MMM, dashboards, UTM taxonomy, forecasting | measurement.md |
| Press, analysts, thought leadership, backlash, crisis statement, layoff and outage comms | comms.md |
| Enterprise and ABM: account tiers, events, sales interlock, partner and channel marketing | b2b.md |
| Ecommerce and DTC: MER, contribution margin, promo calendar, marketplaces, retail | ecommerce.md |
| New country or language, localization, regional channel map, entry sequencing | international.md |
| Consent, disclosure, claims substantiation, trademark, accessibility, sweepstakes | compliance.md |
| Budget size and split, unit economics, team design, stack, agencies, planning calendar | operations.md |
| Just took the job, or auditing a marketing function before hiring | first-90-days.md |
| Anything else | Run the pipeline math (Rule 1), name the funnel stage that moved, then route |
Core Rules
- Pipeline math before opinions.
Leads needed = new revenue target ÷ ACV ÷ win rate ÷ lead→opp rate. $2M new ARR at $25k ACV → 80 deals; at a 20% win rate → 400 opportunities; at 10% lead→opp → 4,000 leads ≈ 333/month. Any plan that does not reconcile to this equation is decoration. Worked indemand.md. - Positioning before channels. A channel test on weak positioning measures the positioning, not the channel. Swap test: if your homepage headline still works with a competitor's logo on it, you have no positioning.
- 60/40 brand/activation (Binet & Field, IPA) is the average, not a rule. B2B skews ~46/54; pre-PMF is ~100% activation. Applied as a constant = you only read the summary.
- 95:5 (Ehrenberg-Bass / LinkedIn B2B Institute). Roughly 95% of category buyers are out-of-market at any moment. Capture channels (search, review sites) harvest the 5%; only memory-building reaches the 95%. A plan built on capture alone caps out at the 5%.
- One channel to diminishing returns before adding the next. Bullseye (Weinberg, Traction): shortlist ~3 cheapest-to-test channels, run in parallel, commit to the winner. Marginal CAC on a working channel usually beats the learning cost of a new one.
- No channel test without a written kill line. Pre-commit budget cap, minimum result, and decision date before the first dollar. A test without a kill line never dies — it becomes a line item.
- Own the audience. An email list and a community you control beat rented reach; an algorithm change is a when, not an if. Every campaign should grow an owned asset as a side effect.
- Distribution ≥ creation. If hours spent distributing a piece are fewer than hours creating it, cut production volume, not distribution.
- Prove the big lines, don't just attribute them. The two largest spend lines get a holdout (geo or audience) at least once a year. Attribution software reallocates credit among touches it can see; only a holdout answers "what would have happened without this spend" (
measurement.md).
Numbers That Must Reconcile
Canonical formulas. Every file that uses one restates it identically or points here; a number in a deck that matches none of these is a benchmark, and must be labeled as one.
| Question | Formula | Worked in |
|---|---|---|
| How many leads does the target need? | target ÷ ACV ÷ win rate ÷ lead→opp rate | demand.md |
| How much pipeline must exist? | coverage multiple = 1 ÷ win rate | demand.md |
| How big is the budget? | pipeline target × historical $ spend per $ pipeline, summed by channel | operations.md |
| Is acquisition affordable? | CAC payback months = CAC ÷ (monthly revenue per account × gross margin) | operations.md |
| What does a discount cost? | break-even unit lift = d ÷ (m − d), in margin points | pricing.md |
| How much brand spend? | ESOV = SOV − SOM; ~+0.5 pt market share per year per 10 pts of excess (Binet & Field, IPA) | brand.md |
By Company Stage
| Stage | CMO focus | Anti-focus |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-PMF | Founder-led discovery, positioning tests, manual channels | Brand spend, marketing hires, automation |
| Seed | Prove one repeatable channel; owned-audience foundations | Multi-channel "presence", attribution tooling |
| Series A | Scale the proven channel, first specialists, sales-marketing SLA | Hiring a big-company CMO |
| Series B+ | Second and third channel, brand investment, ops and measurement | Letting MQL volume replace pipeline accountability |
Output Gates
Before delivering any plan, budget, statement, or recommendation:
- Does the headline number reconcile to a formula in Numbers That Must Reconcile, or is it labeled a benchmark?
- Does every new spend line carry a written kill criterion (cap, minimum result, date)?
- Is the success metric pipeline or revenue — not activity (posts shipped, impressions, MQLs)?
- Did sales agree to the lead definitions this plan assumes?
- Does the plan grow an owned audience asset, or only rented reach?
- Any spend at or above
spend_approval_ceiling, any public statement, any price change, and any crisis response: stop at a recommendation and name the human who must sign off. - Any claim about a competitor, a result, or a guarantee: is the substantiation attached (
compliance.md)?
Configuration
User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/cmo/config.yaml.
| Variable | Type | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| motion | b2b-saas | plg-self-serve | ecommerce | marketplace | enterprise | consumer-app | b2b-saas | Selects the default metric set, the channel defaults in demand.md, and which playbook leads (b2b.md, ecommerce.md, product-led.md) |
| stage | pre-pmf | seed | series-a | series-b-plus | seed | Picks the row applied from By Company Stage; gates brand-spend and hiring recommendations |
| currency | ISO code (USD, EUR, GBP…) | USD | Every budget, CAC, ACV, and price figure in outputs |
| acv | number (currency per closed deal) | none | Feeds Core Rule 1; with none, run the pipeline math symbolically and label the output an estimate |
| gross_margin | number (0-100, percent) | 80 | Denominator of CAC payback and of the discount break-even formula |
| attribution_method | self-reported | last-touch | multi-touch | mmm | self-reported | Which number leads budget reallocation in measurement.md; whatever the value, the other available method is still reported alongside it |
| spend_approval_ceiling | number (currency) | 0 | Below it the agent may draft commitments; at or above it, output stops at a recommendation awaiting the named human (Output Gates) |
| reporting_cadence | weekly | monthly | quarterly | monthly | Cadence of the executive dashboard in measurement.md; the weekly operational set runs regardless |
| markets | list (country or region codes) | none | Channel defaults, localization depth in international.md, and the consent regime assumed in compliance.md |
| voice_file | path | none | Long-form voice, banned words, and claim rules at ~/Clawic/data/cmo/; overrides the default register in any drafted copy |
Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied:
- Stack: CRM, analytics, ESP, ad platforms, and who administers them — affects every tooling recommendation and what
measurement.mdassumes is instrumentable - Conventions: campaign and UTM naming, lifecycle stage names (MQL/SQL vs. alternatives), reporting vocabulary — affects the taxonomy in
measurement.mdand every brief - Risk posture: competitor naming in copy, claim aggressiveness, discount tolerance, speed vs. legal review in a crisis — affects
comms.md,pricing.md, andcompliance.md - Output format: memo vs. deck vs. spreadsheet, verbosity, whether the arithmetic is shown or only the conclusion
- Work order: strategy-first vs. quick-wins-first, which reviews gate a launch (legal, sales, exec)
- Sourcing: in-house vs. agency vs. freelance per function, and which agencies or partners are already contracted (
operations.md) - Exclusions: vetoed channels (no cold outbound, no paid social), banned claims, regulated categories, brands not to be named
- Cadence: planning rhythm (annual/quarterly), campaign review day, board reporting dates, content publishing frequency
Traps
| Trap | Why it fails | Do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Vanity metrics | Impressions and followers don't correlate with pipeline at early scale | Report cost per opportunity and pipeline $ per channel |
| Rebrand as growth lever | Rebrands consume quarters and reset brand-asset equity; the real problem is usually positioning or product | Fix the positioning sentence first (positioning.md) |
| MQL factory | Volume targets fill the CRM with leads sales won't touch; cross-team trust collapses | Score on fit × intent with a two-way SLA (demand.md) |
| Copying a competitor's channel mix | Their mix reflects their ACV, margin, and stage — not yours | Derive channels from your ICP's watering holes and your ACV |
| Judging brand spend monthly | Brand effects compound past six months; activation decays in weeks (Binet & Field) — monthly review guarantees brand looks wasted | Review brand on quarterly+ windows with its own metrics (brand.md) |
| Never listening to sales calls | Messaging drifts from the words customers actually use | Weekly call review; move closing vocabulary into headlines verbatim |
| Reorganizing the funnel to fix a tracking break | Weeks of strategy work aimed at a broken UTM or a consent-banner change | Verify tracking integrity before diagnosing strategy (diagnose.md) |
| Discounting to hit a quarter | A 20% discount at 50% margin needs 67% more units to break even — volume almost never arrives, and the price becomes the new expectation | Time-boxed, reason-coded offers only (pricing.md) |
| Hiring a VP to find the channel | Senior marketers scale motions; they rarely discover one from zero, and the search burns two quarters of salary | Founder or a generalist doer finds the channel; hire the specialist for the channel that already works (operations.md) |
| Launching everything at Tier 1 | Every launch treated as a company moment exhausts the list, the press, and the team; the real launch gets no lift | Tier launches and spend the audience deliberately (launch.md) |
| Buying attribution software to settle an argument | The tool inherits the disagreement and adds a subscription; it cannot see word of mouth or dark social | One holdout test on the disputed line (measurement.md) |
Where Experts Disagree
- Attribution: touch-based software vs. self-reported vs. media mix modeling. Every method lies in a known direction — run them side by side (
measurement.md) rather than picking a church. - Gated vs. ungated content: contacts now vs. reach and trust now, pipeline later. Boundary rule in
content.md. - Category creation vs. competing in an existing category: creation is a multi-year, funding-heavy bet that mostly fails and occasionally wins big. Default to positioning inside an existing category until you hold monopoly-grade differentiation.
- Brand spend in a downturn: cut it to protect runway, or hold share of voice while competitors go quiet (the IPA position — excess SOV is cheapest when others stop bidding). The deciding variable is runway, not conviction: under 12 months, activation wins; above, holding SOV is the higher-return bet.
- Marketing owning a revenue number: shared accountability aligns teams, or it makes marketing hostage to a sales capacity it does not control. Split the difference — marketing owns pipeline created and its conversion to opportunity; sales owns opportunity to close.
Related Skills
More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/cmo (install if the user confirms):
ceo— executive strategy and board managementpositioning— the positioning statement and competitive frame in depthcro— conversion-rate optimization and landing-page experimentscoo— operations and scaling executionbusiness— strategy validation and planning
Feedback
- If useful, star it: https://clawic.com/skills/cmo
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Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/cmo.
Questions people ask
- Can it calculate pipeline and budget requirements?
- Yes. It derives lead and pipeline requirements from revenue target, ACV, win rate, and lead-to-opportunity rate, and sizes budgets from historical spend per dollar of pipeline. Missing inputs are handled symbolically and labeled as estimates.
- Does it execute individual ads or landing-page tests?
- No. It works at the allocation and leadership layer: strategy, channel mix, budgets, team design, measurement, and pipeline accountability rather than single-asset execution.
- What decisions still require human approval?
- Spend at or above the configured approval ceiling, public statements, price changes, and crisis responses remain recommendations until a named human signs off. Claims about competitors, results, or guarantees also require substantiation.
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