Irvine, California, United States
You're spending $5K-15K per month on marketing. Maybe more. Your pipeline is thinner than last year. Lead quality is down. But your agency keeps saying "trust the process" and asks for patience. Here's what they're not telling you: ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ด๐ฎ๐บ๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฎ๐ป๐ด๐ฒ๐ฑ. For 15 years, marketers like me sold the same playbookโSEO for traffic, PPC for leads, content for engagement, branding for awareness. All optimized for the attention economy. That worked when buyers used Google and clicked blue links. But B2B buyers moved to AI. They're not Googling. They're not clicking ads. They're not reading blogs. They're asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity: "Who can solve my problem?" AI builds them a shortlist in minutesโnot days. Before, buyers spent days researching 3-5 vendors. Now they ask AI to find the top 20, analyze them, and rank them. Done. It's not about who paid for the best SEO rankings anymore. It's about who solves the buyer's problemโand whether AI can find that information. If AI can't find it, you're invisibleโno matter how much you spend. ๐ ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ด๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป'๐ ๐ฝ๐ถ๐๐ผ๐. Their business model is trading time for dollarsโbilling hours for SEO, content, and ads. The exact tactics AI-driven buyers bypass. I ran a HubSpot full-service marketing agency for years. We sold that playbook. It worked. Until it didn't. When the game changed, I had a choice: build a bigger team to compete with Deloitte, or become a low-margin execution factory. I chose neither. I went back to strategic consulting. Diagnosing problems. Telling the truth. ๐ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป'๐ ๐๐ฒ๐น๐น ๐๐ผ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ผ ๐ณ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ป๐๐ถ๐น ๐ ๐๐ป๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ฏ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐. Most consultants prescribe solutions immediately. I won't. I need to understand your buyers. Your value proposition. Why clients choose you. Only then can I tell you where you're failing and what to fix. ๐ง๐ต๐ฎ๐'๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ ๐ฆ๐ต๐ผ๐ฟ๐๐น๐ถ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐. I'll show you where you're failing and what to fix first. Then you decide: use your internal team, your current agency, or I can help you find the specialists. I don't have a team to feed, or implementation services to upsell, and I don't accept referral fees from the people I recommend. Just the truth. This is for $2-20M B2B companiesโservice businesses, SaaS, manufacturing, MSPs. CEOs who are tired of agencies selling tactics from 2019 when buyers use tools from 2025. Book a free workshop to understand why your marketing stopped working: https://www.dowhat.works/workshop/adapting-to-the-ai-driven-buyer
๐๐จ๐ฐ ๐ ๐๐จ๐ญ ๐๐๐ซ๐: I spent 20 years in corporate America. Investment banking, commercial banking, HR consulting, IT consulting, and Deloitte Consulting. What I took from that experience was not industry expertise. It was a way of thinking. At Deloitte, I learned to diagnose the problem a business owner cannot see, and then tell them what they need to hear. Not what they want to hear. What they need to hear. I ran a B2B marketing agency for 10 years. Sold the retainers. Delivered the reports. Built the campaigns. Made mistakes. Learned what works and what does not. Now I am an independent marketing consultant. I help B2B companies figure out why their marketing spend is not converting to pipeline. ๐๐๐ซ๐ค๐๐ญ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ฌ ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐๐ฅ๐๐ฆ: Most fractional CMOs in the SMB market came up through agencies. They are good at execution. They know how to run campaigns, manage channels, build funnels, and report on metrics. That is valuable work. But execution and strategy are different things. Strategy is deciding what to do. Execution is doing it. Most marketing consultants sell execution. I sell diagnosis that allows business owners to make informed decisions about where to invest and what to change. I have an economics degree from UCLA/MBA from USC. I spent years at Deloitte Consulting. My background trained me to look at marketing through a P&L lens. Marketing is a line item that should connect to pipeline and revenue. Not a set of metrics like traffic, impressions, click rates, and open rates that look good in a monthly report but do not answer the question the CEO is asking: why is my pipeline down? When I look at a companyโs marketing, I am not asking whether the campaigns are running well. I am asking whether the marketing dollars are pointed at the right tactics. When an agency recommends 300 new pages for AI visibility, is that a better investment than fixing 6 foundational pages that increase your chances of making the shortlist?
๐๐ก๐ฒ ๐โ๐ฆ ๐ ๐จ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐๐ ๐จ๐ง ๐๐: After 10 years running an agency, I saw how AI was changing B2B buyer behavior and undermining the inbound playbook that almost every agency owner, myself included, had been running for years. Buyers stopped searching for vendors. They started outsourcing the research to AI. Describing their problems to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and asking for recommendations. AI became the first filter. It started deciding who gets on the shortlist and who never gets considered. Most marketing agencies adapted by applying the old playbook to the new channel. Track AI citations. Measure AI visibility. Optimize for AI search. The industry calls this AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO. Same logic as SEO, just pointed at a different platform. That is not what I do. I do not optimize for AI visibility. I do not track citations or share of voice. I do not sell AEO or GEO services. I diagnose whether AI recommends you when a real buyer describes their situation and asks for a vendor shortlist. That is a different question, and it requires a different approach. That is why I built the AI Shortlist Audit. It shows you exactly where your company fails when AI evaluates you against competitors, and gives you the data to make better decisions about where your marketing dollars should go. The methodology behind it is the 3 Buyer Jobs Framework. When buyers decide they need to bring in outside help, they complete three jobs: find potential vendors, build a shortlist, and validate their final choice. Increasingly, buyers are outsourcing the finding and shortlisting to AI. That research happens where your marketing metrics will never see it. The framework explains where companies fail and why.
๐๐ข๐ซ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ง๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐๐ ๐จ๐ ๐๐ง ๐๐ ๐๐ง๐๐ฒ ๐จ๐ซ ๐๐๐๐: Different problems need different solutions. I am not the right choice for every situation. Hire an fCMO when you need someone to own marketing strategy and execution on an ongoing basis. Weekly leadership. Team management. Channel planning. Budget allocation. That is a different job than diagnosis. Hire an agency when your inbound marketing is still producing quality pipeline and you need a team to scale what is working. Content production, paid media, SEO, email campaigns. Agencies are built for execution at scale. If the playbook is working, they are the right choice. Hire me when you know something in your marketing is broken but you do not know what. When your pipeline is down and your agency's reports do not explain why. When you need an independent diagnosis before you commit to a bigger spend. When you want someone who will tell you what is actually wrong, not what you want to hear. I do not do implementation work. I do not manage campaigns. I do not have a retainer to sell. That means the diagnosis has no conflict of interest. I am not looking for problems that justify an engagement. The AI Shortlist Audit is a two-week diagnostic that shows you where your company is failing at the two invisible jobs that happen inside AI before buyers ever contact you. You hand the results to your team or agency and say "do this." After delivery, use your internal team, your current agency, or ask me for specialist referrals. I do not accept referral fees. The audit is built for B2B companies where the purchase is a considered decision. Long sales cycles. Multiple stakeholders. High switching costs. SaaS with deep integrations. Professional services. Manufacturing where vendor qualification involves regulatory approval. If your buyers are comparing vendors before they ever talk to your sales team, this is designed for that process. Not for B2C, e-commerce, or transactional sales.