Growth doesn't wait for your marketing to catch up
At every inflection point — post-investment, past PMF, entering new markets — the gap between your marketing and where it needs to be is costing you. I've closed that gap for companies from pre-revenue to $250M ARR. I can close it for yours.
Where the gaps show up
The companies that get stuck aren't short on budget or talent. They're short on the right marketing leadership at the right moment.
You've got traction. Growth is Stalling.
The marketing that got you here — founder-led, scrappy, relationship-driven — isn't building a productive pipeline anymore. You need a system, not more hustle.
The deal just closed. Now marketing has to perform.
The investment is in. The board has expectations. And you don't have 6 months to find and onboard a full-time CMO. You need senior marketing leadership embedded and moving — now.
Sales is busy. Revenue isn't Moving.
Your team is executing. Campaigns are running. But marketing feels like a cost center, not a growth driver. The strategy is missing, broken, or never really existed in the first place.
How I Work
Fractional CMO | Interim Marketing Leadership | Strategy & Guidance
Strategic Sprint
30-60 Days
Positioning, messaging, and GTM foundation. For companies that need to get aligned fast before attempting to scale anything.
Fractional Engagement
Ongoing, Part-time
Your marketing leader — without the full-time overhead. Strategy, execution oversight, and team leadership embedded in your business.
Advisory
As Needed
Senior thought partnership for marketing decisions, team assessments, board prep, and strategic inflection points.
Every engagement starts with a 30-day diagnostic to better understanding your market, your pipeline, and where the real constraint is. Then we build and execute.
No slide decks without action behind them.
About
Operator · Strategist · Executor · Startup Co-Founder · Active Angel Investor
Carrie Cowan
Principal, Synthesize Marketing
Most fractional CMOs are one or the other: strategists who hand you a plan, or executors who run plays someone else designed.
I'm both.
I've built marketing foundations from scratch, inherited broken versions, and fixed both. What makes me different isn't a framework — it's pattern recognition earned by experience at every growth stage, and the proven judgment to know which patterns apply to yours.
As an Executive GTM & Marketing Advisor at Gartner, I worked with pre-revenue startups, emerging market challengers, and mid-market companies scaling toward enterprise — advising on GTM strategy, market positioning, competitive storytelling, demand generation, partner marketing, brand development, and ecosystem positioning. Before that, two decades as an operator inside some of the most competitive marketing environments in tech: NVIDIA during the GPU-to-AI transformation, Microsoft launching Xbox against PlayStation's 75% market share, Toshiba's comeback to top PC hardware market share player, Electronic Arts, and Sega at the inflection point of what became the billion-dollar mobile gaming market.
Today I work with a small number of tech companies at key inflection points — post-investment, post-PMF, entering new markets — where getting marketing right in the next 90 days materially changes the outcome.
