Most fractional marketers get started with a new client by auditing the website, the ads, the social media, and the email strategy.
That’s the wrong place to start.
Before any of that, you need to understand the customer. And not just the client’s opinion of the customer or what they think the customer wants, but the actual customer: what they care about, what drives their decisions, and what a relationship with this business really means to them.
That’s customer intimacy, and it’s the foundation that everything else in marketing is built on.
David Cross has spent decades running marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands and fast-paced B2B companies. In Episode 7 of the Atlas Rose Podcast, he breaks down why customer intimacy is the single most important thread in any marketing program — and how fractional marketers can build it fast, even when they’re new to a client’s industry.
Step 1: Understand What Customer Intimacy Actually Means
Despite the name, “customer intimacy” isn’t a feeling. It’s a framework.
David defines it in three parts:
- Know my industry. Understand the competitive landscape, market dynamics, and what’s happening in the space your client operates in.
- Know my business. Understand how the company makes money, where it’s strong, where it’s stretched thin, and what the real growth opportunities are.
- Know me. Understand the people running the business — their goals, their fears, and how they make decisions.
Most marketers get the first one right. The second and third are where fractional CMOs differentiate themselves.
This framework matters most in B2B and small businesses. Enterprise companies can rely on volume and data to compensate for weak customer relationships. Small businesses can’t, but their proximity is actually an advantage. However, most of them aren’t using that advantage to its full potential.
What this means for you as a fractional CMO: Your job is to help your client understand their own customer better than they did before you showed up, and how that customer persona influences every aspect of their business.
Step 2: Diagnose Customer Intimacy Problems Before You Prescribe Solutions
When customer intimacy is missing, it shows up everywhere. Here’s what to look for when you first step into a client:
They’re trying to be all things to all people.
This is the most common symptom, and it usually means nobody has led an honest conversation about the end user. It looks like:
- Broad messaging.
- Long offer list.
- They can’t tell you who their business is really for.
They have zero personas, or way too many.
No personas means no customer intimacy by definition. But having six or more personas is equally unhelpful. Real customer intimacy requires making hard choices about who you’re actually serving.
The founder’s taste is the only filter.
Marketing decisions should be driven by customer insight, not founder approval. If everything has to go through one person’s preferences — and that person isn’t the target customer — it’s not going to land with the right audience.
There’s no customer experience focus.
Customer intimacy isn’t just a research exercise. It has to show up in how customers are treated at every touchpoint. If the business has no intentional approach to customer experience, the relationship is one-sided.
Marketing is happening, but nobody knows who it’s for.
Campaigns are running, content is going out, money is being spent — but there’s no clear answer to “who is this for and why would they care?” Business owners often think that’s a performance issue, but it actually starts with customer intimacy.
What this means for you as a fractional CMO: ask your client to describe their ideal customer in two sentences. If they can’t, or if their answer sounds like “anyone who needs our product,” you’ve found your starting point.
Step 3: Build Customer Intimacy Fast With the Right Discovery Process
Fractional CMOs don’t have months to figure out a client’s customer. David uses an exercise he calls the “task at hand” — a structured conversation with the founder or executive team that surfaces their business challenges before any marketing conversation begins.
Here’s how it works:
- Sit down with the leadership team, setting aside one to three hours (or even a half-day).
- Ask them to name every significant business challenge they’re facing, without filtering.
- Work together to prioritize those challenges by impact.
- Identify where marketing can actually move the needle, and be honest about where it can’t.
This exercise does two things at once. It builds trust by showing you have a whole-business approach, and it tells you exactly where to focus.
Beyond that exercise, here are the discovery questions that surface customer intimacy gaps fastest:
- “Where does most of your revenue come from?”
- Clients often discover their “Frankenstein business” in this conversation. They’ve added so many services or products that they’ve lost clarity on what the business actually is.
- “Tell me about the last customer who referred someone to you. What did they say?”
- Real referral language reveals how customers actually experience the business.
- “How do you think your competitors would describe you?”
- This question cuts through internal bias fast.
- “If you disappeared tomorrow, what would your customers miss?”
- This gets to differentiation without using the word.
Pay close attention to jargon. If you don’t immediately understand something a client says, their customer won’t either. That’s a messaging problem hiding in plain sight.
Step 4: Turn Intimacy Into Something You Can Execute On
Customer intimacy without execution is just research. The goal is to translate what you’ve learned into clear, actionable marketing.
Personas that actually work.
A strong customer persona answers: what does this person care about, what are they afraid of, and what does success look like to them?
Define one, maybe two, personas. They should be sharp enough that the client can picture the person. Stay away from demographic guesswork and generalites, instead basing on what you learn during the discovery phase.
Focused offers and messages.
Customer intimacy should collapse the offer list, not expand it. Once you know who you’re talking to and what they actually need, you can cut everything that’s not serving that customer. That focus is what makes messaging land.
A staged plan that connects today to the destination.
David uses what he calls “destination planning” — start with where the client wants to be in one to three years, then work backward to the first realistic steps. Showing the client the journey, broken into manageable pieces, keeps them moving without stalling out.
Core values vs. key differentiators.
Your messaging should be built on differentiators, not values. Confusing them leads to positioning that’s either too generic or too internally focused to mean anything to a customer.
Core values:
- Internal
- Aspirational guideposts for culture and behavior
Key differentiators:
- External
- Things you claim make you different that your customer cares about and your competitors can’t say
Step 5: Use Data to Deepen Customer Intimacy — Not Replace It
The symptom of a business with no data culture is simple: ask them how they know something worked, and the answer is “we just know.” There’s a role for gut instinct in marketing, but that doesn’t mean you should constantly be shooting from the hip.
For small businesses, start here:
- Measure the basics. Website traffic, email open rates, conversion from inquiry to client. These numbers tell you if the message is connecting before you spend more to amplify it.
- Run A/B tests with one variable at a time. Change the call to action, or the headline, or the image — not all three. When you change multiple things at once, you can’t learn anything. One variable, every time.
- Build a review cadence. Data is useless if nobody looks at it. Put a standing check-in on the calendar to review what the numbers are saying and what it means for the next move.
The best fractionals use data and customer intimacy together. You learn from the relationship what to test. You use the data to prove or disprove what you thought you knew. Then you go back to the customer with sharper questions.
Bonus: How to Coach Owners Through the Mindset Barriers
Even when you’ve done the discovery, built the personas, and have a clear picture of the customer, you’ll still hit resistance. It usually comes in two forms.
Perfectionism.
Small business owners want their first marketing effort to be flawless. They wait. They revise. They never ship. The reality is that no first attempt is the best attempt — it’s a starting point. Your job is to help them see progress over perfection not as lowering the bar, but as the only way to actually learn what works.
David’s approach: use destination planning to acknowledge the vision, then break the work into small enough steps that moving forward feels safer than staying stuck.
Imposter syndrome at the business level.
When small businesses start doing marketing intentionally for the first time, it can feel like suddenly shining a spotlight on themselves. They’re afraid someone will call their bluff. They wonder if they really are who they say they are.
The reframe: they’ve already been marketing. Every sales conversation, every customer interaction, every referral — that’s all marketing. They’ve been doing it for years. Now they’re just doing it on purpose.
The other reframe is that every business, regardless of size, deserves good marketing. Not someday when they’re big enough. That belief — that the scrappy startup and the established company both deserve to be marketed well — is what changes how an owner thinks about the investment.
The Starting Point for Fractional Marketers
Most marketing programs fail for the same reason: the business never truly understood its customer. Not its industry, not its competitors — its actual customers.
Customer intimacy is how you fix that. It’s what separates a marketing program that produces results from one that just produces activity. As a fractional marketer, this is your first job on every engagement.
The good news: you don’t have to be an industry expert to do it well. You just have to ask better questions than anyone inside the business is willing to ask.
