Fractional CMO for B2B Fintech
You're doing everything right. And it's still not working.
Fifteen minutes. I ask questions. Nothing to buy on that call.
Does this sound like your company?
- You are doing all of it. Content, paid, events, SDRs, an agency. The pipeline is still flat.
- You cannot say which of those things is working, and neither can anyone on your team.
- You closed a round on founder-led sales and you are still the top of the funnel.
- You hired a marketing person once. It did not work. You are not sure whether it was them or you.
- A competitor with a weaker product describes the problem better than you do, and wins on it.
- Your sales cycle is getting longer and nobody has a theory as to why.
If three of those are true, we should talk.
Why this happens
Most stalled fintech companies aren’t doing too little. They’re doing too much, in too many directions.
Marketing at your stage is usually hands without a head. A coordinator, an agency, a contractor, and a founder making the strategic calls between other things. Every one of those parts can be competent and the whole thing still fails to compound, because nobody is deciding what not to do.
So the activity multiplies. Another channel, another agency, another experiment, each one defensible on its own. None of them get enough of anything to work, and the reporting gets thicker while the answer gets further away.
Fintech makes it worse. Long cycles mean you wait months to find out you were wrong. Large buying committees mean the message has to survive being repeated by someone who does not fully understand it. Compliance can kill a deal in month four for reasons marketing never saw coming.
The fix is almost never more spend. It is someone in the seat deciding what stops.
How we work together
I work with three companies at a time.
Why me
30 years leading product in software before I ever sat in a marketing seat. That is a strange direction to arrive from and it is exactly why I am useful here: your marketing problem is usually a product-story problem wearing a marketing costume, and fixing it takes someone who can hold a real conversation with your engineers and then write something a CFO will act on.
I still ship production software myself. Currently AI and agentic tooling: Claude API, MCP, n8n, Prisma, Next.js. When your competitor announces an AI capability, I can tell you whether it is real or a press release.
What that has looked like
Payments. At Semtek I was the sole product manager on the world’s first end-to-end credit card encryption technology. We built it for PetSmart in ninety days, on budget. It saved them a secure network build-out and the PCI fines that came with not having one. Verifone bought the company. That technology is now in card terminals worldwide.
Raising money on the strength of the story. At Open Crypto Trust I wrote the patents, built the business plan and the financial model, produced the investor materials, and presented to investors who committed $30 million in inventory finance capital. Six months of that on the ground in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.
Positioning that moved a market. At Ameranth, selling software into gaming and financial services, we took 50 percent market share in six months and booked more sales in one quarter than the company had managed in the previous nine years. That was 2003 to 2006, and it is still the clearest example I have of what happens when positioning finally matches product.
Owning the whole funnel. Running Local Value, I took a client from $250,000 a month to over $2 million a month in six months, by owning the entire commercial function instead of a slice of it.
Most recently. I held the marketing leader seat for a hospitality technology company, building its go-to-market function ahead of launch. They are in stealth, so that sentence is all I can say.
Different decades, different industries, the same problem every time: somebody had built something good and nobody owned the sentence that made a buyer want it.
The people who watched me do it
Four references, all people who managed or hired me. All contactable.
“Rob performed his portion of the project as the sole Product Manager managing the features and rollout of the technology with the client directly… Rob was central to the success the organization had with this project, ultimately allowing the company to be sold to Verifone.”
Nashina Asaria · VP Business Development, Semtek / Verifone
“His ability to present highly complicated technical information in a clear, concise manner has made it possible for these businesses to attract international investors for our startup endeavor.”
Mayande Walker · CEO, OpenCTNet / Open Crypto Trust
“A collaborative, accountable, and commercially astute leader who understands how to balance innovation with strategic risk management.”
Sunil Daryanani · VP of Products, Shell Recharge Solutions
“Rob was able to quickly establish himself… as an experienced and diligent project leader and problem solver, and was subsequently offered the position of Sr. Dir. Product Management.”
Ulfe Polke · VP Product Management, Mapp Digital
Introductions on request.
Who I'm not for
Companies with neither meaningful revenue nor real funding behind them, where a fractional CMO is genuinely premature and I will say so. Companies that already have a strong marketing leader in the seat. Consumer fintech, crypto trading and tokens.
Start with one call
Fifteen minutes. I ask questions. At the end I tell you whether this is a problem I work on, and if it is not, who I would send you to instead. Nothing to buy on that call.
Or email me directly: roblewis@fintechcmo.com
A Local Value LLC company.