Services

Three situations. The same person doing the work.

Three different problems, and a different engagement for each. Start from the situation you are in — the table further down reads across from it.

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The three engagements

They share a spine: work the economics underneath the campaign calendar. What differs is which problem is in front of you. None of the three is a system implementation — if you are selecting or rolling out a CRM platform, that is a different kind of consultant.

Which one you need

A rough decision table. Read across the row that matches your situation; two columns can look right at once, and the note under the table says what to do then. The Commercials row is a summary — what is fixed, what varies and when each one is quoted is set out on the pricing page.

Comparison of the three engagement types
Fractional Head of CRMRetention programAI marketing audit
The situationThe role is vacant, or the function does not exist yetRetention is the number under pressureWhere AI would pay back is unclear
DurationOngoing, quarterly reviewA quarter and upThree weeks
CommercialsDay rate, retainedQuoted per phaseFixed scope, fixed price
You end up withA function that runsModels and flows in productionA prioritised roadmap

Scroll sideways for all three

Problem Brief

Choose from the problem, not the service names.

A short first pass separates a leadership gap, a retention program and an AI operations problem.

One sentence is enough.

You are talking to an AI assistant grounded in this site’s published pages. What you type is sent to it and used to write this read; nothing reaches Alexander unless you send it at the end. Describe the problem rather than named people — it needs no personal data.

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How an engagement runs

The same four beats every time, whatever the shape.

  1. 01

    A first email

    You send the shape of the problem, the stack and the timing. You get back whether I’m the right person, plainly, including when the answer is that I’m not.

  2. 02

    One call, then a written scope

    Forty-five minutes to find the real constraint. What comes back is a scope with a number on it, not a pitch deck.

  3. 03

    Two weeks in the data

    Nothing gets recommended before someone has looked — cohorts, churn curves, what the current program actually does to them. Most engagements change shape here.

  4. 04

    Build, in your stack

    Whatever we agreed gets built with your team, in your tools, documented so it survives me leaving.

Common questions

How do we know which one we need?

By which problem is actually in front of you. If no one senior owns CRM — or the function still has to be built — that is the fractional seat. If retention is the number under pressure, that is a retention program, and it opens with two weeks in your data that produce the scope for everything after. If what you cannot see is where AI would pay back across marketing operations, that is the audit.

Do you work with agencies or in-house teams?

Mostly in-house. I take an internal seat and work as part of your organisation — including, often, managing the agencies you already have. The work itself never gets subcontracted out. And if you are an agency with a client whose real problem is retention economics, that is a conversation worth having.

What size of company is this for?

Consumer and subscription businesses where retention is the growth constraint — energy, media, marketplaces, retail. Usually somewhere between Series B and listed. Below that, a first CRM hire usually comes before a fractional one — and I can help you build that function: the brief, the hire, and the operating rhythm they inherit.

Which tools do you work in?

Braze most often, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Data 360 where that is the stack, and I’m comfortable across the category. On the data side, Databricks, SQL and Python. You keep the stack you already have: I take no vendor commission and have no licence to sell you. A closer look at each platform — what it’s good at, where it gets oversold — is on the platforms page.

Are you a CRM consultant in the usual sense — someone who implements a CRM system?

No, and it is worth settling early. In English, “CRM consultant” most often means selecting, implementing and integrating a CRM platform — Salesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot — and that is its own discipline with specialists who are better at it than I am. I work in the layer above: what you do with the customer data once it exists. Contact strategy, lifetime value, the churn models, and the decision about who should hear what and when. If the system has to be replaced first, someone else is the right call, and you will get that answer in the first email.

Every question, answered

Available for new engagements

Start a conversation

If the timing fits, email me directly. The reply comes from me — no autoresponder, no sequence.

[email protected]