1969 – Unleashing the Power of Fractional CMOs for Business Growth with Navi’s Jessica Shirra

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Jess Chira. Jess, you are a fractional CMO for seven-figure brands, and you are the founder of Navi. Your website is risewithnavi.com. That's N-A-V-I. Jess, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Absolutely. Well, share with us a little bit about your work. Now, I have to say, you have some amazing experience having worked with companies like Lululemon, Pottery Barn, Jenna Kutcher, Deloitte, Coast Hotels, a number of other ones. So I think you're coming in with a lot of amazing experience. Share with us a bit about your impact in the world and who you serve today.

1:47Thank you so much. Yeah, so I'm the founder of Navi. So we're a boutique fractional CMO agency. So it's myself and a few other fractional CMOs on my team. And we work primarily with six and seven figure brands who typically are creators or personal brands that have some sort of a digital product. And typically that looks like membership, subscriptions, courses, and sometimes e-commerce as well. Yeah. Why would someone want to hire a fractional CMO versus hiring a quote-unquote marketing agency? Yeah, that's a great question. I often find when, like if you're particularly comparing fractional CMOs to agencies, agencies usually have one specialty or they have, you know, they're a massive agency.

2:36So you're kind of like one small number in a, you know, a really big group of clients. If you take the agencies that have one specialty, they're going to come in and they're going to recommend what they know. So maybe they are really proficient in funnel strategy, or maybe they are really great at social. So they're going to come in with their lens and be looking at your business and trying to like sell the services that they do. What we do in a fractional CMO seat is we really get integrated with the business and we try to understand from the CEO's perspective, where have they been? Where do they want to go?

3:09And then we really look at those business goals as a whole and we say, okay, where does marketing fit here and what should marketing be doing to move those business goals forward? And then from there, we create strategy and make sure that all of the things that the marketing team is doing and executing on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis are driving those goals forward. So we're really looking at it like from a holistic perspective. And what that might mean is we might say, Hey, the biggest, you know, opportunity here is improving organic social or optimizing paid ads or, um, you know, I don't know, SEO.

3:44And so we will pull in the people that we need to execute on that, but we have no, um, motivators outside of purely the fact of like driving the business goals forward. So whatever those tactics end up being are actually the right things for the business, not just what we're selling. Are there trends in marketing that you think are maybe overvalued or over hyped versus maybe trends in marketing that you're like, wow, there's actually, I wish more people took X seriously? What are you bullish and bearish on in marketing today? Yeah, great question. I really think like I would say one of the biggest things we see when we come into clients and in a new business is a lack of like really thorough data and tracking in their marketing.

4:37So often what we hear from our clients is that, you know, usually we're working with clients that have some semblance of traction and success and we're not coming in and like starting from nothing and growing. We're usually, you know, coming in at that three, four or$5 million mark and helping them grow. So what we see at that level is they will say something to the effect of like, we don't really know what is working. Like this is what we're doing in marketing, but we don't actually know, like if we were to like remove this, will it have any impact? And if so, what kind of an impact? Because often they have some tracking, but they don't really have granular data.

5:13And certainly they're not using data to drive decision-making in the business. There's usually a lot of like subjective decision-making and opinion-based conversation just around their marketing strategies. So we're very, very data-driven and data-focused. And so I think that would be like probably the thing that we're most bullish on. Yeah. And just maybe share just a little bit about what you bring to the table that might be fairly unique. So, you know, to our friend that's listening to us, they might be entertaining offers and they're getting pitched from marketing services and, you know, maybe folks that call themselves funnel builders and or folks that, you know, kind of focus on being, you know, they're just really, really big on social media strategy and or PR or something like that.

6:05Um, what is it that, you know, if you were to say, well, you know, we're probably one of the best in the world at this very particular opportunity, this particular type of client, and here's exactly what we're going to bring to the table in order to execute and accomplish those goals. Yeah, great question. Um, well, we definitely specialize in, um, businesses who either have an e-commerce arm or they have digital products. So we are experts when it comes to course marketing, membership marketing, any digital products like downloadable guides or anything like that. So my team, and that's like specifically what we recruit around within our agency, Navi.

6:46So we're experts in those spaces, number one. And then number two, the difference between hiring an agency to, you know, do your funnel or, you know, bringing us in. The way I sort of talk about it when I'm on a sales call with somebody is that we're We come in and I really see this role as being like the right hand to the CEO. So I want them to feel like they have like a CMO in their back pocket and they have someone who is like arm in arm. And we really take, we try to almost like imagine the business is just as much ours as it is the client's. And we get very, very invested. So we want to see the business succeed.

7:24We want to see it grow. We want to hit the goals that the, you know, the founder or CEO wants to hit. And so every recommendation, every decision we're making is coming from that lens. And when we're looking at like, okay, what should we be doing here? We are assessing the business from all angles. So we're looking at brand positioning. We're looking at the competitive market set. We're looking at their target audience. We're looking at their offers, their pricing, their marketing, their positioning, like all of it. And we're saying, okay, what are the biggest things here that we're seeing as opportunities that we think are going to move the right needles forward?

8:04And what's actually like the right sized approach for this company? Because we never want to be building a massive strategy that a company will receive or a client will receive and say like, oh my God, how do we do all of this? Like we have a team of three. So we're always looking at like both the opportunity in the business as well as the resources available and like right sizing and prioritizing based on all of that. Yeah. When you begin engagement with a founder CEO who might be wearing a lot of the hats and they are able to bring you in, how does their life change? Oh, that's a great question.

8:47Lots of great questions. Yeah, no, I love that. I feel so validated here. I feel like I'm three for three right now. You are. Like, they're just like unique questions I haven't been asked before. I'm fascinated because I know you just have such a great experience. And I can't wait to get, you know, kind of talk a little bit more tactically about some work that you've done. But yeah, you know, getting back to, I'm curious about, you know, that life upgrade that the founder gets, because I know it's truly a position. It's got to feel validating for them, for that founder to get to that point where now they can start sharing in that leadership burden with other people have been there, done that, and you've had the opportunity to work with so many other founders.

9:25Totally. Well, I'm actually just looking for, I probably won't be able to find it in time. I was taking notes on a call, a check-in call we had with a client from Monday, and I'll try to remember kind of word for word what she said. I was writing this down because I was like, this is gold. I have to get her to record a testimonial. So she said to us that bringing us on as her marketing leadership team has allowed her to close so many tabs in her brain and feel really confident that marketing as a whole, as a department within her business is like fully taken care of. She doesn't have to be worrying and thinking about all of the things that were on her plate.

10:06Before we came in, she really was like leading marketing and all of the people and contractors that she had in her business. So she feels really confident that we've got it. she said that she had dreamed of this sort of support for years in her business and just the relief that she has like having this and just knowing knowing and and also she expressed just gratitude for our professionalism how we've really raised the bar in her business in terms of like how they do things across the board she said not even just in marketing but outside of marketing she's just noticing the whole team leveling up to like rise to meet how we show up in the business.

10:50So like that was just amazing, amazing feedback to hear. Oh, wonderful. Who's ready for you, Jess? Like I think that there are some folks that might be a little early stage. Like they're probably not yet at the level where they would be able to bring someone in at that level, although that would be a dream for them. But like an ideal client for you, like what would you expect that they would already have kind of locked down or where are they right now in their business journey? Yeah, great question. I would say when we're looking at potential leads, like some of the things we look for is revenue level.

11:26That's with a little bit of an asterisk because sometimes we do work with startups that have really healthy funding or where they're in a place where like revenue doesn't feel like that's desperate need. So we either like to be working with people who are established and have traction or they have enough sufficient funding that they can actually do some stuff within marketing. Our team is definitely not junior. We have a mass amount of experience behind us and we're not for the startup and we're definitely not for the company that doesn't have a decent budget for marketing. I will say like, that's very subjective.

12:00Like what does a, you know, a decent budget for marketing mean? Typically what that means is we like to see that they have some level of support to execute on marketing. So we, as like sitting in the fractional CMO seat, we are really accountable and responsible for like the marketing department, the marketing strategy, setting and tracking marketing KPIs, and like overall leading the team. What we don't do is we're not project managers. We don't execute on anything. So we won't be like writing emails and sending them out or scheduling social media posts. Like we're not in any of that executional work.

12:37So if the client, the clients really do need to have like a person at minimum, if not like a small team or resources to bring in contractors or agencies to execute on all of the marketing that we put together. And I'll say that on the small end, I would say a small client for us, we end up sometimes working on like just a strategy and setting them up with contractors and sort of sending them on their way. So we don't eat up some of their marketing budget on a monthly basis. Um, and sometimes they don't have a team and we're saying like, okay, you're, you're at the place that you can invest in your, your company.

13:11Here's a strategy. Here's the, here's some people that we really trust and think are great to work with. So here you go. And then on the larger end, the clients that, um, fit into some of our bigger packages. We'll do strategy for them. We'll move into a monthly retainer with them. And they typically, I would say, have a team of about, you know, three to five internal, maybe a couple of agencies working on like paid ads and things like that. And then they do have a marketing budget. So typically they would have some sort of like a paid advertising spend and they have a little bit of money to put towards some projects.

13:42Like sometimes we end up doing a rebrand or sometimes it's, you know, Hey, we, we really need to redo this whole funnel, which means, you know, we want to bring in a conversion copywriter and we want to really elevate this landing page. So there's, you know, projects and contractors that we want to be setting aside some budget for. Yeah. Jess, your website is risewithnavi.com. And again, that's risewithnavi.com. When somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? Do you have any resources you'd recommend? And, or, you know, again, certainly if someone's interested in having a conversation, please, please share that path.

14:23Yeah, definitely. So at the time of recording, as you are looking at the old website, by the time this podcast goes live, we're actually going to have our new website up, which is going to have some freebies on there. So free downloadable resources, there will be lots. So like, have a look, you'll see them on the homepage, and there'll be in a few other places on the site. And then if anyone's interested in working with us, there will be a really easy way to get in touch with us. We've got a form that we, you know, get all interested people to fill out just to see if we might be a fit. And then if there is a fit, we'll hop on a call and kind of chat through, you know, a little bit about what you might be looking for and where your company's at and can kind of give you a little bit of information about us and how we work.

15:03Yeah, that's excellent. Well, Jess, Shira, again, your fractional CMO, your website, risewithnavi.com. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

15:44We are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm gonna share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

16:27Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening. And thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.