mike schneider.

THE BRIEF

The most expensive sentence in your company is the one that says what you sell.

Rewriting that sentence, then building the systems that make it true, is the job. Here is how that works and who it is for.

The arc.

I have spent fifteen years building marketing from inside B2B SaaS companies. At MongoDB I helped install early digital infrastructure and launch MongoDB University. At Conversocial I built the North American go-to-market, then led work across marketing, revenue operations, and sales development. At Muck Rack I was the founding VP of Marketing, building the function through eight years of company growth.

Now I work inside smaller teams at the point where positioning, pipeline, market intelligence, and measurement need to become one operating system. Some of the work uses AI. The point is not AI. The point is a better way for the team to choose, act, learn, and keep what gets built.

I build those systems inside your team, and your team owns them. Fifteen years of doing the craft and running the teams that scale it means I know where software plugs in cleanly, where it breaks things, and where human judgment stays non-negotiable.

Two names for the same job.

As your fractional CMO

Positioning, message, market choice, budget, the narrative your board hears. The judgment layer: what to say, whom to say it to, what not to do.

As your forward-deployed marketing engineer

The build layer: CRM instrumented, signals scored, intel systems running, AI wired in where it earns its keep. Working infrastructure, not a strategy deck.

Why both matter

Positioning and pipeline are usually two different hires, which is why they rarely fit together. When one person owns both, the words and the systems agree.

The deal

Everything I build is yours: the account lists, the audit methodologies, the CRM instance, the scorecards, the systems. Agencies hoard those to keep you locked in. I don't.

Who I work with.

Founders, and the marketing and sales leaders around them. Sometimes there is no marketing function yet. Sometimes there is a team that wants a senior operator alongside it, not above it.

Stage matters less than the problem. Before product-market fit, the work is finding message-market fit and building the feedback loops that measure what is landing, so you can find and quantify fit instead of guessing at it. After it, the work is go-to-market that scales past founder-led sales.

© 2026 Mike Schneider