Plain answers to the questions B2B CEOs ask before, during, and after the first conversation.
Who Reveal works with — and who it does not.
Reveal is a fractional CMO practice for B2B companies where marketing is active but the pipeline does not reflect it. The agency is sending reports. The internal marketer is working hard. The CEO knows something is off but cannot quite name it. Reveal finds what is actually broken before anyone spends another dollar on campaigns. The clients who get the most from this work are typically between $10M and $50M in revenue, have tried at least one agency and been disappointed, and have a CEO who is personally frustrated and ready to name the problem rather than manage around it.
The industries with the deepest engagement over twenty years are construction, architecture and engineering, professional services, manufacturing, logistics, and B2B software. Not as background knowledge, as active client work. That means Rob is not going to spend the first two weeks of an engagement learning what a subcontractor relationship is, or why the RFP process works the way it does in AEC, or why a law firm's best clients almost never came from a Google search. He already knows. The diagnostic can start at the actual problem rather than at an orientation. If your industry is not on that list, the first conversation will tell you quickly whether the experience transfers. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the honest answer is that someone with deeper sector knowledge would serve you better.
What has to be true before anything else works.
Positioning first. Everything else is downstream of that. If a company cannot explain, in the buyer's language, why a qualified prospect should choose them over a credible alternative, then every campaign, every agency brief, and every dollar of ad spend is amplifying a message that does not land. The second thing is channel clarity: knowing where the closed deals are actually coming from, not where the leads are coming from. Those are often different lists.
Get positioning and channel clarity right and most downstream decisions become easier. Which channels to invest in. What to ask the agency to produce. How to evaluate whether any of it is working. Most companies start at execution and layer strategy on top when the results disappoint. The order matters. Strategy first, then channel, then execution. Almost every marketing problem Rob encounters traces back to those being reversed.
What it is, what it produces, and why it comes first.
It is a structured audit of your marketing, brand, pipeline, and team. The output is the Keystone Report: eight to twelve pages that name the real problem in priority order, not the symptoms, and a 90-day action plan your team can act on immediately. The investment is $7,500 to $12,000. You keep the report regardless of what comes next. There is no ongoing commitment attached to it.
Because getting to work is usually the problem. Most B2B companies in this revenue range are not suffering from a lack of marketing activity. They have campaigns, agencies, a content calendar, monthly reports. What they do not have is anyone who has looked at where the closed deals are actually coming from and whether any of the activity is connected to that. In one engagement, a company had 90 leads a month coming in through paid search with a 9% close rate. Referrals were closing at 61%. The channel absorbing the most budget was the worst-performing one in the mix. Nobody had looked at the full picture. That is what the diagnostic is for.
The questions most CEOs are carrying before they call.
A strategy that is not producing results in the pipeline is still a hypothesis. Having a documented plan and knowing whether it is working are two different things. The Keystone Diagnostic does not assume the strategy is wrong. It looks at what the data actually shows: where closed deals are coming from, what the close rate by source is, whether the channels being invested in are the ones producing revenue. Sometimes the strategy is sound and the execution is off. Sometimes the strategy is pointed at the wrong buyer entirely. The diagnostic tells you which problem you actually have before you spend another quarter executing against the wrong answer.
Hiring is the most common alternative to calling Reveal. It is also the decision most likely to produce the exact situation that leads a CEO to call six to eighteen months later. A Director of Marketing at a $20M company, however talented, inherits all the unresolved strategic questions the CEO has not answered. Positioning. Channel strategy. What a good customer actually looks like. Those do not get resolved by hiring someone to execute them. They get deferred. The hire executes what they can and waits for direction that never quite arrives. The Keystone Diagnostic answers those questions before the hire happens, which changes what you look for and who you bring in.
The agency is usually not the problem. Rob says that having spent a decade running one. Agency teams are generally capable. What they are not is incentivized to question the brief. They manage multiple clients, operate on throughput, and measure success by the metrics they were asked to hit. If the brief says leads, they optimize for leads. If nobody defined what a good lead looks like all the way through to signed contracts, that is not the agency's failure. That is a leadership gap the agency cannot fill from the outside. Reveal closes that gap. When the brief gets rewritten around actual business outcomes, most agencies step up immediately. Same people, same monthly fee, completely different output. If the relationship is worth keeping, we keep it and make it work harder. If it is not, we find one that fits.
That instinct is right, and the concern behind it is legitimate. A lot of outside advisors arrive, declare everything broken, rebuild from scratch, and leave with the same underlying problems still unresolved. The Keystone Diagnostic is not built around that model. It starts by looking at what is actually working, because something almost always is. Referrals closing at a higher rate than paid leads. A practice area generating disproportionate revenue. A client profile that closes faster and stays longer. The job is to find those signals, stop funding what is working against them, and build forward from the foundation that already exists. Sometimes that means significant changes. Often it means concentrated ones. The diagnostic tells you which before anything gets touched.
It will find some of that. Most CEOs have a working theory about what is broken. The diagnostic almost always confirms part of it. What it also almost always finds is something the CEO did not know, usually in the data rather than the instincts. A channel performing far worse than assumed. A client segment closing at twice the rate of the others with almost no marketing support behind it. A positioning gap showing up in the close rate without anyone having named it. Beyond that: knowing something and having it named, prioritized, and accompanied by a concrete plan are different things. Most companies have a general sense of the problem. The Keystone Report makes it specific enough to act on, which is the part that tends to be missing.
Rob has spent twenty years in three roles most marketing consultants have lived only one of: agency director, in-house marketing VP, and fractional CMO, in that sequence. That combination matters because it means he can see the same situation from every angle in the room simultaneously. He knows what the CEO needs to hear. He knows what the agency is optimizing for and why. He knows what it feels like to be the junior marketer who can see the problem and does not have the standing to say it out loud. He has been wrong in each of those seats. That education is what makes the diagnostic work. Industries with deep experience include construction, architecture and engineering, professional services, manufacturing, logistics, and B2B software.
A consultant is accountable to the deliverable. Rob is accountable to the pipeline. That is the practical difference. A consultant hands over a strategy document and the engagement ends. Whether the strategy produces results is a question the consultant is not around to answer. Reveal is structured differently. The Keystone Report is the starting point, not the finish line. For clients who continue past the diagnostic, the work stays embedded at the leadership level until the pipeline reflects it. That means Rob is in the room when decisions are being made, not reviewing them after the fact in a quarterly check-in.
Strategy vs. doing — where Reveal starts and stops.
This is the right question to ask. The execution stays with your team and your agency. That is by design, not limitation. Rob's role is ringleader, not implementer, and that distinction matters for a specific reason. When a fractional CMO gets pulled into execution, momentum slows. One person becomes the inevitable pinch point. Work queues behind them. The client ends up back on the same roller coaster they were trying to get off. Beyond that, there are simply better specialists for many execution tasks: content writers, video producers, web developers, paid media managers. Rob has managed all of those relationships and done much of that work himself at earlier stages of his career, which means he knows what to ask for, how to brief them properly, and how to evaluate whether the work is any good. What he does not do is become the person doing it. What he does is make sure the people doing it are pointed in the right direction and held to the right standard.
What it costs and what that buys.
The Keystone Diagnostic is $7,500 to $12,000. For context, that is roughly one month of what most companies in this revenue range are already spending on an agency whose results they cannot clearly explain. The Keystone Blueprint, which builds the full marketing operating system, is $15,000 to $22,000. The ongoing fractional CMO engagement runs $7,500 to $12,000 per month. Each phase stands alone. None of them require committing to the next one.
The pipeline tells you, not the dashboard. Most marketing programs produce plenty of numbers. What they rarely produce is a clear read on which activities are connected to closed revenue. The first thing the Keystone Diagnostic establishes is that baseline: close rate by source, which channels are producing, where the spend is going relative to where the results are coming from. Once that picture exists, progress is measurable in terms that actually matter. Not impressions or click-through rates. Pipeline by source, close rate, cost per customer all the way through. As for timing: directional signals usually appear within a quarter. Meaningful pipeline change typically takes two to three quarters, depending on your sales cycle. Anyone who promises faster than that is describing activity, not outcomes.
What happens, in what order, and what it requires from you.
Two to three weeks from kickoff to delivered report. The first week is mostly Rob: reviewing existing materials, pulling close rate data by source, auditing the agency relationship, and mapping where the current spend is going relative to where the results are coming from. The second week involves two or three focused conversations, with the CEO, with the internal marketing lead if there is one, and sometimes with the agency. The goal is not a lengthy interview process. It is filling the gaps that the data does not answer on its own. The third week is the report: findings in priority order, the reasoning behind each one, and a 90-day action plan the team can act on the day after it is delivered. The time commitment from your side is light, two to three hours of focused conversation, plus access to whatever marketing data and agency reporting already exists.
Two things, and the second matters more than the first. The practical requirement is access to existing materials: agency reports, close rate data, CRM information on where deals are coming from, and anything the company has already produced or commissioned, past ad campaigns, PR efforts, market research, brand work. Most companies have more of this than they realize, and reviewing it means the engagement builds on what exists rather than starting from a blank slate. It also reveals quickly how prior work aligned with the actual positioning, which is itself diagnostic. The more important requirement is candor from the CEO. A diagnostic reflects what it is given. If the conversation stays at the surface, the report stays at the surface. The most useful Keystone engagements happen when the CEO is willing to say what is actually going on, not the version they would say in a board presentation.
After the Keystone Report is delivered.
Not unless you want to be. Some clients take the Keystone Report and hand it to their existing team to execute. Some use it to write a better job description for the marketing hire they were already planning. Some come back when the timing is right. All of those are good outcomes, and the report is built to be useful regardless of what follows. For clients who want to continue, the next phase builds the full marketing operating system: positioning, messaging, channel strategy, campaign calendar, and team structure. After that, an ongoing embedded engagement is available for companies that want a senior marketing voice in the room on a regular basis. None of those phases are required. Each one stands alone. The diagnostic is not a down payment on a longer engagement. It is a defined deliverable with a defined cost, and what comes next is entirely the client's call.
Indianapolis, Indiana, with regular presence in the Tampa Bay area. Most engagements are with companies in the Midwest and Southeast, though the work is not limited by geography.
The first call is 30 minutes. No pitch deck. Rob will ask about your situation and give you a straight read on whether Reveal is the right fit. If it's not, he'll say so.