Fractional CMO for B2B Tech
Laura McAliley, Founder
I once spent three days at a trade show pitching a message I believed in. I'd listened to the business leader, built the story around his vision, and put it on everything: the banner, the handouts, the pitch.
We walked away with zero pipeline. And one attendee told us, to our faces, that we had it wrong.
Not because the product was bad. Because the message didn't match what buyers actually cared about. We'd built it from the inside out: what we wanted to say, not what the market needed to hear.
The same constraint, everywhere I went.
That experience kept resonating. At startups where I was the only marketer and there was no budget for research. At agencies where we'd build campaigns on whatever the client told us in a kickoff call. Through a company exit where I watched good strategy compound over time. Through agencies, MSPs, SaaS, and cybersecurity companies where the teams were small, the stakes were high, and everyone was doing three jobs.
The reality was always the same: you could build something brilliant or something wrong, and with limited resources, you often couldn't tell which until it was too late.
I started using AI the way most people do. Then I learned what it actually needs.
AI tools got fast. The outputs sounded polished. But when I handed one a brand deck and a prompt, it produced content that sounded like every competitor in the category. The problem wasn't the tool. It was the inputs.
AI doesn't just need a prompt. It needs layers of context: what the market actually says about your category, what your company claims, and what your buyers care about in their own words. So I started building those layers, pulling buyer language from communities and reviews, cross-referencing competitive claims against what customers actually said. The more structured the inputs, the sharper everything downstream became.
That's also where I learned what breaks. Companies building positioning straight from ChatGPT with no way to know if the output is real or fabricated. That's not research. That's guessing with better typography.
What most companies give AI
A brand deck
A prompt
A gut feeling
Generic output that sounds like every competitor
What AI actually needs
Market context
Company claims
Buyer language
Specific output built for your business
I've been every one of these people.
The first marketing hire who's talented but doesn't have the strategic foundation to build on. The team that nodded at the brand deck, but six months later the website says one thing, the sales team says another, and the AI tools produce a third voice that sounds like everyone else.
And now, I'm the founder who knows exactly what she does but can't always explain it in a way that lands.
I kept seeing the same problem. Now I can actually fix it.
Pebble is a fractional CMO practice. I stay engaged so the strategy evolves as your market does. But it starts with getting clear on where you actually stand, because everything you build on top of it depends on it.