Best Fractional CMOs for MSPs and Cyber Firms (2026)

If you run an MSP or a cybersecurity firm, growth usually comes from two places: referrals you cannot turn up on demand, and hiring another salesperson. A fractional CMO is supposed to break that pattern by putting senior marketing judgment on the business without a full-time salary attached.

This page lists fractional CMOs who publicly work with MSPs, cybersecurity firms, or both. Every person here was checked against their own live website in July 2026: the company is real, the person is named on it, and the description below reflects what they actually say they do. Where someone could not be verified, they were removed rather than left in.

A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who joins a company part-time to own strategy, priorities, and revenue outcomes, without the salary or ramp of a full-time hire. For an MSP or cybersecurity firm, the right one builds a demand engine that runs without the founder and ties every channel back to pipeline.

Key Takeaways

• A fractional CMO owns strategy, priorities, and outcomes part-time, usually one to a few days a week, without the cost or ramp of a full-time hire.
• Fit matters more than reputation here. Some of the people below only work with early-stage founders, some only above $10M in revenue, some only in the UK.
• Ask any candidate what they will do themselves and what your team or an agency has to deliver underneath them. That boundary is the most common source of disappointment.
• MSP marketing and cybersecurity marketing are not the same job. A few people cover both; most lean one way.
• Numbering on this page is navigational, not a quality score. Entry 1 is our own, disclosed below; the rest are listed alphabetically by company.

How This List Was Built

Every entry was checked the same way in July 2026:

Removed: one person from the previous version of this page, Susan Towers of Towers Fractional Marketing. She is real and active, but her site states her industries as industrial manufacturing, software and SaaS, and professional services. There is no MSP or cybersecurity claim on it, so listing her here was wrong.

Disclosure: NUOPTIMA published this page and appears on it at number 1. That placement is not evidence of anything, and the numbering below is navigational. Entries 2 to 9 are alphabetical by company name. Our own entry carries the same "think twice if" treatment as everyone else. Nobody paid for placement and there are no affiliate links on this page.

Not claimed: we did not test anyone's results, contact their clients, or verify third-party figures. Where a person's site publishes a number, it is attributed to them, not asserted as fact.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Re-reviewed quarterly. Entries are added or removed when the evidence changes. If you are on this page and something is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

The list at a glance

1. Alexej Pikovsky, NUOPTIMA

Strong at: combining fractional marketing leadership with the delivery underneath it, across SEO, AI search visibility, and paid. Two engagements we have permission to name: Cortavo, an MSP, where the engine produced roughly $1M in pipeline and over $210K in contracted value in six months, reaching $403,330 in contracted sales value at a 4.6x return by month twelve; and Eden Data, a cybersecurity firm, where organic visibility grew roughly 11.6x in six months.

Best fit for: MSPs and cyber firms that do not have a marketing team to execute a plan, and want the strategy and the execution from the same place.

Think twice if: you already have a capable in-house marketing team and only need an advisor a few hours a month. An agency-backed model costs more than a solo fractional CMO and is over-specified for that. Also worth saying plainly: we wrote this page, so weigh our entry accordingly and check the other eight yourself.

2. Kelley Marko, Chief Outsiders

Strong at: go-to-market strategy, positioning, demand generation, sales enablement and marketing operations for B2B technology, SaaS, cybersecurity, FinTech and telecom. Her profile lists 25 years of marketing leadership across early-stage through Fortune 50 companies, with prior roles at Capital One and cybersecurity firm Arbor Networks. Chief Outsiders publishes her results, including a 380% increase in enterprise leads at Arbor Networks; those are her firm's figures, not ours.

Best fit for: a cyber or B2B tech company that wants a named fractional CMO but also wants an established firm, a bench, and a standard process behind that person.

Think twice if: you are a smaller MSP looking for someone to get their hands into the work. Chief Outsiders is an executives-as-a-service firm and the model is executive leadership working through your team, so you still need people to deliver.

3. Casie Abello, CyberSec CMO

Strong at: cybersecurity marketing specifically. Her services page lists four routes in: a four-hour strategy workshop that produces a written plan, a fractional CMO engagement where she works as your part-time CMO, sets KPIs and reporting and manages vendors and contractors, an advisory tier for teams that already have a marketer, and an AI marketing strategy service. Positioning and messaging work sits alongside those.

Best fit for: a cybersecurity company that wants one senior person embedded in the team rather than an agency relationship, and that likes knowing the engagement shapes before the first call.

Think twice if: you are a pure MSP with no security product to position, or you want indicative pricing before you make contact. Pricing on her site is by request.

4. Jolynn Applebaum, Profit Edge Strategies

Strong at: senior marketing leadership for B2B tech, with MSPs named on her site alongside SaaS, AI, telecom and compliance-driven platforms. She lists over 20 years in B2B technology marketing and prior senior roles at Cisco, ServiceNow, Genesys, Hewlett Packard and Cision. The engagement is explicitly acting-CMO rather than advisory-only, with defined KPIs and dashboards.

Best fit for: a company that has outgrown founder-led or manager-led marketing and wants executive ownership with reporting discipline attached.

Think twice if: you are below the revenue band she works in. Her lead engagement states $10M-plus in annual revenue and a three-month minimum, so a smaller MSP is likely a mismatch on both.

5. Chris Downey, Reverb Strategic Marketing

Strong at: early marketing strategy and building pipeline through the founder's own brand. He describes 25 years of B2B marketing inside Microsoft, Dell, IBM and AMD, covering social, digital, paid and performance, and the site positions him as a fractional CMO for cybersecurity. Two case studies are published, on enterprise engagement and on organic reach.

Best fit for: a founder at an early-stage B2B or cyber company who is the most credible voice in the business and has not yet turned that into pipeline.

Think twice if: you are an established MSP with a marketing team already in place. He states that he works only with founders of early-stage companies and takes on very few at a time, so availability and fit are both real constraints.

6. Michael Williamson, TechGrowth Strategy & Insights

Strong at: operator-led growth for MSPs and ISVs, framed around enterprise value rather than lead volume. His site targets MSPs between £1M and £25M, runs a diagnostic called the Growth Maturity Model across seven dimensions, and packages the work as growth programmes. He lists 25 years of P&L accountability in technology businesses and an MBA from London Business School.

Best fit for: a UK MSP owner whose real problem is that growth depends on the founder and there is no repeatable acquisition system underneath it.

Think twice if: you are US-based and want someone in your timezone and in your channel's rooms, or if you want campaigns run rather than a diagnostic and an operating plan. This is closer to growth advisory than to marketing delivery.

7. Laura Johns, The Business Growers

Strong at: MSP-native marketing. The site states its focus as MSPs, cybersecurity, cloud services, telecom and IT companies, and the service list runs from fractional CMO through SEO, paid advertising, websites, B2B social, brand messaging and CRM implementation. If you do not want to explain what an MSP is on the first call, this is the shortlist entry that solves that.

Best fit for: an MSP that wants leadership and delivery from one MSP-focused firm rather than assembling a fractional CMO and an agency separately.

Think twice if: you specifically want one named individual's calendar time. The fractional CMO service sits inside a full-service agency, so ask early who is actually on your account and for how many hours.

No screenshot: their site blocks automated capture with a bot check, so we could not take one honestly. Everything above comes from a read of their own about page in July 2026.

8. Nicola Moss, The Fractional Marketeer

Strong at: marketing leadership for MSPs and B2B tech firms that are not ready to hire a full-time marketing director. Her site describes over 20 years in B2B marketing with MSPs and technology businesses, and the offer is strategic direction plus hands-on execution rather than one or the other.

Best fit for: a UK MSP with one marketing person, or none, that needs someone senior to set direction and still do some of the work.

Think twice if: you need a delivery team behind the leader or coverage of the US market. This is a solo practice, which is exactly the point for some buyers and a ceiling for others.

9. Becky Freemal, The Market Exec

Strong at: brand narrative and positioning. Her site describes her as a journalist turned author working as a fractional CMO and keynote speaker, building brand voice and marketing plans for founders, CEOs and marketing teams, mainly across tech, SaaS and finance. Services are structured as an engaged fractional CMO, a shorter strategic intensive, and an advisory tier, plus workshops and keynotes. A published client review on her site comes from a cybersecurity platform in education.

Best fit for: a technology company whose real problem is that nobody can repeat what it does, and where fixing the story unlocks the channels.

Think twice if: you want deep MSP channel knowledge or cybersecurity category expertise. That is not what she leads with, and the MSP channel has enough of its own vocabulary that the gap is real.

No screenshot: her homepage is built around a photograph of her, and we do not republish photographs of the people we list.

Comparing the nine on the same terms

Same facts, same columns, taken from each provider's own site in July 2026. "Not stated" means the site does not claim it, not that they cannot do it.

Fractional CMO vs full-time CMO vs agency

A fractional CMO is not an agency with a nicer title, and not an advisor who sends a deck and disappears. The right fit depends on your stage and your bottleneck.

If your bottleneck is execution that drifts, see our take on the best MSP RevOps agencies for how strategy and execution should connect. If you want the structured version of the hiring decision, our fractional CMO framework for MSPs covers when to hire one, how to scope it, and what to hold them to.

Why the model fits MSPs and cybersecurity firms

Technical services businesses have long buying cycles, risk-averse buyers, and trust that only builds through repetition. The leaks are usually in positioning, packaging, channel choice and the handoff to sales, which are judgment problems rather than activity problems. That is what a part-time senior leader is for.

Cybersecurity has its own rules on top. You are selling into committees that will not forgive an overclaim, so messaging has to carry proof and restraint at the same time, and demand tactics that work in SaaS can cost you credibility. If you sell security, weight the entries above that name cybersecurity explicitly.

How fractional CMO engagements are usually structured

The model matters as much as the person. Most fractional CMO relationships for MSPs and cyber firms fall into one of three shapes.

• Retainer leadership. A fixed monthly commitment, usually one to a few days a week, where the fractional CMO owns strategy and runs the marketing function on an ongoing cadence.
• Project or sprint. A defined scope with a finish line: a repositioning, a website and messaging rebuild, or a demand-engine launch. Good when you have a specific gap and the internal capacity to sustain it afterwards.
• Leadership plus execution. The fractional CMO sets direction and an in-house or partner team delivers underneath. This is where execution drift usually gets solved.

A retainer typically covers strategy, quarterly planning, channel prioritisation, sales and marketing alignment, reporting cadence, and management of any agencies in the stack. What it usually does not include, unless you agree it up front, is hands-on production: writing every article, building every landing page, running the ad accounts day to day. Clarify that boundary in the first conversation. The most common disappointment with a fractional CMO is expecting one operator to also be the whole marketing team.

How to choose between them

1. Technical-market fluency. They should understand how MSP and cyber buyers actually decide: risk, stakeholders, proof, long cycles.
2. Pipeline math. They talk in conversion rates and contribution, not vibes.
3. Messaging and offer architecture. If they cannot simplify your narrative, every channel underperforms.
4. Search and AI visibility. Ask how they get you found when a buyer asks an LLM for a shortlist, not just how they rank you. Many cannot answer it yet.
5. Sales alignment. Growth here is rarely marketing-only, so handoff discipline matters.
6. Who does the work. Get the split between their hours and your team's hours in writing before you start.

What to expect in the first 30, 60, and 90 days

• First 30 days: diagnose and prioritise. ICP clarity, competitive narrative, funnel baseline, tracking cleanup, a focused plan.
• Days 31 to 60: build the system. Offer packaging, messaging architecture, channel strategy, search and AI-visibility foundation, sales enablement.
• Days 61 to 90: create repeatability. Execution cadence, a content and demand engine, reporting, and a pipeline model leadership trusts.

For the content side of that engine, our content marketing for MSP growth guide walks through what compounds and what wastes budget. On the visibility side, generative engine optimization covers how AI answers get sourced.

Where NUOPTIMA fits

We do the leadership and the delivery in one place, across SEO, AI search visibility and paid, which is the right answer when there is no marketing team to hand a plan to and the wrong answer when there already is one. The Cortavo and Eden Data results above are what it looks like when it works. If you want to see where you stand before you talk to anyone on this page, get a free audit.

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