Anna Novak Executive mandate Marketing Leadership Seat · USD 4,500 / month
90-day CMO mandate: Verano Software
Anna Novak owns demand. The founder keeps the brand. Both are written down.
Verano has five people in marketing and nobody who owns whether the pipeline fills. The team is busy and the team is good; what is missing is a person who can say no to the fourth request from sales this week. This mandate makes that person Anna for 90 days.
From 2 March, Anna owns demand generation, the marketing team, channel mix and spend to USD 15,000 a decision. Brand, visual identity and anything with the founder's name on it stay with Tomas, who was clear he did not want to hand those over. That is workable, and clause 4 says where it will create friction.
Document control
- Document number
- MAN-VER-01
- Version
- 1.0
- Effective
- 2 March 2027
- Owner
- Anna Novak, Fractional CMO
- Approved by
- Tomas Vega, CEO
- Next review
- 1 June 2027
- Classification
- Confidential. Leadership team
Why
What the diagnostic found
| Observed | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Nobody owns pipeline contribution | Marketing reports activity, sales reports pipeline, neither reports the join |
| The team runs on inbound requests | 31 of 44 tasks in the last sprint originated from sales or the founder |
| Six channels, none resourced properly | Paid, SEO, events, email, partner, social, across five people |
| No campaign has been stopped in 14 months | Confirmed with the team. Things are added, nothing is retired |
| Attribution exists and is not used | The tooling is in place and nobody reads it |
The team is not underperforming. Five people running six channels against an unfiltered request queue is a structural problem, and it is the one this mandate is for.
Authority
Decision rights
| Anna decides | Tomas decides | |
|---|---|---|
| Which channels are funded and which stop | Yes | |
| The marketing team's priorities and what they decline | Yes | |
| Campaign spend to USD 15,000 per decision | Yes | |
| Agency and freelancer selection within budget | Yes | |
| Messaging and positioning for campaigns | Yes | |
| Marketing team structure and roles | Yes | |
| Brand, logo, visual identity | Reserved | |
| Anything published under the founder's name | Reserved | |
| Pricing and packaging | Reserved | |
| Hiring beyond the approved plan | Reserved | |
| Anything legal, including claims in copy | Reserved |
Plan
What the 90 days does
-
Baseline and a request log
Every inbound request to marketing gets logged before anything is refused. You cannot cut a queue you have not measured.
-
Channels cut from six to three
Paid, SEO and one event track. Email folds into all three rather than being a channel.
-
One intake route for sales requests
Weekly, prioritised, with a published no. This is the change the team will notice most.
-
Run the three channels properly
Same five people, a third of the surface area.
-
Pipeline contribution reported for the first time
One number, agreed with sales, reported monthly from here.
-
Review
Renew, revise or hand over with a written channel plan.
Friction
Where the reserved brand decision will bite
Tomas keeps brand and anything under his name, and that is a legitimate founder decision. It is also the boundary most likely to slow this mandate down, so it is written here rather than discovered in April.
| Situation | Why it is friction | Agreed handling |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign messaging that implies a brand change | The line between messaging and positioning is not clean | Anna drafts, Tomas has 3 working days to object |
| Founder-led content in the paid channel | Highest performing format, and it needs his time | Two pieces a month, agreed in advance |
| A website change that touches brand | Almost every website change touches brand | Anna decides below the fold, Tomas above it |
| An agency proposing a rebrand | It will happen in month two | Out of scope. Anna declines it without escalating |
Three working days is the number that makes this work. A reserved decision with no response deadline is not a reserved decision, it is a stop.
Measures
How this gets judged on 1 June
| Measure | Today | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Funded channels | 6 | 3, run properly |
| Marketing tasks originating from an unfiltered request | 31 of 44 | Under a third |
| Pipeline contribution reported | Never | Monthly, agreed with sales |
| Campaigns retired | 0 in 14 months | At least 3 |
| Attribution used in a decision | Never | At every monthly review |
| Pipeline value | Reported | Reported, not promised |
Pipeline value is reported at every review and is deliberately not a target for a 90-day mandate. A marketing leadership change that moved pipeline inside one quarter would be a coincidence, and treating it as a measure would make everyone behave badly.
Document control
Revision history
| Version | Date | Author | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 14 February 2027 | Anna Novak | Agreed and signed. Effective 2 March 2027. |
| 0.3 | 10 February 2027 | Anna Novak | Draft. Three working day response deadline added to the reserved brand decisions after the founder and I both recognised the stop risk. |
| 0.2 | 6 February 2027 | Anna Novak | Draft. Brand and founder-name content moved from delegated to reserved at the founder's request. |
| 0.1 | 2 February 2027 | Anna Novak | First draft from the marketing diagnostic of 28 January. |