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This blog post is a detailed account of our Founder Unfiltered podcast episode featuring Sara Nay, CEO of Duct Tape Marketing and author of Unchained: Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models.
Sara Nay didn't start her career in the corner office. She started as an intern at Duct Tape Marketing with minimal business experience, quietly figuring out her path. Sixteen years, a half-dozen roles, and one CEO title later, she's built a perspective that most marketing leaders simply don't have - one forged from doing the work at every level of the business.
That journey matters because when Sara talks about what's broken in marketing today, she's not theorizing. She's seen the wreckage firsthand across hundreds of small businesses. And her diagnosis is one every fractional executive needs to hear: the problem isn't your tactics. It's that you skipped the strategy.
The Mindset Stuff You're Probably Skipping
Before we get into marketing frameworks, Sara dropped something that hit hard. She works with a lot of fractional CMOs and agency founders who are brilliant marketers but brand-new business owners. They know how to build campaigns. What they don't know how to do is sell themselves, price their worth, or put their face out there without breaking into a cold sweat.
Sara herself was once terrified of public speaking - the kind of terrified where saying her own name in front of five people was a nightmare. She didn't just "get over it." She built a ladder: first hosting her own podcast (low stakes, conversational), then guesting on others, then webinars, then live stages. Baby steps with intentional progression.
The lesson for fractional consultants? If something scares you - whether it's posting on LinkedIn, pitching a higher rate, or getting on a sales call - figure out the smallest possible version of that thing and start doing it. The discomfort isn't a signal to stop. It's usually a signal that growth is on the other side.
And if you're struggling with confidence around pricing or sales, Sara's blunt about it: that's a mindset blocker, and it will cost you real money. Addressing it early isn't soft skills fluff - it's a business survival strategy.
Why "Doing All the Things" Is Killing Your Results
Here's where Sara's 16 years of pattern recognition really shows up. The number one problem she sees with businesses under a million in revenue? The CEO is also acting as the CMO, the COO, and the CFO. Marketing becomes a massive list of disconnected tactics with no connective tissue.
Direct mail here. Some paid ads there. A few social posts when there's time. Then when someone asks "what's working?" the answer is a shrug.
Sound familiar?
Sara's argument is that AI has actually made this worse in some ways. Yes, you can now bring execution in-house at a fraction of the old cost. But when people skip the strategy and jump straight to tools, they end up producing generic content that could have been written by literally anyone. The output is faster, but it's also forgettable.
The fix isn't more tactics. It's putting a marketing leader in place - whether that's a fractional CMO or someone owning the strategic direction - who can answer the fundamental questions before a single campaign launches.
The Strategy-First Framework That Actually Works
Sara walked through the exact process Duct Tape Marketing uses with every client, and it's a framework any fractional consultant can borrow.
Start with a baseline. Where are you right now? Do a marketing and brand audit so you actually know your starting position before making any decisions.
Do your competitive research. Sara's team now uses AI-powered deep research to pull 30-page competitive reports that give them more information than they ever had doing it manually. If you're not using AI for research and strategic thinking, you're leaving massive leverage on the table.
Interview your best clients. Not a survey. Actual conversations. Learn what made them choose you, what language they use to describe their problems, and what keeps them up at night. This is gold for messaging - and for training your AI tools to sound like you instead of sounding like everyone else.
Build ideal client profiles and messaging. This is step one and step two of marketing, period. You need to know who you're targeting with what message before anything else can work. This also becomes the foundation for everything your AI tools produce going forward.
Map your customer journey. Sara uses Duct Tape Marketing's "Marketing Hourglass" - know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer. Look at each stage and find the gaps. Because when someone moves through the full journey, they become repeat and referral clients. That's where real, sustainable growth lives - not just getting in front of more eyeballs.
Set quarterly priorities and track them. Pick four to six growth priorities for the next 90 days and define what success looks like. If you're not tracking, you're guessing.
Stop Tracking Vanity Metrics
Sara was emphatic about this one. Too many businesses track website traffic and call it a day. That's a vanity metric. The real story is in the full funnel: how many visitors filled out a form, how many booked a consultation, how many became clients, and what's the lifetime revenue from those clients.
If you can't answer those questions, you don't actually know if your marketing is working. You're just spending money and hoping.
She gave a great example with direct mail. If you're a local service-based business and direct mail makes sense for you, then you need a QR code, a custom phone number, and a dedicated landing page so you can actually trace whether that piece generated revenue. Otherwise you're just sending expensive paper into the void.
The same principle applies to every channel. Attribution is hard, yes. But "hard" isn't an excuse to skip it entirely.
Productize or Perish
One of the most practical takeaways from the conversation was Sara's stance on productized services. Duct Tape Marketing requires every client to start with a 30-to-45-day strategy package before any execution work begins. No exceptions.
When people push back - "Can't you just build us a website?" - Sara's response is straightforward: she can't build a good website without knowing who they're targeting, what the messaging should be, and what the customer journey needs to look like. If she skips strategy, she's either doing it for free as part of the build (devaluing her expertise) or delivering a pretty website that doesn't actually convert.
For fractional consultants, this is a critical lesson. Saying "we have to do this first" isn't losing business - it's protecting both you and your client from wasting time and money. Productized offerings are easier to scale, easier to staff, and easier for clients to understand. The businesses that try to be infinitely flexible end up with unpredictable revenue and an impossible-to-document process.
AI Is a Thought Partner, Not a Replacement
Sara's take on AI was refreshingly balanced. She's not anti-AI - her team uses it extensively for research, content repurposing, and accelerating execution. But she draws a clear line: AI should augment your thinking, not replace it.
Her practical advice? Make a list of everything you do regularly. Categorize each item by whether it's increasing, stable, or decreasing in value in the age of AI. Then cross-reference with what you enjoy doing versus what drains you. The items that are decreasing in value and you hate doing? That's where AI should step in first.
The things that are increasing in value - strategic thinking, creative direction, relationship building, clear communication - those are where you should be spending more of your time, not less.
Key Takeaways
Sara's core message is deceptively simple: stop doing marketing without a strategy, stop tracking the wrong things, and stop trying to be everything to everyone. Put the strategic foundation in place first, productize your offerings, use AI to move faster on the things that don't require your unique expertise, and invest your energy where it actually compounds.
If you want to connect with Sara, find her at ducttapemarketing.com or connect with her on LinkedIn. And if you're a fractional consultant who's been winging your own marketing strategy, consider this your wake-up call to practice what you preach.
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