The world needs more great CMOs.
And the CMO position is one of the toughest jobs imaginable these days. It’s a job with low tenure and relatively high turnover rates relative to the rest of the C-Suite. Not only does a great CMO need to partner with the rest of the C-suite and be totally aligned with what the C-suite needs marketing to accomplish for the company, but they also have to inevitably put more points on the board and do more work with the same budget or a lower budget. This is a very, very difficult job.
What are some practical strategies that CMOs can use to enhance their likelihood of success?
Develop Effective Proxies
No one really is ready to be a CMO these days, because of the breadth and stress of the job. At any given moment in time, it’s normal for a CMO to not feel like they can get it all done, or to feel confident that they even have the right roadmap in place to tackle what they need to do and to do it in the kind of prioritized way that allows them to get their job done. They may be working 70 and 80 hours a week and are still having trouble keeping up.
And often we find that because they’re so busy, they have trouble finding the time to do the few really critical things necessary to succeed. So, the first piece of advice we give to CMOs is to ensure that they put enough time and effort into building effective proxies for themselves. That doesn’t mean having a bunch of mini-me folks running around. Rather, it means having your direct reports and other executives in the organization that handle marketing be knowledgeable enough, have similar values, have similar ways of evaluating what’s a good idea or a bad idea, or a good plan or a bad plan so that you can have confidence that they can handle things.
This isn’t just delegating; it means building people in a way where you’re confident that they are going to represent the company and the organization the way you need them to. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of role modeling. Your people need see you in action, understand your priorities, and share comparable philosophies in order for them to represent you, your organization and the company with distinction.
Ensure Resource Alignment
Resource alignment plays an enormous role in the success of a company. But it’s hard! A common mistake many CMOs make is that they don’t put enough effort into making sure all marketing resources are aligned with the business needs of the company. The marketing organization is expected to accomplish what the C-suite expects, and that takes great planning and process.
Yet many marketing organizations fail to ensure that expectations are aligned from the C-Suite all the way down to the activation level.
To create this alignment, the CMO needs to make sure their organization has a prioritization process that accounts for all external resource investments (like advertising and media budgets, PR, performance marketing, etc.) as well as all marketing staffing. CMOs need to ensure that everybody in marketing knows their role and knows how that role adds up to those bigger objectives that the C-suite needs marketing to accomplish. There needs to be clear linkage from the C-Suite all the way to activation. Alignment is the strategy that enables every penny to work as hard as possible and to ensure your marketing organization is spending their time and resources rowing in the same direction as the rest of the company.
Resource alignment is a top priority for successful CMOs. And resource alignment can increase the job satisfaction of everybody in marketing as they better understand and can see their own role in driving the whole company’s success.
Be a Good Partner with Your Agencies
Agency executives see much more change on a daily basis than marketers because they deal with a broad range of industries and clients. They see a wider range of issues as well as a broader group of potential solutions. Learning how to better partner with agencies can be a real ticket to success for CMOs.
One of the first orders of business for a CMO should be to launch a client-agency 360 assessment of what is working and not working in the client-agency relationship. What is the agency doing well? What does the client do well as a client? And, of course, what opportunities do each team have to be even better partners?
Another key step is to have routine top-to-top calls with the CMO’s agency counterpart.
Finally, a sound strategy is to keep the agency in the loop early and often. Take advantage of the agency team’s experiences and knowledge and give them the time needed for greatness.
A core responsibility of the CMO is to ensure their marketing organization is a great partner to their agencies. It’s simply good business and pays effectiveness dividends.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
Mercer Island Group helps marketers and agencies succeed. Company leadership is as much at home with marketers and their C-Suites as in an agency’s boardroom. With marketers, Mercer Island Group is a top 5 agency search consultancy covering all types of agency relationships (creative, media, web, PR, experiential) and assists marketers with marketing organization structure, workflow and critical skill development (briefing, creative evaluation & feedback, etc.). The company also supports leading and aspiring agencies with positioning, pitch and strategy training and pitch support.