For ambitious, new CMOs navigating their critical first year.
As the marketing function takes on ever more responsibility for the growth agenda, CMOs need to credibly demonstrate not just business acumen but their ability to design and deliver growth strategies that align to business metrics.
However, there's no real resource designed to help CMOs navigate the critical first year where reputation and impact are essentially defined.
CMOs need an Operating System to interrogate and evangelize marketing’s role in driving the growth agenda and cut through the confusion surrounding the remit of the role. A confusion that's exacerbated by a proliferation of channels and metrics.
Here's how we approach it:
- Crack the Culture Code
Your valuable insights, ideas, and experiences may struggle to gain traction until you can work out how to ‘dock’ with the existing culture. What business is the company in, the products and services, the business plan. How it operates both formally and informally. Who makes decisions and how things get done. Engaging in a process of discovery with key stakeholders will reveal essential clues concerning both the challenges the organisation faces and their potential solutions.
2. Identify your role in driving growth
Make it your quest to become fluent in the drivers of top-line and bottom-line growth. It is critical that you figure out what the role of brand can do for this moment of the company's growth trajectory i.e. aided awareness, repeat usage, 'it's cool to use'. And then ruthlessly focus on the few metrics that really move the needle. Involve the CEO and key leadership peers in this quest: it’s everyone’s responsibility to help you get the measurement system right.
3. Create coalitions, inside and outside
The entire reason marketing exists is to enable other teams to meet their goals: whether it’s hitting sales targets or acquiring new customers. It's far easier to win their support when you need it if you help other executives get what they need out of your function. While many organizations have successfully built in-house capabilities, getting the best work out of your agencies remains critical. Re-stage the relationship by setting clear expectations on what efficient and effective collaboration looks like. The work is only as good as the client.
4. Make your Martech matter
In a world where acquisition costs five times retaining and reselling, first-party data is worth so much more than an advertising budget. Think about your relationship with your martech as being like that of a conductor with their orchestra. Each tool is like an individual instrument. As the conductor, you need to ask if you have the right instruments and if they are in harmony with one another. Audit your martech through three lenses: acquisition, lifecycle, and connecting the dots. Take stock of what’s working well, and celebrate the points of leverage you already have. Next, be ruthless about the martech you can eliminate.
5. Put Purpose into Practice
Your purpose isn’t just a statement of why you exist, it should help communicate your sense of mission, worldview and ambition and be a filter to drive decisions, investments and actions. It should inspire your employees and customers to do the thing you need them to do—like move yourself (Nike) or listen to your body (Flo Health) or create the life you love (Pinterest). Whether your north star metric is LTV, customer growth, or premium subscriptions, make it crystal clear how your purpose accelerates it. Done right, it becomes a flywheel for growth.
6. Educate on the wider impact of brand investment
Most CMOs are also responsible for overall brand effectiveness but the measurement playbook here is far less understood. The below framework measures the potentially transformational value that brand investment creates internally and externally. The framework is based on four dimensions of impact, laid out in the order they tend to take effect. A useful ritual is to keep revisiting the framework with your team and peers every quarter to track impact. While the leading indicators are by definition short term, they can be incredibly valuable in buying you and other leaders time and space to achieve longer term goals.
If you're a new CMO, our Marketing OS Accelerator can help you make the most of your pivotal first year. Drive this process with your CEO, CFO and other x-functional leads to identify the critical challenges that the brand can help address. And better yet, let us run it for you.
Not sure how to get started? Let's talk!
