How to Be a Better CMO

A recent Brandweek article cited a Spencer Stuart study highlighting the decline of CMO’s tenure. Greg Welch, who heads the marketing officer practice for the executive search firm, said “there are several things behind the turnover rate. First is that CMOs need to do a better job of communicating with all their peers at the C-suite level, making sure everyone understands what marketing can and can’t do for the entire company.”

In our investigation, we’ve discovered that the first and most important step is not helping everybody understand what marketing can do, but building a contract with the CEO as to what he/she expects from marketing.  Writing that contract may mean educating the CEO, but most importantly it means clearly outlining his or her expectations of marketing and at the end of the day, how those expectations will be quantified. 

If the CMO has the impression that he/she is to be a change agent, but that role is not definitely spelled out, the CMO will be quickly surprised to see this tactic come back and bite them, hard.  The role of marketing in each company is different.  It has to be spelled out.  Each party has to know exactly what is expected of the marketing effort the CMO is driving.  Once the CMO establishes credibility, changing the role of marketing is not hard.  But without credibility, trying to execute a change agenda is both difficulty and deadly.  One CMO I recently interviewed said that any new CMO that does anything but listen in the first 90 days of their new job is just asking for problems.  Often the answers are lurking within the company – all the CMO needs to do is to have the skills to ferret them out.

Of course it is critical for CMOs to “do a better job of communicating with all their peers at the C-suite level, making sure everyone understands what marketing can and can’t do for the entire company” – but they can’t do that until they have clearly defined the role of marketing for themselves and the CEO.  Then they’ll be able to clearly share that insight with others within the company.