First Things First

Congrats! You're a Marketing Exec - Now What??? listed the five things SpencerStuart* identified that CMOs must do well:

• Get the marketing mandate right
• Build meaningful relationships with functional and business leaders
• Agree on how to measure success
• Collaborate with external partners
• Cultivate the best talent 

Let's take these one at a time.

1. Get the marketing mandate right

“Marketing” means different things to different people. For some it means a focus on branding and advertising. For others, sales support. And for yet others, product development support or marketing research. The reality is that marketing is situational, dependent on the needs of the organization at a particular point in time. Seth Godin provides a useful framework, identifying six audiences**:

• The sales force
• The stock market
• Potential new customers
• Existing customers
• Employees
• The regulators

To these, I would add:

• The CEO
• Other key organizational leaders, including the CFO, the head of product development or research and the head of human resources 

So, your first choice is which to focus on. Seth continues:

Many companies are sales-force driven. When the sales force is happy, the CEO is happy. Other organizations are driven by the daily (or hourly) stock price. The company is run to please Wall Street. You can choose to focus your best work on attracting new customers. This evangelical growth model is going to change your pricing and your product development efforts too.

Contrast this with the organization that puts a priority on delighting existing customers. This will refocus a non-profit on doing work that gets existing donors to up their commitment, for example. It changes the way you talk (more depth) and what you make.

Pleasing employees, of course, might help with any of these constituencies, but also changes how you make difficult decisions.

And finally, if the lawyers have enough sway, you might make your hardest decisions around what you think a regulator will say.

Let’s start with your most important customer, the CEO. He or she (and yes, there are increasing numbers of these), hired you for a reason, and THE thing you need to do immediately is understand that reason and, importantly, the mindset behind it. So, what does the CEO want?

Straightforward, right? All you need to do is sit down with your boss, get his or her objectives and then get to work. That’s what you've always done with a new boss, and since you've now got the top marketing job, that strategy has clearly worked.

Reflect on this: USA Today reports “The pressure and scrutiny on performance has shortened the tenure of the average CEO from about 10 years to about 5½ years since the 1990s, says John Challenger of consultants Challenger Gray and Christmas,”*** or about two years longer than that of their CMOs. They are under intense pressure to drive results, so they need a CMO who can deliver marketplace results, which can include profitable growth, new product introductions and new market penetration.

But the CEO doesn't have a lot of time: he or she must deal with a plethora of constituencies, including boards, customers, partners, suppliers, investors and shareholders, employees, advocacy groups, the media and regulators. This means they are also highly concerned with corporate image which is, after all, an extension of their own image.

Compounding the problem is that unlike your prior marketing bosses, your new boss most likely doesn't have a marketing background. Nor do your peers. Nor, for that matter, do many in the constituent groups, who'll want to know the profitability of investments. Consider the challenges in measuring the return on a marketing campaign

• What impact did sales or distribution have? 
• What about product development - did the new product meet customer expectations? 
• How about customer service?
• In what time frame?
• What role did competitive responses play?

While great progress has been made in the past several years in measuring the impact of marketing, there is still much art that can't be measured. As Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director, Bliss Integrated Communications says, “marketing is a profession filled with ambiguities.” Your success will depend on how well you deal with those in the organization whose jobs are driven by hard data and who expect the same from marketing. 

Finally, you must deal with others in the C-suite or line management, each with their own agenda and each with a varying understanding of what marketing is and what it can do for them. Every one of these wants something – a new website, new collateral, a new brand or messaging, a new campaign, a new event, new insights into the customer...

And they want them fast. 

And your temptation is to get results fast, to show your value.

Big mistake, says Nigel Dessau, ex-CMO of AMD. “Avoid making too many decisions too early. Marketing is many jobs, and it is too easy to confuse the important with the urgent at the beginning.”

Next: Allies, Agnostics and Antagonists

*“What Do You Want From Me? How High-Performing CMOs Exceed Expectations,” SpencerStuart, 2010

**Six Audiences, Seth Godin’s Blog, September 15, 2012

***“CEOs stumble over ethics violations, mismanagement,” USA Today, May 5, 2012,