(Post 4 of 4 in the series on Scaling CMOs – other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief Marketing Officer, What Does Great Look like in a Chief Marketing Officer and Signs your Chief Marketing Officer isn’t Scaling) Similar to interactions with all CXOs, you’ll have to capitalize on your moments but there are a few ways I’ve typically spent the most time or gotten the most value out of CMOs over the years. One of the key ways to engage with the CMO is to include them in meetings with the rest of the go-to-market (GTM) executives as a group, not in a silo. While of course I have always had 1:1 meetings with my CMO, I…
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CMO
Signs Your CMO Isn’t Scaling
(This is the third post in the series… The first one When to Hire your first CMO is here, and What does Great Look Like in a CMO is here). In Startup CXO I wrote that I always think that the French Fry Theory can be applied to many things, usually other food items. The French Fry Theory is the idea that you always have room to eat one more fry and in my case I always do. But the same idea applies to marketing because you can always do “one more thing.” One more press release. One more piece of collateral. One more page on the corporate web site. One more newsletter. Trade show. Webinar. Research study. Ad. Search…
What Does Great Look Like in a CMO?
(This is the second post in the series… the first one When to Hire your first Chief Marketing Officer is here). Whether you have someone in your company that can level up to greatness or you need to bring in a CMO, the characteristics and skills of a great CMO you should aspire to include some of the following. A great CMO understands that the marketing budget starts with drivers and business results and works backwards in a modular way to spend, not the other way around. Yes, they will get some resources but rather than spend that money to fill in the gaps on their team to make the Marketing function strong or powerful, they’ll look at the business…
When to Hire a Chief Marketing Officer
(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CMOs) Unlike some of the other teams in a startup, the marketing function often has a few people carrying out various tasks and you’ll find that there is at least a medium sized and quite busy marketing department—even at the earliest startup stages. You could operate this way for quite some time and it’s common to have a marketing team with multiple mid-level leaders well before there is a seasoned leader at the helm. One of those leaders may be a VP of Marketing and, depending on the nature of the company, that VP is likely someone with a specialized area of focus within marketing (brand, digital, event, etc.) who has…