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The Gist
- Build cross-functional ties. Fostering relationships with go-to-market peers and maintaining open communication are pivotal for aligning marketing with broader business objectives.
- Utilize your expertise. Leveraging personal strengths and a foundation of curiosity aids in building trusted relationships and driving better outcomes.
- Prioritize team cohesion. Assessing team structure and talent is crucial for creating a unified marketing team that aligns with company goals and market opportunities.
You’ve landed a coveted seat at the C-suite table — congrats! Expectations are high, and according to overused and not entirely representative research, your tenure as CMO may be short. Time to focus on learning the business, building your team, assessing the competitive landscape, driving pipeline and translating your external market knowledge into internal impact.
Listening and observing are key to understanding the nuances of an organization, but companies hire and expect us to hit the ground running, immediately delivering impactful, measurable results.
As I reflect on my first year as a first-time CMO, these marketing leadership strategies have helped me succeed — you may find them useful, too.
4 Marketing Leadership Strategies for the CMO
1. Align With Your Go-to-Market Peers
My first order of business as a CMO included establishing strong relationships with our sales, customer success (CS), finance, product and engineering leaders — and of course, the CEO. Since marketing is the headlight of the business, I needed to intimately understand our product roadmap and vision to effectively illuminate the path forward.
Our go-to-market squad — the heads of sales, CS, product and I — stay tightly aligned to increase growth, profitability and other business goals. To foster that alignment, we meet weekly to share respective team and market insights about topics like:
- Priority objectives that surfaced in broader executive meetings.
- Specific customer accounts that need extra attention to unlock faster ROI.
- Strategies for improving customer retention and growth.
Building critical relationships goes beyond scheduled meetings and involves recognizing the importance of connecting with peers and embracing our role as business leaders driving the next growth stage. We must make deliberate efforts to spend time together as an executive team and prioritize one-on-ones or informal chats with peers, like sending a quick text message, making an unscheduled call or making time for a walk-and-talk when you’re in the same location for conferences, off-sites and customer visits. These actions create opportunities to establish trust with colleagues and promote open, transparent communication centered around shared business goals.
A tight go-to-market connection and open communication are essential because CMOs can’t just live in the marketing world. Remember the “Team One” principle? Your most important team isn’t your marketing team, but the executive team. A CMO doesn’t just solve marketing problems — you are solving business problems.
Related Article: Marketing Leadership: Is Chief Marketing Officer the Right Title?
2. Leverage Your Personal Strengths and Foundation
My early journalism career honed skills invaluable to my CMO role — knowing my audience, asking good questions and being fueled by insatiable curiosity. I’ve learned to examine issues and marketing leadership strategies from multiple angles, finding diverse perspectives within and outside the organization.
This foundation of curiosity and openness to different viewpoints can serve you well in getting to know and build trusted relationships with colleagues across functions; understanding your customers, market influencers and analysts; and working with your marketing team to ask the right questions, connect the dots and drive better outcomes.
Related Article: CMSWire CMO Circle: Paige O’Neill on Exploding Martech, Marketer Career Growth
3. Manage Time With Intention
With a clear purpose in mind — nurturing my executive team relationships — I prioritized spending intentional time with peers, seeking to deeply understand their perspectives. In my first 60 days, I took a proactive approach, setting goals to engage with customers, partners, industry influencers and analysts. Employing a color-coded calendar system, I evaluated where my focus resided, leveraging these insights to refine my priorities and allocate my time more effectively.
Time is precious to any CMO, especially in those first few months. Knowing when and where to set boundaries and when to say no is critical. Be intentional about how you structure your time. Map out 30, 60 and 90-day plans before day one, and create clear milestones for yourself despite the ongoing stream of new tasks and responsibilities. Set marketing leadership targets for how to split your time between:
- Understanding company strategy, goals and performance metrics.
- Honing your marketing craft.
- Interacting with customers to get a sense of the market.
- Assessing your team and making hiring decisions.
Share insights — and data — from your listening tour and how they informed your plan when you present a 90-day update to the executive team and board. Presenting a strategic and thoughtful assessment should garner positive feedback and further establish your confidence and credibility.
Related Article: Preparing CMOs for the Next Decade of Marketing Leadership
4. Build a Cohesive Marketing Team
A unique scenario greeted me when I joined Totango: Two separate marketing organizations — a growth org focused on a product-led growth (PLG) motion and a brand, events and community org — were unified under my leadership. Within my first six months, I assessed our structure and talent, pinpointing areas where we lacked essential capabilities such as product marketing. I concentrated on bridging these gaps by aligning product offerings with market opportunities, articulating our unique value proposition and reorganizing the team under a unified vision.
Ensuring you have the right team to support your marketing leadership strategies is critical, so build in time to foster a cohesive culture and clarity in roles and responsibilities. Share your leadership and work style with your colleagues, and (if budget allows) find opportunities for in-person or virtual events focused on team-building shortly after you start. Your first 90 days should focus on building rapport, understanding everyone’s talents and roles, and developing a shared strategy document and quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs) tied to business goals.
Lessons Learned, Growth Achieved
My first year as CMO at Totango was a dynamic journey filled with demanding challenges and exciting successes. As we embark on a new “first year” following our merger with Catalyst, I find myself leaning on those hard-earned lessons. Just as I did when joining Totango, I’m intentionally spending quality time with the new combined C-suite, reassessing roles and skills across the marketing team to align with our objectives and embracing an inquisitive nature to uncover the unknowns about Catalyst.
This new chapter is a time of discovery and iteration. By capitalizing on my background, mastering time management and nurturing deep connections, I’m prepared to build a cohesive marketing team, collaborate with “Team One” peers through data-driven decision-making and maintain a relentless customer focus as we navigate this unique landscape together and contribute to our collective success.
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