Welcome to another episode of CMO Field Notes. My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO, and I work with clients, both large and small, who are looking to have definitive marketing leadership in play in their business, so that there is a coordinated strategy around marketing. And it’s not just a constant battle in that Monday morning, 11am marketing meeting to go, “What are we going to try this week? What are we going to do there, here, and what are we going to do that,” and rely on ideas from the founder or the business owner themselves.
So how does this change? How do we respond in this world?
Let me just share a bit of a personal story, it’s something that has happened this week in the field. That’s why these short podcasts are called CMO Field Notes, because this is me in the field as a fractional CMO, working with businesses.
So, something interesting happened. We’ve just had a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and over the bank holiday weekend, the CEO of a company that I’ve been working with emailed me because I wasn’t going to be able to make the Monday meeting. The Monday meeting that normally takes place at Monday at 12. It’s either with his marketing team or it’s with him. So, every other week, the meeting is different. This Monday would have been his day, and we had scheduled it for Tuesday at 12.
But the email that came in over the weekend was basically him canceling our contract, as we were due to talk about the renewal of it, because we’ve been working together for a year. I had submitted the results based invoice, because I operate from a results based perspective with my fractional CMO work, and he has decided that he wants to take the work that I’ve been doing and the tools that we’ve integrated, the reporting system and the way in which I’ve been leading the marketing over the last 12 months for him (and yet I’m getting a results payout, because we have increased and grown the company over the last year together) and he’s redistributing the tasks amongst his other C-suite employees.
I think this is a decision that a lot of businesses are making right now. I’ve recently read on Forbes that there is this trend to effectively take the CMO function out of the business and redistribute the different things that a CMO would do amongst the different C suite people.
From a perspective of budget and finance, that’s going to the CFO. From a perspective of things such as like operations and AI, that’s going to the COO. If it’s anything to do with sales, then it’s going to the sales division.
And, you know, there’s also newer roles that have been kind of created along the way. I’ve seen banded around a lot a Chief Brand Officer, and having worked with one for a few months last year, it was an interesting dynamic - because the Chief Brand Officer was more concerned about the message and the colour of things, rather than actually the results that were coming in.
This is where I feel like the role of a modern day CMO has changed dramatically.
The role of a modern day CMO is supposed to be about the campaigns and the numbers, looking at how is marketing activity directly correlated to the results that are being brought into the business. And it’s really difficult to measure for some companies because they have no idea. That’s why strategic leadership in their marketing is needed.
But in this new age of distributing the marketing leadership away from the role of a single CMO, I feel like there’s going to be a bit of a technology mess, because nobody’s really looking at it all. You’re going to have the marketing team operating at one level, the COO operating at another level, trying to bring in AI across the whole company, dealing with maybe an IT manager or an outsourced IT support. Plus, you’ve also got all the finance side of things, and the financial reporting. There’s nobody really looking at it all. There’s no executive oversight around the entire martech structure and the budgets associated with it.
I feel like if there’s nobody leading the marketing from a perspective of quarterly sprints, which is how I would operate, then who’s actually taking the way in which we should operate campaigns and build in the right way? Is it just going to be down to the different teams choosing to do what they want?
It’s not just about colouring it and making things look pretty. It’s about seeing what works, what doesn’t work, doubling down on what does, and stripping back and simplifying by removing the stuff that doesn’t work.
I think for me, my plea to any founder, any CEO, any entrepreneur who is operating at a level that does not have this integrated marketing leadership in place... the human judgment that comes from being able to see from experience what’s working, what’s not, how we test, how we measure, how team fits into all of that... that’s never going to ever be something that you can replace by taking the role of a CMO and splitting those tasks and putting additional pressure on other C suite members of staff. And it’s certainly not fair on them.
I truly believe that there is a role for a CMO that should be present in every single business, no matter how big or how small. If you’re just an entrepreneur, you’re a solopreneur, having someone who is assisting and working with you from an accountability perspective about your marketing is the kind of thing that I offer, right through to working with my largest client who is running at around $110 million a year right now. It’s that strategic work around a marketing team. It’s that strategic work around the conversations in the boardroom and how that filters down and how projects are managed and how results are measured.
I really feel like there is this generalist kind of view - that the CMO is a marketing generalist, not a specialist in certain areas, but a CMO taps into the specialisms of those who are focused on their task, and brings it all together. It’s about that cohesive marketing leadership. If you distribute marketing leadership across different functions, you end up with something that’s just completely dysfunctional.
Commit to a genuine integration of a CMO in your company. You might celebrate the fact that you are without your CMO, because you’re saving a few $100,000 a year because you’re not employing somebody at that level, and then those short term wins mean that maybe people are excited that they’ve got a bit more autonomy around things. But what’s likely to happen is underperforming marketing over the next few years.
Transformation in your marketing will come with definitive marketing leadership.
If you’re asking the question of CMO or specialists right now, keep your marketing leadership in play, and then allow them to work with the specialists. It takes all of the weight off your shoulders as the CEO and as the founder of your company, so you haven’t got to be worrying about it. And that’s the whole point of having either a fractional CMO or a CMO employed.
If it’s something that we can talk about, how I can really show you how that marketing leadership will work, the best thing for us to do is just jump on a call. Head over to www.anthodges.com, book a call with me. Just click the “Work With Ant” button, and then you can just fill out the details and book a call.
Let’s get on a call, and let’s see how we can transform things for you by keeping that marketing leadership in a centralized space, and you focus on growing the business with what you do as a founder and CEO.
Go ahead and book that call over at www.anthodges.com.
