It’s an unfortunate truth that CMOs are known to have shorter tenures than their C-suite counterparts. But this typically isn’t down to poor performance.
The problem is that marketing leaders often struggle to quantify their function’s impact in a way that demonstrates business outcomes. In fact, recent Gartner research found that just 52% of senior marketing leaders have been able to achieve this.
Marketing is crucial for acquiring and retaining customers, building brand awareness, and unifying teams to deliver impactful experiences. But oftentimes, business leaders only have one crucial outcome on their minds: financial impact. The trick to bucking the trend of the short CMO tenure is to realise your role as a translator to the rest of the organisation, establishing the value that marketing drives in a way that demonstrates financial impact. Here’s how to do it.
Determining business impact: measure, track, and align
The CMO’s remit is vast. Their teams cover everything from brand awareness, pipeline creation and the customer life cycle, to product marketing, customer community and advocacy. And, on top of it all, CMOs need to prove that investment into their activities can benefit the business in the long-term. To achieve this, CMOs must align with their executive team on how to measure business impact, and what impact is expected in a given year. Clear metrics are critical to keeping the function focused on programmes that drive the most value across the organisation. They also ensure that marketing efforts are linked to wider outcomes.
But alignment also means determining which initiatives are most critical right now and, sometimes, the budget has the final say. It’s frustrating when financial constraints mean activities don’t pan out as planned, so CMOs have to figure out which initiatives yield the best return. Start by tracking digital channels and programmes and measuring the cost of acquisition (CAC) against the lifetime value (LTV) delivered to customers. These insights empower CMOs to confidently allocate budget and resources toward driving pipeline and contributing to revenue.
For instance, CMOs are often accountable to helping accelerate an organisation’s enterprise sales pipeline through account-based marketing (ABM) programmes and targeted field events. That means many marketing leaders are now turning to the concept of “allbound,” a double-funnel approach that combines inbound with a shared “allbound” number across sales, partners and marketing. Essentially, it’s a collective effort to target the same accounts and maximise results. And this cross-functional approach allows for a more precise measure of business impact.
Know customers like the back of your hand
CMOs have a wide remit, but the importance of understanding the customer journey can’t be overstated. Live and breathe it; know it inside-out. This encompasses everything from managing relationships with customers and gathering feedback, to showcasing product success stories. Having an intimate knowledge of the customer experience makes the CMO an invaluable unifier across the entire organisation, as they can help product and go-to-market teams build more sticky digital experiences.
There are many ways that CMOs can better understand their customers, with one important insight being renewal rates. Growth marketing teams collect user engagement data to get firsthand insights into customers’ in-product experiences. And this can also be used to track, and report on, retention rates. But customer engagement isn’t just about the numbers. Companies must bridge the in- and out-of-product experience to keep customers coming back. Product data does half the job by illustrating the in-product experience, whilst real-world initiatives like customer advisory boards and user groups allow people to share deeper product experiences that can’t be gleaned from data alone.
Online communities are another critical avenue to better understanding customers and the user journey. For instance, measuring the number of weekly active community members can reveal who engages with an organisation’s brand outside of its product, what challenges customers face, and what new ideas they have.
Living and breathing the customer journey is a big responsibility that CMOs need to face head-on. But if a CMO can demonstrate that they deeply understand customers’ wants and needs, the rest of the C-suite will be more likely to trust that their decisions and investments will drive results.
Build internal relationships – but don’t be afraid to push back
Relationship-building doesn’t just apply to customers. Marketing is inherently cross-functional, and one of the primary jobs of a CMO is to influence their peers within the organisation. Boosting profitability calls for a coalition, and the first step is understanding how other teams think.
Take sales versus product functions. Sales teams are tactical and pragmatic, and they want simple, digestible marketing content to leverage with customers and prospects. Product teams, however, want to go more granular in showcasing the technical intricacies of the features they’ve developed. This function is all about pride in precision, and product teams care deeply about the way their hard work is presented. For marketers, learning how to strike a balance with both teams takes time.
Let’s consider an example. Imagine a regional sales leader wants to organise their own event and approaches the CMO for help. Instead of defaulting to “yes”, the CMO decides to crunch the numbers to determine potential value and outcomes. From a cost and pipeline generation standpoint, the regional event doesn’t make sense, but the CMO doesn’t want to simply shut the idea down. Instead, they recommend a roadshow series of smaller regional events. These would increase local awareness and connect with current and prospective customers, satisfying the sales function’s core needs. And by implementing this strategy, the sales team is able to boost the region’s pipeline. A straight “yes” isn’t always the answer when it comes to strengthening relationships. Aligning on a strategy and goals, while pushing back where appropriate, can mitigate cross-functional friction and fuel business growth.
With a thoughtful strategy, it’s possible for CMOs to have tenures as sustainable as their other C-suite peers. Start by mapping out which marketing programmes have the highest impact, encourage alignment and collaboration with other teams, and demonstrate an expert understanding of the customer journey both qualitatively and quantitatively. By doing so, CMOs won’t just be setting themselves up for success; they will become strategic assets in the boardroom.
Tifenn Dano Kwan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude, a leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. She previously held CMO positions at Collibra and Dropbox.
Tifenn's mission is to help shape the future of work through the conduit of marketing, powered by superior digital experiences that help people and teams reach their potential.
