leadership

CMO: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love

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Rapid change. Complex analytics. Brand advocacy, creativity and strategic leadership. Judged on execution and impact….and by the way, the clock is ticking.

These are some of the challenges that face to the evolving role of the modern Marketing leader, requiring a dizzying array of skills to deal with a rapidly changing environment and high CEO expectations.

RAPID CHANGE

As McKinsey & Company presaged a few years ago, “Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer”.  A number of factors are driving that change:

  • The liberation of the information consumers use in making buying decisions
  • Multiple, online channels of interaction between consumers and brands
  • Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology
  • Competitive intensity and the shortening lifespan of competitive advantage

The Liberation of Information:

Consumers today have access to product reviews, detailed product descriptions, comparative price data…and that’s before they ever hit your company’s website.  “CMOs face a power shift from selectively informed consumers to consumers “armed to their teeth” with information and choice”, as detailed in The Changing Role of the CMO – Evolution and Revolution At Work by the Vivaldi Partners Group.

The empowered consumer can be at multiple phases in the buying cycle (awareness, consideration, investigate, purchase and use) at the same time, quickly obsoleting any notion of a linear narrative with your customer.  In addition, being transparent, factual and honest about your brand has never been more consequential given that customers will detect gaps and inconsistencies across your message points (customer service, technical support, trade shows, in-person sales, online, print, etc.).

Multiple Online Channels of Interaction:

Of course customers will, if you’re skillful and can break through the noise, be listening to your messages across your platforms (blogs, social media, Pay-per-Click advertising, your website(s), and email).  “Designing a consistently positive, rewarding experience across all those touchpoints takes system-wide thinking and an integrated service-delivery approach. Point solutions, such as focusing on the call center, the store, or the website, no longer cut it in a multichannel environment”, says Peter Dahlstrom, Chris Davis, Fabian Hieronimus, and Marc Singer in the Rebirth of the CMO,  (HBR Oct. 2014).

But as important your messages on your platforms (and they best cohere), the messages about your company and products/services hosted on 3rd-party sites are potentially even more important.  These include other purchase channels that have customer reviews, consumer interest groups (these exist in both B2C and B2B), user-developed content and the social media ‘twittersphere’ and beyond.  Being keenly aware of the digital conversations about your brand, bringing that information into your organization, and appropriately directly or indirectly responding can be critical.

Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology:

As Aditya Joshi states in Technology Questions Every CMO Must Ask (HBR Oct. 2014), “Marketers today encounter a mind-boggling array of technologies.  CMOs I talk to are swamped by meeting requests from technology vendors, and most feel an acute pressure to climb on the tech bandwagon”.  Marketing technology has dramatically evolved over the last decade and continues to quickly mature.

Digital Marketing platforms (for landing page and forms development, social media management, email marketing), Web platforms (for eCommerce, product and content search, and online customer experiences), CRMs (customer relationship management for a 360 degree view of your prospects and customers), Customer Review platforms, Analytical tools (Google Analytics, KISS metrics, etc.), Online communities (for customer engagement, customer feedback, and market research) et al. are enabling marketers to track how well they are evolving customer relationships and which activities are positively contributing to each step of the customer journey.

These systems create multiple imperatives:

  • From the sea of data these systems produces, what actionable insights are being generated?
  • How will you scale Marketing’s impact by connecting the dots across these systems and the other critical enterprise systems linked to production, development, finance, reporting, etc.?
  • Can you successfully set expectations for return-on-investment timing and business impact?

Competitive Intensity:

In the Rebirth of the CMO the authors state: “Digital disruption…has created an increasingly commoditized product and service environment. Digital has removed barriers across sectors, even in old-line businesses known for “sticky” products, such as telecom and insurance. And that same transparency has radically shortened the shelf-life of any new competitive advantage.”  As information has become more democratized, barriers to awareness have been lowered.  A firm I worked with saw it’s competitive ranks climb from 30 to over 300 competitors in less five years.

TOUGH AND GETTING TOUGHER

The pace of change will not slacken in coming years and the systems and technology will necessarily (thankfully) continue to evolve.  Role expectations will not soften either.

Shelagh Collins reports that the IDC Predicts Hard Times Ahead for CMOs (CMS Wire, Dec. 2014) that “One in four CMOs will be replaced every year through 2018.”  Why?  “Chief marketing officer turnover is partially due to a disparity between CEO expectations and the hiring of the CMO to execute them. ‘If the CEO isn’t sure what he wants when he makes the job requisitions specification, it’s not surprising that the CEO might be disappointed if the CMO doesn’t perform over those first 12 or 24 months’, according to Rich Vancil, Group VP, Executive Advisory Group.”

Last year Fortune reported that although CMO tenure has improved in some sectors, it remains significantly lower than CIOs or CEOs.  They report that CMO tenure is “shortest in the healthcare, automotive, restaurant and communications/media sectors, averaging between 28 to 32 months.”

Ty Montague (Are CEOs to Blame for Short CMO Tenures?  HBR July 2013) states CMO tenure is “astonishingly low compared to other execs in the C-Suite: eight years for CEOs and ten years for CFOs. So why is CMO tenure so short? Experts have pointed to a host of reasons: the explosion of social media, the rise of big data, general complexity and chaos, incompetence…”

SO WHY DO IT?

While as Dahlstrom et al state “The need to deliver on organization-wide imperatives creates lots of pressure for CMOs”, it also “has elevated – and complicated – the role of CMO. Delivering above-market growth increasingly hinges on differentiating the customer experience and building tighter customer relationships . That in turn relies on not only having excellent marketing capabilities, but also connecting marketing with the entire organization.”

To be a CMO today is to be at the cross-currents of change, with customers, technology and the organization.  Technology is enabling marketing capacity and capabilities to positively impact the strategic direction of the company, customer engagement, product definition, brand vibrancy, and revenue growth.

Marketers experience in their personal lives, and see all around them, dramatic changes in the way customers learn about and purchase products.  Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity to work across the entire organization to build a shared vision for uniquely delivering value to customers.

Executing against that vision, with products and programs that result in dynamic customer relationships, could not be more critically important or rewarding in business today.  If you like leading change, technology and analytics, creativity and strategy, and continuously evolving yourself and your team’s marketing skills, being a CMO is the toughest job you’ll ever love.

Cultivating Distrust

As strategists and marketers one of our more complex tasks is to listen to customer feedback, probe market dynamics, understand competitive intent, divine replacement or disruptive technology and synthesize the varied inputs into actionable information for the business.  My experience has been, however, that even the least xenophobic teams trust too completely in their own data and their own framing of market and customer dynamics, which leads to numerous strategic and marketing errors of omission and commission.

Take for example the dutiful front-line marketing team which shares at company meetings first-hand accounts of deals they won and lost.  The stories are captivating and no doubt provide insight into operations, science/engineering and other teams who rarely have the chance to directly observe the real-world dynamics of their product deals.  We know, however, that there is bias in the selection of which deals to present to the audience and that a few instances of competitive dynamics is not data but mere anecdote, no matter how well intentioned.

What about the team that does more systematic sampling of wins and losses, convincing the sales force to document the final disposition of all deals from their funnel on a quarterly basis.  Can we trust this information?  While having more data points and in theory, not being selective which deals to include, is clearly moving in the right direction, the source of bias is the sales rep making the observations.  Anyone who has been through this exercise make recognize the top 3 reasons why “we” lose from this type of analysis:

  1. Customer relationship with the competitive account manager
  2. Lack of product performance/features
  3. Price

It’s not that the sales team is intentionally trying to skew the data, nor that marketing teams believe that this is necessarily the best method to collect deal dynamics.  Nevertheless, our not wanting to rock the boat by putting an objective, market research firm at the helm of collecting information directly from the customer trumps our own instincts to distrust the information we’re gathering.  Worse, folks further from strategy and marketing may end up feeling good about the collected data and be even less suspicious of their own plans and strategies which align with the “data”.

I am always mindful of the elementary school biology example of the frog placed in a shallow pan of water on the stove.  The frog does not jump to safety when gradual heat is applied to the pan.  So how do ensure we can take the mental leap out of our own business to think objectively about the opportunities and issues facing the company?

It’s a slight shift in focus, from trying to find the right data and answers to finding the right questions.  The right questions are always more valuable than answers.  Remember your inner three-year-old and follow your why!  A few other tips to cultivate healthy distrust:

    1. Seek out customers who purchased in the past but haven’t bought recently.  Ask them why they’ve stopped buying and if there’s anything the company can do to earn their business in the future.
    2. Stay close to technical support and customer service.  Repetitive issues, even at low levels, are the smoke that can sometimes lead to fire.  Remember that the customers that reach out to you are just a portion of your dissatisfied customers.
    3. Use 3rd party market research firms to conduct win/loss studies, surveys and focus groups.  Try to understand if your value proposition is still relevant, credible, distinct and positively impacts purchase intent.  Watch the win/loss trend line over the year.  Seek out unaided impressions of your firm vs. the competition.  Try using QFD to understand what the customers values most when selecting your product vs. the competition.
    4. Travel with sales on customer visits.  See if you can bring you to an unhappy customer, not just the best and brightest account.  Even better:  have them bring you to the customer who is a die-hard fan of the competition!

If you can sit with objective data and resist drawing conclusions for as long as possible, ask a lot of questions, listen and observe deeply, cultivating an outsiders mindset, you will always find new opportunities for improvement and growth….that you can believe it.