How CMOs Can Succeed by Balancing Influence and Control

The results are in, and it's official: the life of a CMO is harder and more high-risk than ever. In fact, the average tenure of a CMO has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade according to an annual study by leadership advisory firm Spencer Stuart.

And no wonder: CMOs need to navigate an increasingly complicated landscape fraught with constant threats to a company's reputation, and they're expected to build relationships with finicky customers across a complicated web of touchpoints ranging from their websites to ever-evolving (and emerging) social media - all while complicated and confusing regulatory changes and technology shifts have created a consumer privacy minefield.

And yet, being a CMO is an exciting and rewarding role, too, for anyone who relishes the challenge of building an enduring brand. At Investis Digital (iDX), we know that modern CMOs come into their role from a variety of backgrounds yet still face the expectation of doing it all. With cross-functionality and technological innovation being non-negotiable skills for enterprise-level executives today, purely focusing on client acquisition and growth won't cut it anymore. CMOs must be agile, adaptable, and empowering, bridging the gap between brand and customer. So, how might CMOs not only survive but thrive?

Insider Intelligence highlights more than 10 different factors that CMOs must consider and align to be successful beyond just growing revenue. It's about understanding and advocating for the customer with the right data, choosing technology that will set your brand up to have the most impact, communicating your goals, and more.

Managing these details can be overwhelming, but not if you have the right tools and partnerships.

Influence and Control: knowing your power

Based on our client work helping CMOs build trust with their audiences, we believe that CMOs who know how to harness their control and influence can have a real impact on their metrics and relationships. This is increasingly hard to do. In a recent report commissioned by Basis Technologies, more than 90% of U.S. marketers agreed on some level that the marketing field is becoming more complex. Respondents cited changes in media buying methods and a growing number of channels having the most impact.

Though those traits -- "influence" and "control" - are often brushed aside as mere buzzwords, there's a reason the words have gained so much weight: both are critical to the success of enterprise CMOs

Forbes' "World's Most Influential CMOs" list for 2022 said the job of a chief marketer is "about nothing more than it is the influencing of attitudes and behaviors in service of growth." Descriptions of those featured included words like "expansions," "bringing new users and revenues," "pioneering," "global accountability," and "seeing the future through the eyes of those to whom you're marketing." Moreover, influential CMO doesn't just bring in more customers; they create happier, more efficient organizations.

And that's where control comes in. When you understand what it means to influence your teams, your audience, and your industry, you can move the needle in the right direction by controlling the most impactful elements of your organization.

It starts at the top

Insider Intelligence says that to be successful, CMOs "should focus on connecting the marketing strategy to their organization's business strategy, as well as adopting a leadership style that matches both." For influential CMOs, company growth doesn't just mean growing your customer base; it means uniting all forces toward a common goal. Doing so isn't easy in the constantly changing world of marketing. To combat these challenges, start by making sure your goals and vision for your brand (and the customers who engage with it) align with other decision-makers.

Align with your CEO

Before you enact any real change in your company, you must be aligned with your CEO and their vision. And for the most influential CMOs we work with, "alignment" means more than weekly 1:1s and team standups. Do you know what's scribbled on your CEO's whiteboard, both literally and figuratively? Do you know what resources they're reading? Which board member they met for coffee last week? Do you feel confident walking into their office without a formal invite to bounce ideas off each other?

If you answered "no" to any of the above, that might be your sign to start investing in your relationship with your CEO. Without the right buy-in, any real changes you set out to make will only go so far. In fact, this friction can even cause turnover in high-stakes scenarios - which is not uncommon.

Reduce C-suite collisions

Challenges of driving growth for your organization don't go away just because you and your CEO have established yourselves as members of the same team. Your interactions and connections with other C-suite executives and their teams deserve investment, too. In one report, Insider Intelligence found that "only 40% of respondents said their CFO was aware of digital marketing KPIs, and a similar percentage effectively integrate sales, marketing, and customer service data."

It's obvious that connectivity is becoming increasingly more difficult with the various roles and industry changes that executives are facing, but what isn't so obvious is how marketing executives can eradicate uncertainty.

Well, it happens when you remove the friction that exists between you, your teams, and other departments. To establish yourself as an effective, trustworthy leader among your executive peers, focus on seeking to understand. What are the pain points other departments face? Can your teams work together to solve any of those issues? If not, how do those challenges affect the marketing goals you're trying to achieve?

Gaining clarity on these issues will not only give you the crucial information you need to drive growth, but it will also show your peers that you're a team player who's willing to solve root issues, instead of coming in hot with ideas that only grow feelings of frustration and discouragement.

Harnessing your strengths (and identifying opportunities)

Driving growth requires you to look outside yourself and understand the field you're playing in. Then, you can focus on the internal factor: you. How do your teams feel about your leadership style and your ideas? Do they feel empowered to help you reach your goals, or do you need to focus on a new group of individuals to help the organization reach its full potential? To get the answers to those questions, you must conduct a self-assessment to understand your own strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. For example:

1.) What does your community look like?

The power of community is unmatched when it comes to driving real change in your organization through your marketing tactics. A strong community can completely change the game for marketing executives who are challenged with doing it all the time.

Do you have a mentor you can look up to and reach out to for support when you're stuck? Have they shown you why you can trust their advice? And beyond that, what does your network look like? Do you make time to attend conferences and build new connections, sometimes with the sole goal of finding mentors for your teams and direct reports instead of for yourself? Again, if you answered "no," to any of these questions, that's your sign to invest in relationships that support you.

2.) What do your teams say about you?

Establish regular feedback opportunities for your internal collaborators to let you know what they think about your attitude, goals, and tactics. This helps you manage relationships and understand how well you and your teams are achieving your marketing goals. It's important to gather feedback in a variety of ways, both in-person with people who feel comfortable doing so, and anonymously through digital surveys or polls.

3.) How do your leads affect the success of your sales team?

It's not enough to know that your marketing tactics are growing leads for your business - you must understand what happens to those leads when they begin contact with your sales team. And the only way to do that is to lead more conversations. Ask your sales reps what they need from you, where they feel your tactics are lacking, and most importantly, why.

4.) How does your martech stack stand up to industry best practices?

CMOs need to understand technology's role in driving the business more than ever. There is a symbiotic relationship between a marketing team's performance and a company's mastery of the martech stack - or myriad software applications that marketers use to create, execute, manage, and measure the results of marketing campaigns. If your teams aren't using platforms that make things easier, more efficient, and more scalable, then the connections you build and the ideas you create will never reach their full potential. Understand where your platforms are lacking, improve them, and coordinate them to support all aspects of marketing (and we can help you do that). However, doing this is easier said than done. Our own company's research shows that martech stacks suffer from extraordinary inefficiencies that create unacceptable waste. CMOs need what we call a Connected Content strategy to manage martech stacks efficiently with reusable assets.

Once you're aware of your own influence on your teams and the industry, you can begin to leverage your control to either enhance that narrative or change it.

Control the narrative with your customers

Influential CMOs know the power of asking hard questions, but it's crucial to make sure you ask the right ones. How does your brand make people feel, even the people who aren't buying your product or using your service? After all, one main challenge of successful CMO leadership is focusing on the thing that matters for you and your teams: growth. So although one of your responsibilities is to understand the pain points, weaknesses, and frictions across departments and how they influence your growth goals, it's (typically) not your job to fix them all.

Control the narrative about your customers

How do your CEO and other executives define and think about your customer? What do they see as their pain points and desires? Though it's your job as CMO to know your customers better than anyone else, your stakeholders also have ideas on who your audience is and what they need from your brand. Set up regular check-ins with your CEO, sales teams, and customer success teams to identify new findings and determine how they affect your organization.

Then, take those insights and work them into your reports to help educate your stakeholders and align on the most impactful initiatives.

Establish a consistent reporting structure

Gathering information and feedback from your teams is important, but they also need to know that you're actually driving results with those insights. The more consistent your reporting, the more likely it is that your teams will feel like they have a real part in the growth you're driving. Your reports should be thorough, but the exact structure and content depends on a variety of factors, starting with the statistics that matter the most to your team.

Sure, you may understand what it means that "sessions grew to the site by X%," but what does that mean to the rest of the organization? For example, did those sessions drive more valuable leads (an answer requiring the input of your sales team), or are sessions simply a vanity metric? And if so, what KPIs can you factor into the equation to tell a broader, more complete story that fully communicates the impact of the initiatives your teams are putting their efforts toward? These are questions that we help CMOs address often through our work building data-driven strategies with analytics.

It all points back to you and your vision - if you don't communicate the impact, the impact won't continue.

Let Investis Digital (iDX) Help

Forbes says this: "Today's unicorn CMOs should be commercially minded constructors, creatives, communicators, and connectors all at the same time. Does this sound exhausting? It is …, but it's also amazing."

Consider just how many factors today's CMOs are tasked with managing, as cited at the beginning of this post with the Insider Intelligence research: media buying, channel growth, user privacy and data, measurement, technology . . . the list goes on and on. But with the right tools and agency partnership, you can use your influence and control to make real change in your organization as a modern CMO, even those who come into their roles from different backgrounds and face a variety of expectations. These tools will help you identify and ultimately strengthen the gaps in your experience to be the leader your teams and customers need.

We at Investis Digital know that it takes more than a blog post to change habits and patterns. We're ready to help you identify your pain points through robust custom audits that not only analyze the gaps in your strategy but also reveal the impact your current strengths have on your customers and your organization. If you have weaknesses in any of these areas, CMOs need to prioritize, check out our marketing solutions or reach out to receive a custom consultation.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.