Hardest C-Suite Role to Master, Easiest to Fake — Who Wants To Be a CMO?
Series: How great leaders create value outside of their function
At Abacus & Pencil I focus on helping SaaS startups define their Growth Strategy, align their Operating Priorities, and Raise Their Next Round as they scale from $10M to $100M in ARR. Whether you’re simply looking for a quick gut-check or are interested in exploring a project together you’re welcome to grab time on my calendar.
Today’s cover image is Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol.
Is this the world’s most famous example of content marketing (before we had the internet?)
The company captured the publicity by giving away dresses made of paper with this imagery.
Almost thirty percent of Fortune 500 companies do not have a CMO. That includes consumer-focused companies with incredibly strong brands like Uber, Johnson & Johnson, AB InBev, and Starbucks. And the list is growing. Needless to say, the work of “marketing” is still being done — just elsewhere in the organization.
Why did these companies decide that CMO isn’t a C-Suite role anymore? What can startups learn from that?
In today’s post, I will cover:
Why the CMO role is uniquely hard to master, yet so easy to fake:
It’s not a single discipline but a grab-bag of very diverse skills
Requires constant right-brain / left-brain balancing
What you can do to setup your SaaS marketing team for success:
CEOs / Founders: resist the temptation to divide and delegate — instead focus on creating tight feedback and accountability loops between the teams.
CROs: engage with marketing metrics the same way you approach a roll-up of your AEs’ quota and forecasts — and not the way you would think about your pipeline reporting coming out of your RevOps team.
CFOs: create room in the budget for the team to take risks, resisting the urge to center every decision on an LTV/CAC ratio.
Ops/Analytics: counterintuitively, you may need to leave room for ambiguity and, as a result, marketing creativity in your data frameworks.
Product: establish a high-bandwidth two-way conversation across all parts of the marketing org. While Product Marketing may feel like it should be your one-stop shop, it is equally important to align with Brand & DemandGen.
Previous posts in the cross-functional leadership series:
“Growth Pains” — Universal Truths of Scaling Up Your GTM Engine (link)
The top fundraising mistake Founder & CFOs consistently make together (link)
Why Go-to-Market and Finance Teams Struggle To Work Together (link)
Your CFO is failing and might not even know it (link)
Most CFOs think they own annual planning & budgets — do they, really? (link)
Be your own culture demolition expert (link)
Why the CMO role is unique(ly hard)
Think about the roles and skills that roll up to a CRO: Customer Success, Account Management, Account Executives (New Business), Sales Development, Revenue Operations, and Sales Engineering. There’s a generally accepted “pecking order” within these in the sense that some are objectively “harder” than others. AMs consistently get paid more than CSMs, SDRs get promoted to AEs, SEs move into AE roles and crush them etc.
More importantly, senior leaders that are good at leading one team, can typically successfully take on another team that is “lower on the totem pole.”
Similarly, think about the roles that roll up to CFOs (accounting, FP&A, CorpDev), CHROs (generalists, recruiters, business partners), or even a GC (compliance, commercial, corporate). These too have a clear pecking order: most FP&A leaders know enough to manage an accounting specialist, i-bankers successfully take on Head of Finance roles etc.
Across virtually all functions senior leaders have a significant base of shared foundational skills and a clear hierarchy of transferable experiences.
But not in marketing — Demand Gen, Brand, and Product Marketing disciplines are as different from each other as Finance, HR, and Legal.
This 👆 makes the CMO role incredibly hard to master.
To their credit, CMOs are usually more self-aware about their strengths/gaps than other senior leaders. Most CMOs I know are good at one of these three things even if they’d rather not admit it publicly. As a result, they usually rely on one of two strategies, each of which comes with its risks:
Hire very senior lieutenants to head up disciplines where they (the CMO) have skill gaps. One startup that I observed closely hired fantastic VPs (each of which could easily be a CMO elsewhere), but ended up with them operating out of sync with each other.
Lean on their strengths and let non-marketing teams lead the charge elsewhere (with marketing playing a support role). Another team that I worked with relied heavily on demand gen to punch about its weight but had to rely on sales engineering to close product marketing gaps.
When recruiting for a CMO, the most important debate Founders, Exec Teams, & Board Members need to have is this: which disciplines within marketing to prioritize?
Unlike in Finance, Sales, HR, or even Product, the two standard “skill closing” strategies are harder to execute when it comes to marketing leadership roles. Here’s why:
In other functions, each sub-discipline is a direct stakeholder and “consumer” of their peers’ output: AMs can only be successful if AEs close high-upside customers, FP&A relies on Accounting for accuracy and timely reporting, recruiting gets a lot harder when your HRBPs aren’t coaching first-time managers. This creates an accountability & alignment forcing function within the discipline. Except in marketing: the primary stakeholder for the VP of Brand is the CEO, for DemandGen it is the CRO, for Product Marketing it is the CPO — crucially, these primary stakeholders sit outside of marketing.
In a SaaS startup context, the skills behind DemandGen (mostly aligned with SalesOps), Product Marketing (much more technical), and Brand (with strong creative elements) are vastly different. This makes it a lot harder for even the best CMOs to add value for their lieutenants. As a result, they end up simply passing down high-level company strategic goals and letting each VP interpret them differently.
Often, you may decide that it’s better to have a VP of DemandGen or Brand that rolls up to the CRO and/or a VP of Product Marketing that aligns with Product, instead of 3 VPs that report to the CMO. You may convince yourself that you will achieve a better result by splitting the CMO’s team because you won’t have to worry about aligning their operating priorities with their respective internal stakeholders.
If all of this hasn’t convinced you that CMO is the hardest C-Suite job to master, consider this:
Disciplines like DemandGen or Product Marketing concurrently require you to exercise high-caliber “right brain” and “left brain” skills — they are data-driven, yet a tiny design improvement or storytelling misstep can make or break the whole campaign.
I’ve seen this firsthand:
A marketing team that I was working with bombed a major offline advertising campaign because the shade of yellow they picked looked beautiful on a screen but was hard to print — the text became illegible when printed on a billboard.
Another team was so addicted to being data-driven that they had A/B tested their website into a dead-end. Optimizing every word in the navigation bar, but failing to re-think whether the product line-up that was being offered was targeting the right audience in the first place. This resulted in a web experience (a) was tailored for volume, not quality (b) drove clicks, but did not contribute to the brand narrative (c) nor did it scale up to support pipeline goals.
Finally, a third struggled to make their product marketing repeatable because 100% of it hinged on the ability of a single technical leader to spin an engaging story for the audience they were familiar with. The company struggled to land a message that resonated with non-technical personas.
While the CMO role is objectively hard, it is easy to fake
Most non-marketing leaders I talk to are not big fans of their marketing counterparts. A productive and respectful partnership between marketing and sales/finance/product is an exception, not the norm. Executives often know in their gut when the marketing role isn’t living up to its potential, but struggle to pinpoint where and how.
Here are the 4 ingredients that make the role easy to fake for ~2 years:
Each of these can be a powerful tool driving performance in the hands of a great CMO, however, often ends up acting as the smoke/mirrors covering up for a bad CMO:
Lots of “squishy” numbers to throw around. They can help create the illusion of being results-oriented, even though there are layers of ambiguity, logical fallacies, and subjective judgment calls in how they’re calculated. E.g.: do YOU know the definition of an MQL at your company?
Heavy reliance on 3rd party agencies. You can easily spend 30% of your time in the role just blaming the agency, ripping them out, ramping a new one…
Good marketing should feel like magic. But magic requires suspension of disbelief for the duration of the show. You end up letting things play out until it’s too late.
No external accountability signal. You know your sales team is failing when ARR isn’t growing, you know your finance team is failing when you’re missing Cash Burn goals, you know your product/engineering teams are failing when they’re not shipping new features — but what is that objective metric that marketing has sole and final responsibility for?
As a startup Founder or Executive, what can you do to setup your CMO counterpart for success?
CEOs / Founders
Resist the temptation to divide and delegate — instead focus on creating tight feedback and accountability loops between the teams. For example, this may mean not having a separate goal for the DemandGen. Instead, measure their performance based on their joint success together with the SDR team. It can also mean requiring your Product and Product Marketing leaders to have a joint perspective on where the market is going, instead of treating Marketing as being the downstream commercialization arm of whatever product chooses to build.
CROs
CROs: engage with marketing metrics the same way you approach a roll-up of your AEs’ quota and forecasts — and not the way you would think about your pipeline reporting coming out of your RevOps team. In practice, this means that you can’t just limit the sales/marketing alignment conversation to setting shared KPIs once a quarter. It is vitally important to have a weekly forum to dig into the story behind the numbers and help the marketing team learn how to maintain a “sales forecast.”
CFOs
Create room in the budget for the team to take risks, resisting the urge to center every decision on an LTV/CAC ratio. This can take the form of formally carving out an “experimentation” budget that isn’t included in LTV/CAC target calculations. It also implies giving the team broad leeway to reallocate funds between channels and initiatives based on real-time results. Finally, this needs to come through in how you talk through and learn from failed campaigns, not just the successful ones.
Ops/Analytics
Counterintuitively, you may need to leave room for ambiguity and, as a result, marketing creativity in your data frameworks. For example, if there’s debate and ambiguity about which attribution framework to use, treat this as a feature, not a bug. Instead of debating which one is more accurate, ask yourself (and help the team learn) how the difference in attribution frameworks tells us a story about what we’re doing.
Product
Establish a high-bandwidth two-way conversation across all parts of the marketing org. While Product Marketing may feel like it should be your one-stop shop, it is equally important to align with Brand & DemandGen. Marketing input should surround your product roadmap, not just help commercialize features that have already been launched.
It is already August. Deals are moving slowly. You, your team, and your customers may all be taking PTO and charging up for the end-of-year push. We may still be in Q3, but 2025 will be here sooner than you think.
The best (i.e. successful) annual plans I’ve seen start with a strategic alignment conversation in August and an executive offsite in September. Whether you’re a revenue leader, a finance executive, or a CEO — early alignment is crucial to setting up the entire company for success.
Drop me a note to get a head start 👇 on next year’s growth.
Share this post with a colleague to initiate a conversation about accelerating your growth in 2025.
Upcoming posts in the cross-functional leadership series:
Why you should never goal CROs on sales efficiency
They don’t teach you Sales at Harvard Business School
Using pricing to align sales, marketing, product, finance, and operations!
…and more