Thursday, November 6, 2008

Challenges for CMOs - Here's a list

Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, launched "The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit" in SF today. Krainik asked the group of 60+ to each get up, introduce themselves, their company, and some of the challenges they're facing.

Here's a list of some of those CMO challenges. Very amusing that they're truly all over the map.
  • How to deal with customers who don't listen.
  • Coming up with creative and intriguing tools to support a reseller channel.
  • Dealing with ROI, where the marketing department is the sales department.
  • Reaching out to the eBay power seller community.
  • Trying to keep our brand promise in line with product breadth because they're growing so much.
  • How to get everyone back on the same ideas and strategies.
  • Looking for good SEM vendors.
  • How does a small team market to an audience internationally and in different languages?
  • How can our three offices being more unified?
  • Try to get leads through the door and get the brand built.
  • Splitting time between tactical stuff and longer range tactical thinking.
  • Resolve conflict with my VP of sales (big laugh from the room).
  • Understanding from CEOs what's expected from the CMO role. How do you stay in line with the CEO at the start of a CMO gig?
  • (From a tobacco manufacturer) Handling communicates in a very restrictive communications environment.
  • How to get decision making going through the top five banks.
  • (From a mobile advertiser) Biggest challenge to make people realize that WAP is not crap.
  • How do you create an end-to-end structure to measure ROI?
  • Now that we've invited large competitors into our market, how does a small company that's been doing well compete with the big boys.
  • As a B2B play, we have 8 million users, but nobody knows who we are. We need to build our brand.
  • What are consumers going to start spending their money on again now that their wallets have closed after October?
  • Demand has shot up and we need to scale.
  • Evangelize our new business concept.
  • How can my sales team market our charter memberships to brands.
  • How can we translate an "aha" moment with a customer engagement and then actually market it.
  • What am I allowed to say now that I'm with a public company?
  • How do I convert a boxed software company to a SaaS model?
  • How do you get partners when you haven't achieved scale to make you look more attractive?
  • Change people's expectations that a social media solution is not free.
  • How do you convince companies that outsourcing is a good thing and not a bad thing.
  • How to get a company to focus and take action on generating revenue.
  • How to effectively go to market with traditional and social media marketing.
  • Cutting through the noise of social media and social marketing and get them down to the ROI perspective and actually generate revenue.
  • When you're a private company, how do you compete with large public companies' marketing budgets.
Many of the CMOs started their new job just weeks ago. Not new to being a CMO, just new to the company. Constantly jumping from one company to another is the fate of a CMO. One CMO joked that she was a tenured professional because she had been at her job for 18 months. From the last CMO Club summit we learned that the typical life span of a CMO is 18 months.

Check out all coverage at The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit.

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