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.