CMO is a Credibility War Every Day

Patty Azzarello, CEO of Azzarello Group, continued the discussion about managing the CMO role with her presentation, "CMO is a Credibility War Every Day." She walked the audience through some great advice for the CMOs on how to build their credibility within the organization.

Building credibility is a task for any executive, not just CMOs

• Credibility is inversely proportional to stupid questions (e.g. Why are you spending money on that? Do you think that's important?) The higher the credibility the fewer you get these stupid questions.
• People with high credibility get more done.

Does your organization equate marketing with leads and glossing things up? If you do, then you have an issue, but luckily with this crowd that wasn't the case.

The CMO has extra credibility challenges built right into the role. You're not always seen as a business leader, the system is pitted against you, your budget is easy to cut, brand is built by their behavior, yet bad perception is the fault of marketing. Plus, if the CMO doesn't have product marketing reporting to him/her, then you've got a major strategy and positioning disconnect.

Lastly, does the CEO "get it." If not, you still may have opportunities if you've got a good corporate situation.

Building credibility

• Do things on purpose
• Schedule and make time for issues - Make room to do extra stuff. No one is going to do it for you. They don't have motivation to do it. The most successful people are not burned out. They don't have to do everything. Focus on your "ruthless priorities."
• Build capacity in your team - Get better results out of the same programs over time and take costs out year after year. Don't keep asking for money year after year. Do better with less. In addition, increase the capabilities and learning agenda (individual and team level) of your team.
  
• Act like a general manager (how you position the way you spend money, build an internal communications plan for your stakeholders)

Think and act like a business manager

• Make sure your marketing plan is not isolated to marketing.
• Show your understanding of the P&L and what impact your spending has on profit.
• Get your priorities ratified by the business.
• Tie your marketing approach to business model objectives.

Budget
Azzarello recommends what she calls a "left column makeover." And what that involves is taking your costs and divide them up in newly titled categories that have high level marketing and business goals. Put those headings over the costs so they know what that is. An example of those three columns could be:

• Support current business/products
• New initiatives and improvements
• Strategic initiatives.

On top of that, Azzarello suggest a MUST column. This is all key for your negotiations. The must column allows you to take things off the table. Allows you to protect money and head count. Now you're able to negotiate because you're now just debating by column, and each column is titled by a different business initiative. You're defining what that is, you're just negotiating which one you're going to achieve.

Key Internal Stakeholders - The CEO
All they think about are trade offs. Get your head in the trade off mode. Marketing makes them nervous. Understand the issues they have which is primarily profit and share value. They also want to be industry changing and want to be seen on the map in a different way.

The CFO
Win the CFO over and try to have them see you more as a person than just dollars which is all they traditionally think about.

Sales
Show up and meet the sales staff. Advertise a process to the sales force as to how they should communicate with marketing. You bring it back to sales and ask them to create the top ten list of issues. Attend reviews (in person or on phone at any time). Make sure you have ex-salespeople on your team.

Ask the salespeople what happened to your leads
Don't tolerate endless requests for more leads if they can't account for the ones they already have.

Measurement
Are you measuring to increase effectiveness, or are you doing it just to keep people off your back? Be prepared, because you'll be attacked.

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

Being a Better CMO

What does it take to be a better CMO? Four CMOs sat down to discuss leadership and career management issues for CMOs. On the panel (from left to right) were:

• Holly Ripley-Boyd, CMO of Ness Technologies
• Beth Weesner, Founder of Marketing Transformation Services
• Meredith Hanrahan, CMO of Salary.com
• Ram Menon, CMO of Tibco

Here's a summary of advice from the panel and the audience of CMOs:

• Menon - Make marketing an attractive place to work. I start by trying to hire people that are smarter than me. Rotate people so they have a global perspective of the business. Give them the same kind of perspective you have. Reward your best people excessively and have it skewed.
• Hanrahan - 60% of your employees don't talk about their goals outside of their performance review. 65% don't think their goals are tied to the company goals. What does it matter how I perform if it doesn't count in my review, employees think. And 60% of employees don't think their feedback is taken into consideration in their review.
• Hanrahan - Millenials are expecting feedback every single day. They grew up working in a team environment. You have to have goals that a team can embrace and they need to see it.
• Celebrate personal moments in your employees' lives and even ask what people's "happiness" index is (personal and professional).
• Hanrahan - One of the reasons people stay at a job is because they have a best friend at work.
• Ripley-Boyd - You don't want to educate on marketing theory, you want to tap into the business aspirations of the CEO and President. Develop a CEO-like obsession with the bottom line. Contributing to things outside of the marketing sphere and help out and show consideration to the CMO.
  
• Weesner - Be a marketing person that can actually talk about the business.
• Menon - Get to know your product. For example, if you're at a software company, you should be able to demo your product. Go out on a sales call and know what the story is being told out in the field. Manage upward to the board and get into the board meeting. Do all those things that you don't think are your job. That's how you can be both the cheerleader and chief. All those little things add up.
  
• Menon - Go for the emotional play. Sure you've got a few spreadsheets that say one thing, but tell some actual stories that paint a bigger picture.
• Ask your different groups, "What does marketing mean to your part of the company?" You'll be amazed with the answers you get. Unite this information and then communicate back to the corporation that marketing means something different to everyone.
• Hanrahan - Marketing is often seen as a staff function rather than a revenue function. Define your role and the communicate it.
• Weesner - The more we understand the details of our customers and the ability to align them with the company's goals, you'll be able to make better decisions for the marketing department.

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

Driving In-Market Success by Leading Organization Alignment

Amy Roman and David Covucci, Principals of CMO Associates, led a discussion entitled, "Driving In-Market Success by Leading Organization Alignment."

They shared results from a CMO survey where they're in the process of trying to uncover what separates super star CMOs from really good CMOs.

They boiled down the number one challenge for the CMO role is getting the organization aligned. Here are the main barriers a CMO has to deal with:

• Who is responsible for value delivery?
• Who are the required 'value team' members?
• How do we communicate with each other?
• What is our process?

The CMO Club survey revealed the following:

• Over 90% stated organizational alignment is very important to marketing success and customer retention.
• Over 60% stated their company performs inconsistently or very poorly in achieving organization alignment.
• Over 85% stated the CEO was responsible for alignment leadership, or there was no designated leadership.

CMO Associates sees these opportunities:

1. CMO has best vantage point to understand all of the key details and can foster collaborative rather than authoritarian alignment process.
2. Establish an alignment process. You get consistency. CMOs provide the energy and facilitation.

Three challenges

• Construct a process that facilitates collaboration, coordination, communication, and giving credit.
• Develop a systematic approach to implement this process.
• Enlist 'C' level peers and sell the CEO on the revised CMO role.

CMOs have the most ambiguous job within the company. You need to create a process and here are necessary elements for that process:

• Give the organization a common language.
• Make alignment imperatives visible to everyone.
• Enlist support of peers through collaboration.
• Show the CEO that you have a plan and the support of your peers.

CMO Associates recommends these four steps:
Step 1 - Own the value proposition. This is what CMOs already do and know they should do.

Step 2 - Define the value delivery network. Know the roles, functions, and processes involved in the value delivery (e.g. pricing, value, sales, delivery, and measurement).

Step 3 - Construct the network alignment model. This is the core and defines what alignment actually looks like. How should roles and processes be integrated with each other to deliver value to the customer base? Customers should be a part of this process and it's the primary communications process for the rest of the organization. And it's what you should be showing to your CEO to explain what alignment looks like at your organization. To actually align it you start with situational success and you move towards continous improve it.

Step 4 - Structure the leadership role.

The skills and competencies you need to make it work require you to think beyond the traditional four P's and think of alignment as a team effort for both marketing and non-marketing staff. Ultimately, this alignment will be highly customized and be malleable to deal with different situations.

CMOs surveyed by CMO Associates were asked what are the three most important factors for successful alignment. Here were the most often cited factors:

1. Clearly articulated value proposition
2. Clear understanding of what alignment looks like
3. Alignment between sales and marketing
4. Metrics for non-marketing functions
5. A scorecard to measure and monitor alignment progress
6. Appropriate executive owns the value proposition

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