CMOs in the Boardroom: 5 Essential Strategies

The board meeting is our chance to review our performance, forecast the rest of the year, contribute to the long-term strategy, get the right resources, and prove our value. It’s scary because the board is judging us, and we don’t always have perfect, rosy news. But you can be successful despite business challenges if you bring strong insights, accurate data, and a point of view on what to do next. Here are five steps for success, informed dozens of CEOs, VCs, PE investors, board members and investors:

1. Know the Background and Language of the Board
2. Be Strategic, Clear, and Brief
3. Balance High-Level and Detail
4. Physically Prepare to be Confident and Effective
5. Consider This Slide Outline

#1 Know the Responsibilities and Language of the Board

The board of directors is responsible for strategy, overseeing management, and protecting the interests of shareholders and stakeholders. In both private and public companies, the board typically includes internal members like the founders, the CEO, or the CFO and external members like investors, independent experts, or representatives from major stakeholders. Independents have often been CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, or other C-Suite executives.

For private companies, it's common for the board to be made up of founders, CEOs, and investors only, independents are less common. Investors have a big financial stake and provide strategic guidance and critical introductions. But they may have never actually worked inside a business as an operator. The board provides financial oversight and guidance to help the company grow and thrive, hires and fires the CEO, and makes recommendations on compensation and investments. Note that this focus (and their experience) is strategy, financials, and governance — marketing itself is generally not an expertise and often not a deep interest! Only 4% of the directors of Fortune 1000 boards are CMOs, according to Spencer Stewart .

Because of this, board members often don’t want a CMO to get too deep in the weeds. They don’t care about acronyms and activities, they care about financial outcomes and generating more profit or growth. Too much detail makes you look junior like you don’t have mastery of your domain. Specifically, they would like a brief perspective on these questions, with clear data, compared to historical numbers or benchmarks to support your analysis:

• Strategic: What is your perspective on the market dynamics, customer insights and levers that marketing or the company can pull to drive more growth in revenue and profits over the next several years? What do we need to do to get there?
• Present: Did you hit the pipeline and revenue this quarter - why or why not?
• Future: Will you hit the pipeline and revenue for the next quarter and the remainder of the year - why or why not?

#2 Be Strategic, Clear, and Brief

Many CMOs over-index on the “present” - digging deep into funnel metrics, marketing qualified leads, and recent activity reports. Board members are looking for you to guide their strategic thinking. They are looking for you to digest and summarize the information FOR THEM so they can focus on what really matters. Here are a few key tips on being strategic, clear, and brief:

• What’s most important for them to know, and why? How can you make the context, opportunities, risks, and plans simple and easy to understand?
• Marketing stats are table stakes - how can you add to their knowledge about the core business and market drivers? Don’t just give a weather report; bring a thesis to encourage debate and analysis.
• Provide synthesized insights on your competitors, market dynamics, or customers. Are there relevant benchmarks or historical data? CMOs often earn their seat as the voice of the customer and market.
• Besides informing company strategy, can you show that marketing strategy clearly aligns with the same vision, and priorities? Show alignment with the CEO.
• YOU MUST BE ALIGNED WITH SALES & THEIR DATA - You must pre-met with sales and align your #s, plans, and remedies. There should be no discrepancies in pipeline numbers, no finger-pointing, only alignment that shows mastery of the problems and agreement on the solutions.
• What is your ask or goal? Are you giving them an FYI, asking for advice, a decision, or money? Is it simple and clear?
• Start the answer to every question in the board meeting with “Yes” / “No” / # / or “I don’t know.” Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” -- it will add trustworthiness to the answers you do know and share. Don’t banter on with long answers that don’t clearly answer the question.
• Provide a small set of clear, impactful and consistent performance stats and why they matter. Report on the same stats quarter after quarter to build trust and understanding.

#3 Balance High Level and Detail

The board doesn’t want to pre-read endless decks and analyses. They want the digested summary. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want YOU to know and have all the details you need. The board meeting is like an open-notes test - you can bring all of the executive dashboards, graphs, and data you need to answer questions precisely. A few more tips:

• Simplify your slides to the core summary, but consider adding supplementary data charts to the official pre-read appendix or just a day-of appendix.
• You MUST trust and understand your numbers. Some CMOs actively plan insight / data projects ahead of board meetings to address known data issues. No one wants to get stuck the day before slides are due with unanswerable questions.
• Consider pre-meeting with any board members (WITH THE CEO’s APPROVAL) to check your agenda and understand their hot buttons, concerns, and board history around your topics.
• Don’t be obsessed with sticking to your slides -- follow where the board wants to go in the discussion. Sometimes, you’ll only discuss a few slides.
• Gather all your most valuable data, and then ask yourself again: where can I simplify? “LESS IS MORE X 10,” says Christine Heckart , a former CEO, multi-time board member, and former CMO of Cisco.

#4 Physically Prepare to be Confident and Effective

The board can HELP you and the company get the strategy right. It can be scary, but you also don’t have to have solved every problem already. You need to show that you understand the problems deeply and have a solution, a timeline, and metrics to evaluate progress. Your confidence will be greater if you’re fully prepared. Practical considerations:

• Do you know the exact dates of scheduled board meetings?
• How early do you need to pre-send materials to the board? Some companies send a week ahead, some a few days.
• Have you added the dates to your team’s calendars for prep? How does this timing relate to your Quarterly Business Review? Can it be used for analysis?
• How much time does your CEO need to make revisions? Design?
• Have you scheduled enough time with the CRO to align on slides and data?
• Is your content visually appealing and inspiring? You’re the brand ambassador.
• Have you blocked time before the meeting to center, relax your body, and prepare? (I once scheduled a super-stressful meeting right before a board meeting and came in frazzled. “Proper planning prevents poor performance…”)

#5 Consider this Slide Outline

... Get the outline for slides and the rest of the article the rest at www.carilu.com