A CMO's First 90 Days: Expectations, relationships, pacing and more

Ask chief marketing officers to share their best practices for managing through their first 90 days on the job and people go DEEP. The following excerpts from last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk sessions covers a wide range of topics - from listening tours to board relationships, to expectation-setting to culture and team set-up and beyond.

Some actionable and thought-provoking comments below, keep reading to the end to get all the good stuff.

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I always think no one hires you to sail a smoothly sailing ship.

I find WFH extremely difficult building relationships. It tends to silo your relationships to immediate circle.

For me, the #1 priority is relationship building because most of what I do in those first months involves big change - to the brand, the tech stack, the way we communicate. Having a solid foundation of relationships BEFORE I roll those out helps prevent people feeling like I’m rocking the boat too much. Having said that, my goal is always to have a clear plan in place by the end of the first 30 days showing what I’ll be doing for the next 90, with goals attached.

First board meeting is sharing your understanding/assessment and areas of opportunity you see.

I had a colleague say to me, the best thing you can do for a new senior hire is fill them in on the underground scoop.

Conflict resolution all comes down to fixing Relationships vs Tasks. Check out Adam Grant's new book Think Again - full of team dynamic and 1:1 insights.

Listening tour also includes a lot of people’s feedback on “the last person in the job” and you learn a lot about what’s expected of you by process of elimination.

Love the listening tour. What’s working? What’s not? What needs improved? Who are you and why are you here?

I ask people who their favorite manager was in their career and why? It helps in understanding what they may need from me as their new leader.

I like to ask, “If you were me, what would you focus on?”

I ask “what do you think I should know about that I might not be asking”

If you had a magic wand, what one thing do you think we need to fix?

I’ve found there usually aren’t dumb questions… these are the ‘tough’ questions.

I often try to make friends with the underserved operational teams who feel overshadowed by sales. A lot of great ideas and insights there.

I make super friends with IT every time. I always end up with the nicest gear??!

Also live vicariously through new members on your team…follow along on their 90 day plans (I have all new hires do 90 day plans for themselves).

I always meet with non-direct reports at 45 days and ask them what we need to do to improve onboarding.

Our team culture has built up to the point where we now have "adoptive" marketing team members (folks from other departments who just want to be a part of our team). We have them in our Teams chat now.

My best early relationship turned out to be the CFO b/c they had the best insights on how to work with the CEO.

Get to know Biz Ops - the team that holds the cross-functional data. Data has always been my best friend for good decision-making… starting a new role or trying to drive transformation mid-tenure. Second that on the CFO as well.

My biggest mistake in my prior role was not insisting on a LOT of time with the CEO early on. And because of that, my “quick wins” didn’t register as wins at all to them. This time around, I insisted and started with two 1-on-1’s a week, and we’ve been aligned the whole time.

Important to talk with the current marketing team members. In my last 5 roles they have not been heard because leadership assumed they knew nothing.

My biggest challenge is finding who is caustic and who is an ally across the org. A few times it's been product management but mostly sales.

You can spend a lot of time digging in with product or sales or channel or customer success etc - but if you don’t have a good sense of the biggest business challenge (and are aligned with CEO on what that is), you will waste all your time ‘collaborating’ not problem solving.

Why do humans assume ANYONE outside the company is smarter than the people we have here?

Similarly, I always ask what should marketing start doing, stop doing, and continue doing.

I've had to rebuild the team at least 3x and every single time, I waited too long to let go of toxic people.

I also spent a lot of time in my first 6 months making “friends” with all the other exec team leads through 2x/month 1-on-1s. It paid OFF. They LIKE me now. They TRUST me now. Especially starting the role during pandemic remote-ville where they all already had physical-real relationships they established in the office prior to my arrival. Now I’m using all that capital I built up.

One of the hardest situations is someone on the team who is smart and charismatic but toxic at the same time. Those people are hard to address because “everyone loves them.” You have to remember that they are the most effective at spreading toxicity because of their charisma. You need to take action and not let it grow.

If you can pitch your Marketing Scorecard/KPIs based on a collective build WITH your CFO, it will likely mean more to your CEO.

My CEO at the last startup created a User Manual for him and had me create one for me. Based on a post by Brad Feld here - it was really helpful in a small, intimate environment as we got the business up and running.

I think it is important to be aligned with the CFO BEFORE you take a new CMO role.

For me it is important to have trust with the CFO that I can manage to a cost structure that fits in the P&L but have flexibility to move my spending between headcount, program, tech and T&E.

Just finished my first 90 days. Additional things I did was figure out what worked last year and get super aligned on revenue goals for 2021 and the breakdown of where that revenue would come from (channel vs expansion vs direct, etc). Then I built a plan on how Marketing would help us get drive that revenue. It meant we could no longer just focus on Inbound. Had to build an ABM muscle and put more into Channel and staff/budget accordingly.

Culture is absolutely king. The only jobs I quit were a result of leadership and culture.

Your relationship with the board or at least the active ones is also key - often the CEO wants to be the gate keeper which can be a problem if the CEO is not from the sales/marketing world.

Sometimes THE most important relationship is that squeaky wheel on the board. I would always ask to speak to a board member/investor before taking a new role.

Present with the Sales leader in your first board meeting. Shows alignment that you are working together on top priority.

I start every board presentation with market insights. They look to me as the one who is grounded in outside insights.

We built a full marketscape kit for board meetings as a pre-read that we would go through highlights. Category, customer insights, trends we're seeing, competitors, etc. They appreciated that a LOT.

Our CEO is the gate keeper and main presenter during the board meetings simply to streamline the meetings. But I (and a few of us on the exec team) have direct 1:1 relationships with the board advisors and standing 1:1s to leverage their expertise in their respective areas.

If your CEO is the gatekeeper, provide her with great content to use. I flood mine with cool dashboards showing results across field, distribution, marketing ops, social, website, etc. Give her great stories to share at the board.

In my experience the board does not expect us to have all the answers all the time, but rather to see that we are on top of the gaps and actively seeking solutions. A sense of curiosity and urgency too.