The Global CMO - A Real-life Unicorn

A co-authored article by members of G-CMO Forum; G-CMO is a community of Israel's top CMOs from global companies and VC's, powering the "Startup Nation".

Yael Shatzky, CMO at Seegnal, led this interesting discussion about today’s global CMO role, with G-CMO members: 

The role of the CMO was born initially to focus mainly on lead generation, advertising, and brand management. Over the past decades, the main purpose and the way CMOs are measured has shifted from “hard sell”, to creating relationships with customers and communities, and more recently, to lead customer experiences, as CMOs aim to make customers “feel something”. 

As global marketing becomes the main growth engine of fast-moving companies, today's CMOs are also responsible for global growth, market penetration and scaling up the brand offer to global markets, in addition to their traditional roles. 

In a data-centered world, everything must be measured, carefully and meticulously calculating ROI to justify any investment of time, money or attention. But how do you measure customers “feeling something”? 

With the role of CMO evolving rapidly, we reached out to G-CMO forum members to get their take on the most pressing questions.

What do CMOs do, anyway? 

Let’s start by defining what we believe a CMO in this day and age should be responsible for: 

Efrat Fenigson, Co-founder of G-CMO and former VP Marketing at Airobotics, provides a very strategic view of the CMO role: “In 2019, CMOs who run global marketing operations are the new age compass of the company. They master branding, content marketing, demand generation, storytelling, communications, budgeting and oversee various tactics for growth. But above all, they master a strategy, to bring out the uniqueness in each brand, delight customers and build relationships and communities that show real value to the world.  If executed well, their strategies will drive companies’ valuation up, drive growth and create a true impact. In many cases, CMOs act as the CEO’s right hand.” 

Yael Shafrir, VP of International Partnerships at Playbuzz, paints a vivid picture: “The marketing world is a complicated ever-changing space where the CMO is a superhero, flashing superpowers and hiding secret weapons. Each CMO has his/her dominant power and each leads a gang, that together possesses all required tools to fight successfully. CMOs’ responsibility is to win and they’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish that. They’ll use creative thinking and apply technology. They’ll plan strategic moves, but also tactical quick wins. They’ll develop a long term vision, but do whatever it takes to bring in revenue yesterday. They’ll do all that as it’s their responsibility to beat the competition and master their domain.”

Amit daniel, SVP Marketing and Employer Branding at Verint concures: “The fact that a single brand needs to convey a clear story, aligned across all potential targeted audiences is now clearly understood. Nowadays, marketing involvement is being demanded by different parts of the organization. As we are at an age of storytelling, even departments, previously having limited interaction with marketing (e.g. HR, service, business development) now understand the importance of such clear story, and strives to leverage this know-how and to cooperate, as marketing becomes part of more strategic initiatives.”

Taking into account a company’s lifecycle stage, does that stage influences the roles and responsibilities of the CMO? 

Dana Zelitzki, VP Marketing at Valens, seems to think that it does, to a certain extent: “In one sense, the CMO is responsible to make the company’s valuation as high as possible. This is specifically true for start-ups. A company’s valuation is comprised of many factors - many of which fall under the immediate responsibility of the CMO, such as brand, perception, strategy, media relations, analyst relations, partnerships, new sales and customers, customer retention and all that, is a result of the company's ability to tell a good story. This is exactly the CMO’s responsibility today.”

Gal Jacobi, VP Marketing at SparkBeyond has a different opinion: “CMOs’ key mission is leading brand building and serving as guardians to the brand. In that aspect, the CMO’s role in generating value, changed very little in recent years. Having said that, the challenges, opportunities and tactical execution are indeed ever changing and evolved dramatically in recent years. The prioritization of the key results indeed varies according to the life stages of the brand, the business objectives and the positioning in the competitive landscape.”

Lisa Bennett, VP Marketing at Kaltura, thinks that “The CMO’s role is to strike the right balance between the “art” and the “science” of marketing. On the one hand, marketers are increasingly measured across a range of metrics. Most commonly, demand generation, brand awareness and influence to the company’s bottom line; but on the other hand, companies look to marketing to drive creativity and excitement in the market.“

Sophie Melnik, Co-founder of G-CMO and former Head of International Marketing at Outbrain, summarizes: “The constant tossing and turning, and feelings of unease are all too familiar for CMOs who wear more hats than ever before. From playing the role of the brand advocate, strategist, technologist, growth hacker, revenue drivers, and much more, the CMO’s scope of responsibilities has notably expanded. Marketing leaders now hold accountability for their company’s growth and ROI more than ever. The main challenge, in a world where consumers are overwhelmed with content and information, is how to cut through the noise and get the customer's attention. All marketing initiatives and strategies should be made with the customer in mind. And in 2019, CMOs will have to drive a customer-focused mindset throughout the organization more than ever before. To stand out, marketers must understand the customer’s needs and how their expectations are changing. Remember – you’re communicating with humans, so sounding like one is imperative. Consumers appreciate authenticity and will support brands they can personally relate to.”

The future CMO

Given the increased pace of change, it is only reasonable to expect that the role of the CMO will continue to change and adjust over the next few years. We’ve asked the G-CMO forum members what they thought their role would look like in 3 years. Their answers were surprisingly varied:  

Jonathan Kaftzan, VP Marketing at Deep Instinct: “I believe the CMO role will be very context related - B2B or B2C, enterprise or startup. For me, as a CMO of a growing startup, I expect to be much more involved in generating sales (not just leads and pipeline) and my role will become more driven by actual sales results. At the same time, as a general trend, I think marketing needs to get back to basics and to classical marketing, and be less "funnel technical". So, refocus on the brand and story, as well as the unique selling points and the differentiation.

Rafi Kretchmer, Head of Check Point Product Marketing and former CMO at Panaya, takes it even further: “In B2B tech companies, the recent focus on the marketing technical flurry and the ongoing hassle around granular, execution-oriented measurements, drive marketing to a tactical position. CMOs will have to reverse the dynamics and become tightly coupled to business results and even commit to pipeline generation and win ratio. In parallel, the focus will have to shift back from an “inside out” technology-driven marketing, to “outside-in” or buyer-oriented marketing that is based on classical marketing methods such as buyer and persona analysis, market trends analysis, and understanding buyer problems, needs and journeys.” 

Uri Bar-Joseph, VP of Marketing at Mindspace: ”I believe CMOs will be expected to ‘touch’ even more parts of the organization on the one hand, while automating and scaling ‘touchpoints’ on the other hand. In B2B, marketing will be expected to become a ‘revenue center’ and we will see more organizations moving sales development into marketing, freeing up the sales teams to focus on opportunities and sales. Additionally, I agree with Jonathan and think that as the pendulum swings back from focusing on ‘performance marketing’, brand marketing will see a resurgence, armed with new ways to measure and attribute brand marketing success to revenue and performance.” 

Yael Paz, VP Business Development at Qumra Capital, thinks that “Expectations from CMOs are constantly on the rise. CMOs need to show their value in driving growth and to do so must be open to learning new technologies and flexible to adapting new initiatives that drive top-line revenue. Also, the CMO is as good as their team. Identifying the new roles that are going to be needed as a result of digital developments and staffing them with the same open-minded team members, are a key responsibility of the CMO to keep themselves and their organization ahead of the curve.” 

Shiri Grosbard, Director of Innovation People Experience at AppsFlyer and Former Co-founder at Join Digital Talent Agency, adds “I believe that the changing environment poses an opportunity for marketers to really carry out and train the best muscle they are supposed to ‘come with’ into this profession: Creativity. The second most important skill is managerial capacity. When running global marketing operations, the ability to manage processes remotely, while engaging and truly leading the team, is of crucial importance. CMOs are meant to inspire, bring innovative new thought and help bring out the creative thinking of their teams.”    

Yael Shafrir, VP of International Partnerships at Playbuzz concludes: “I believe the three most important words for the CMO in the next three years will continue to be Value, Data (knowledge base >> insights) and Relationships - but as we move forward, we will fine-tune the meaning and the means to achieve these key values.”

There is no doubt the role of the global CMO is evolving, hand in hand with the strategic shift of the organizations served. Yet, this role is becoming more and more multi-disciplinary, demanding in-depth knowledge and versatility not commonly found in any other domain. Good global CMOs are leaders and dreamers.

Good global CMOs:

• Are creative, innovative, great storytellers and always a little different;
• Have an eye for a brand
• Possess an in-depth understanding of the products and services they promote
• Have strong analytical skills for on-the-fly optimization of digital marketing lead generation,
• Are able to understand customers along with their specific pains and demands across countries and regions,
• Are great communicators, diplomats, and coachers
• And of course, they must be (from time to time) hands-on executers and project managers. 

Simply put - a good CMO is your every-day unicorn. 

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G-CMO Forum is an exclusive community of Israel’s top CMOs from global companies and VC’s. Take a look at our members, currently CMOs at:

Verint, Matrix, Taboola, Google, Check Point, Soda Stream, Playtika, Fiverr, Lemonade, Payoneer, AppsFlyer, IronSource, Kornit Digital, Tiny Love, PlayBuzz, Argus Cyber Security, Caesar Stone, Kaltura, Next Insurance, DreamCloud, MSD, Gett, Moovit, Optimove, PlayTech, Scientific Games Interactive, DGN Games, Natural Intelligence, Harman, Iridize (Oracle), Leonardo Hotels, Venn, Mindspace, hi-bob, SparkBeyond, Guesty, Lightricks, JoyTunes, Valens, Pitango VC, Viola, Qumra Capital, TLV Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, StageOne Ventures, Team8, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Firebolt, Deep Instinct, Cynet, Stratoscale, Freightos, Algatech, WhiteSource, Percepto, Promo, Keywee, UVeye, Ripples, PlainID, Upright, Sapiens, Dario Health, Workiz, Magic Software, Pearl Cohen.

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