Growing Your Marketing Department

For most CMOs, growth is a mandate. Their team is expected to help propel the company forward by generating new opportunities, providing “air cover” for sales teams, developing materials that help close deals faster, and increasing revenue from existing customers. And that’s just a partial list of the growth requests. To meet these demands, CMOs must have equally growth-oriented?departments.

But how to do this? Especially when talent costs are skyrocketing, attrition is out of control, and budgets remain tight. That’s the gnarly challenge we’ve discussed in?CMO Huddles , and while there are no easy answers, there are a number of things CMOs can do to help themselves and their teams succeed. Here are six that emerged from our?discussions.

Start with Strong Direct Reports

If you’re serious about building a department that can scale with your organization, you need highly skilled direct reports who are ready to build out and lead their own?teams.

The alternative is to hire more junior staffers who can save you money in the short term but will cost you both time and scalability in the long run. It’s a tradeoff with a predictable outcome that should also be made clear to your CEO and CFO–real growth requires an upfront?investment.

Become a CMO Trainer

One of the ways to attract skilled direct reports is to become a CMO who is recognized as someone who creates future CMOs. One huddler noted with pride that they had helped 6 direct reports go on to the CMO?role.

Doing this means hiring talent who are promotion-ready and helping these individuals fill in their developmental gaps. Rotating your direct reports and/or underwriting training courses will help each gain a broader understanding of marketing and how the pieces fit?together.

Limit Direct Reports to 6 or Less

This newsletter ?described the crisis of “meeting mania.” One culprit is that some CMOs have more than 6 direct reports which mean more 1:1s, more emails that you can’t ignore, and more?evaluations.

In our huddles, several CMOs noted having 3 or 4 direct reports, enabling them to have more senior people in those roles which in turn meant the CMO could spend more time leading marketing and less time doing marketing. Ah yes, that’s how we put the Chief in Chief Marketing?Officer.

Grow Cross-Functional Players

Marketing has a silo problem. The folks that are driving demand don’t think about the brand. The folks doing PR aren’t thinking about sales enablement. The result is that the components don’t work together, limiting their impact, and these individuals aren’t becoming well-rounded?marketers.

One huddler shared how they are fighting this by encouraging staffers to have “majors” (primary role) and “minors” (secondary role). The result is that employees are learning more, are generally more satisfied, and are readier for?promotions.

Protect Your Team from Low Priority Requests

Most CMOs acknowledge that their team members are feeling unprecedented levels of stress. While many of the causes are outside of CMOs’ control (pandemic-related disruptions), there is one big thing CMOs can do – empower their teams to say “no” or “great idea but not?now.”

The simple idea here is that your department has priorities that are fully aligned with organizational priorities and that your team has permission to push back on requests that don’t align with these?priorities.

Empower All to Be Innovators

About 10 years ago, then-CMO of SAP Jonathan Becher established an innovation marketing team within his department. Six months later he shut it down, admitting, “It didn’t accomplish what I expected, as we were essentially segregating innovation to one small group. In fact, it created some resistance to change and innovation. We disbanded the group and focused on creating a culture of innovation?instead.”

Creating a culture of innovation will not only help you attract and keep talent but also will ensure your growing team fulfills its?mandate.

If you have other thoughts on growing your department, please let us?know.