How CMOs embrace and drive corporate strategy: Best practices from the pros

There's a big difference between "running marketing" and "driving the market opportunity". According to one CMO, the "running marketing" part should be just one third of a successful chief marketing officer's job.

Our weekly CMO Coffee Talk last week focused on corporate strategy, and the CMO's role in defining and driving it. This includes product roadmap, strategic planning, executive and customer-facing team alignment and much more.

A few highlights and insights in the quotes below (also check out our video recap). If you are a marketing leader and would like to join this amazing group of CMOs (Friday mornings and/or via the vibrant Slack channel), let me know and I can send you an invitation.

Be curious, agile and discuss risk tolerance (Kimberly Storin)

Embrace win/loss research – it can not only help you impact sales, it’s also used to help with pricing, product strategy and much more (Alex Gobbi)

Sales/marketing alignment = pipeline. Product + marketing + sales alignment = market impact. (Sara Larsen)

In smaller companies you can use research to drive strategy more easily – the key is to make sure you have the respect and clout for people to take it seriously (Nimmy Reichenberg)

Move the research discussion to be about product roadmap. It leads to a more valuable alignment discussion between product, marketing and sales (Sara Larsen)

I’ve always taken the “what do I want to know” approach to research, designing interviews to go from the broad (“what do you do/what is your scope”) to the specific product or market related challenges/needs/wants. Most people will contribute their thoughts if you explain it’s just for internal use. (David Cooperstein)

A doctoral thesis showed that 20-30 interviews can generate the same insights/intelligence as a larger (often more expensive) quantitative survey (Debra Zahay-Blatz)

Building trust = reliability x credibility x vulnerability. Asking for help is good when you have the first two. (Helen Baptist)

Showing some vulnerability goes a long way to building a relationship. (Dwight Griesman)

Hire an analyst on your marketing team with a finance background who will help you dig into the data, find and leverage more insights.

CMOs have three jobs (in this order): Leadership (across the C suite), alignment (product/sales/marketing) and functional (marketing). Valuable to track your time in each as it will indicate whether you are in a ‘marketing’ or ‘market’ role. (Sara Larsen)

I use marketing to solve business problems (Penny Williams)

Position research as also a content development initiative to help secure budget for both. (Kimberly Storin)

PowerPoint has no power and rarely helps you make points. (Carilu Dietrich)

Don’t just show up with data, come with ideas, insights and recommendations to guide the conversation (JJ Jeffries)

The biggest mistake CMOs make is not tending to their key relationships – CEO, CFO and the board among others. (Carilu Dietrich)

Manage up is the best advice I’ve ever been given. (Sara Bresee)