How to Get a CMO Gig (or any other Marketing Job)

I enjoyed the Linkedin article titled “The CMO Mess and How We Can Clean It Up” by Jenifer Kern. In the piece, Jenifer happily reports that the CMO profession “…is alive and well, as vibrant and thriving as ever.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, if you’re a marketer at any level, it’s a great time to be looking for work, a promotion, or starting your own business. 

However, despite the positive assessment, she adds “… our profession is One. Big. Hot. Mess.” One of the reasons for this, she says, is that there are many different types of marketers with varied strengths, backgrounds, and skill sets out in the wild. Because of this, companies can get lost in the scramble to hire the right-fit marketing leader for their business.

Based on my informal research spanning some 25 years, I think the problem may be more deeply rooted. I’ve served in various roles in business, marketing, and technology, including almost 20 years an adjunct at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. Over half my time at NYU has been spent developing and teaching marketing strategies and tactics to hundreds of wicked smart brand and agency marketers from around the world. As a trusted consultant and advisor to Chief Marketing Officers, senior marketing execs, and plenty of their direct reports, I’ve done a lot of listening, learning, and sharing of ideas on the ways of the Marketing Jedi (sorry, I couldn’t help it).

Digital versus Traditional Marketing

And while we’re in the neighborhood, let me address this ongoing conflict of digital versus traditional marketing; some say sure, the world has gone full-tilt digital, but that doesn’t mean we must abandon traditional marketing. Others say the idea of digital marketing as a discipline is a farce – it’s all part of marketing. If you buy that, then congrats - integrated marketing is your bag. Integrated marketing means coordinating messages across channels, digital and traditional, online and offline, to create unified, interactive experiences for consumers that cut through the noise and help them to interact with – and remember - your brand.

"I always smile when agencies claim they are doing digital. Honestly, maybe that was good in 2010, but in 2017 they should claim they just do marketing. We need to stop talking about digital – it’s all part of marketing." – Stéphane Bérubé, Western Europe CMO at L’Oréal

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

I think we can all agree that the most significant change in the past decade has been the tectonic shift from traditional to digital – everything – not just marketing. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The proof of this is at your fingertips, on your new iPhone, Pixel 2, LG, HTC, or Samsung device. And it’s not just the technology; it’s how we’ve fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and communicate. And it’s constantly changing, turning legacy industries upside down:

• NBCU Gathering of Ad, Media Elite Raises Questions About Industry’s Future (Executives discuss problems with commercial fatigue, ad measurement and reaching consumers across platforms—but few solutions emerge.) – WSJ
• How Agencies Are Shifting Strategies to Compete With Accenture and Deloitte (Evolving client demands call for sweeping changes.) – Adweek
• WPP dismissive of Deloitte and Accenture's 'creative' aspirations (The world's largest agency group, WPP, has dismissed the apparent threat from consultancies such as Accenture and Deloitte which have begun to acquire creative shops to grow into the advertising and design sectors to service their clients.) – The Drum

"I don't know how larger agencies can shift their gears fast enough to protect the foundation of their business and their staff." – Ken Lomasney, COO at unified.agency

• Glamour magazine goes 'digital first' and cuts back print editions (A spokeswoman told the BBC the "mobile-first, social-first" move with a focus on beauty was based on how readers are "living their life today".) – BBC
• The Print Apocalypse and How to Survive It (Between 2000 and 2015, print newspaper advertising revenue fell from about $60 billion to about $20 billion, wiping out the gains of the previous 50 years. But lately, the collapse of newspapers is looking less like a steady erosion than an accelerating avalanche.) – The Atlantic

Think Google, Uber, Facebook, Snapchat, Spotify, Instagram, Tesla, Tinder, and Brietbart to name a few random brands that have disrupted the world we thought we knew. Seriously - have any of you experienced the exhilaration of getting a text message from your IoT-enabled refrigerator while at work advising you it has placed an order with AmazonFresh and your groceries will be delivered (and put away – thanks, Amazon Key!) before you get home? You will.

Don’t Get All Faklempt, OK?

Jenifer rightly says, “It’s time for US to take control of our own destiny. In the confused and crowded Marketing space, it’s imperative that senior marketers clearly communicate who you are, what key skill sets make up your marketing toolbox, and where your core strengths lie.”

Again, I couldn’t agree more, but that’s easier said than done. The challenge, from my vantage point, is that the marketing space isn’t the only thing that’s confused. Many of the marketers (and that includes CMOs) I’ve met and worked with over the years have a difficult time understanding and articulating who they are, what their core strengths are, and most important, putting together a clear, unique value proposition that describes the benefit of their “package.” What distinguishes you from your competition? How can you help organizations solve their customers’ problems?

Add to that the fact that those doing the hiring have a hard time answering the same questions, a clear understanding of precisely what they want in a resource, or putting together a clear, practical job description. This not only cultivates a populace of faklempt marketing folks, but it also makes hiring managers uptight and feeds the storyline that CMOs have the highest turnover in the C-suite.

Do You Like Pi?

Back in the 80’s, McKinsey & Company described the kind of people they wanted to hire as “T-shaped.” These T-shaped people were said to have two kinds of characteristics; the vertical stroke of the T indicated depth of skills, while the horizontal stroke described the ability to collaborate across disciplines. T-shaped people offered both depth and breadth in their skills.

Fast-forward to 2017 and we’re all about Pi-shaped people. It’s not enough to simply offer breadth and depth these days. Today, organizations expect you to have a number of adjacent skills (the bottom of the Pi symbol) and a whole lot of generalized knowledge about your industry, and other industries, too (the top of the Pi symbol).

To create value for any organization you work with, you’ll need strategic and execution chops. For the longest time, we’ve separated leadership profiles in two distinctive buckets - the “visionaries” who embrace strategy and think about the what and why, and the “operators” who handle the how. As this article in HBR says, “…we intuitively knew that there must be leaders that span these areas, but in fact, few do.” It will take work to get there, but the payoff is enormous.

"Pi-shaped marketers have a broad base of knowledge in all areas, but capabilities in both ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ disciplines. They are both analytical and data-driven, yet understand brands, storytelling, and experiential marketing." – Ashley Friedlein, Founder at Econsultancy

You don’t have to know everything to be valuable to an organization. Besides, how could you? The marketing industry is moving so fast; it’s hard for anyone to “know it all,” let alone to keep up. Fill the base of your Pi symbol with things that get you excited and let the top of your Pi be jam-packed with everything else, from “what is a digital product or service?” to “how do we get paid?”

Martech is a Fast-Moving Wave of Change – Ride Captain Ride

Just as important, if you want to succeed in marketing as a CMO, or in any other role, one of the first orders of business is to learn to ride the crest of technological change. This is mandatory, not an option.

The learning curve in marketing (and yes, that’s especially true of digital marketing) can be quite steep. If your goal is a long-term career as a marketer, you need a firm grip on this highly dynamic innovation we call digital marketing; it moves quickly and broadly like the crest of a high-rising wave. Riding that crest requires at least a basic understanding of the technologies that make the marketing industry work and how to choose and use them.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In the 2017-2018 CEB Marketing Talent Trends Report (registration required), one of the areas covered is core fundamentals of marketing that are necessary to drive corporate growth today. From the report (emphasis mine):

“Companies are currently spending more than ever on systems and technology— between 7% and 10% of their entire budget. The bulk of this is going toward digital investments, particularly those around personalization. Despite this robust increase in investment, our 2017 data shows little to no improvement over the past three years in marketers’ core understanding of the digital landscape or their understanding of the right principles and behaviors to harness in that environment.

"Given this focus of financial and energy resources on digital marketing efforts, it’s alarming to see that returns are not measuring up to those investments. In fact, only 26% of CMOs say they get significant returns on their digital personalization efforts

"Interestingly, marketers identified strategy as the greatest organizational-level barrier to reaching marketing excellence. The barrier cited least was the availability of marketing tools. In essence, marketers are telling us they don’t need more data, more machines, or more systems; they need to be upskilled to use the tools they already have.”

"The introduction of new digital technologies will inevitably lead to the creation of jobs that haven’t previously existed, with highly specialized skill requirements. But beyond these specialist type roles, the talent crisis is much broader. In fact, I would argue that all business talent needs to evolve by attaining a broad spectrum of digital skills, and more importantly a digital way of thinking." –Shane Steele, Global Head of Brand Marketing at Dropbox

Scott Brinker’s popular Marketing Technology Landscape chart has 5,381 logos as of May 2017, up 40% from the previous year. With all of those choices, moving ahead too far can incur risks inherent with unproven technology (“What do you mean we can’t integrate those 25 really expensive martech tools we’re using for a single view of the customer?”). Remaining behind courts obsolescence and the related loss of competitiveness (“Why does it take us 10 days to get changes to our website made and pushed live – and why do we have to call IT to do that?”). However, if you’re going to ride the crest of change, there’s a cost. It requires a constant commitment to learn and grow – much like the strategic planning and management approach to growing a sustainable business.

Cats and Dogs Living Together?

Let me be clear; I’m not suggesting we’ve got a rampant competency (incompetence?) problem within the marketing population, that the sky is falling, or that cats and dogs are living together. I’m just saying we all need to work a little harder defining our unique selling proposition and challenging ourselves to move out of our comfort zone (traditional marketers, take heed). That can take time, work, help from others (can you say, “mentor?”), and maybe even cost you a little money. But it’s critical to your success.

As the folks at CEB point out in their report, marketers don’t need more stuff (even though there’s plenty of it out there). Marketers need to wrap their heads around the what, why, and how of the digital landscape and develop strategies and tactics that allow them to use marketing technology to its fullest (especially the stuff they’ve already invested in) while developing integrated marketing chops. For CEOs hiring a new CMO or CMOs building out a team, technology skills must be somewhere near the top of the list, but integrated thinking and doing should be right there, too. And once we get them onboard, let’s make sure we’re regularly training our people in the ways of the Marketing Jedi (I know, I did it again).

Check out one of the platform-based or online training programs offered by NYU or countless other organizations, including Udemy and Google. You should also be networking like crazy and having as many conversations with your peers as you can. It’s not about knowing everything; sometimes, it’s as simple as knowing who to call. You can learn about new marketing technologies using the browser tool Ghostery to get a list of the martech tools used on any website. Choose a couple each week and setup a demo with vendors to learn more. (want to learn more about the best Customer Experience Platform on the planet? Get in touch – I’d love to tell you all about Sitecore!)

Finally, try and be more of Pi-shaped person (or just eat more pie - whatever works best for you). You don’t have to know everything to be valuable to an organization. Fill the base of your Pi symbol with things that get you excited, keep learning and pack the top of your Pi with broad-based, general knowledge about the marketing space. This will help you create real value for yourself, your organization, and the people it serves. As Einstein said, “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.”

Want to continue the discussion? Let's connect here on Linkedin - send me a connect request with a short note about yourself. You can also reach me on Twitter.

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