So You Want to Be a CMO? 5 Skills to Get You There

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely in a marketing career or planning for a marketing career. And if you’re ambitious, you may be aiming for a senior level position, like CMO.

All the ambition in the world—without preparation through meaningful action—makes you merely a dreamer. Take for instance, a high school senior who decides halfway through her senior year she wants to go to an Ivy League university. How would her school advisor respond?

“Sorry, sweetie, but that ship has sailed.”

Some ambitions simply require time and preparation to bring them to fruition.

It’s the same story for a future CMO. If you’re starting to build your marketing career, craft a resume NOW that will lead you to a CMO spot. If you wait until midway through your career, you might find it hard to get there.

Based on my 20 years as a CMO, here are five skills that I believe every CMO needs to have – and you can get ahead of the game by starting NOW to build these skills:

1. Become a customer expert

As marketers, our end-goal is to affect the buying decision of potential customers. Unless we understand their thoughts, pains, and motives, we can’t craft messages, materials, and campaigns to reach them.

You might be a skilled graphic designer, but if you constantly need direction on a message—because you don’t understand how the customer thinks—you’re not going to get to the CMO seat.

When creating marketing materials, ask questions like, “What drives my potential customers?” and “How can I use my design to engage with their needs, motivations, and challenges?” This leads to strategy-driven design and, ultimately, a CMO-quality leader.

Practical Tip: Use big data to understand your customers. Link traditional customer personas (the human element) to big data analytics to discover sentiment or behavior trends. As IBM puts it, big data helps you “know your customer inside and out .”

2. Understand the sales process

Marketing and sales act as a partnership, so expand beyond your marketing bubble and intimately understand the sales perspective . CMOs fail when they mold their own view of the value proposition—creating marketing collateral that aligns with their vision. Instead, they need to intimately understand the mile-high view of their organization’s sales funnel and coordinate with sales to move prospects through the funnel.

For example, leads may be initially attracted to an organization through thought leadership content, but as they move their way through the buying process, the sales team needs sales enablement messages that meet leads where they are. CMOs need to understand how sales people think and what tools they need to be successful. When marketing and sales act as partners, they are better able to share their story with leads and turn them into customers , who then become raving fans. A senior marketing leader who doesn’t have an intimate knowledge of how the sales process works is going to struggle.

Practical Tip: Learn the language that crosses both sales and marketing to create clear communication: It’s not necessary to spend years in sales to understand the process. Why? By taking a detour in sales, you run the risk of diluting your marketing resume. No one looks to hire a generalist. They want someone with “15 or 20 years of marketing experience.” Instead, spend time with sales leaders. Learn from riding shotgun. A strong CMO candidate will have been on so many sales calls that he or she has lost count.

3. Be a tech expert

If you don’t recognize the role of technology in marketing today, you will never make it as a CMO – and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in for that to hold true. While the need to understand tech is enhanced for certain CMO jobs, tech is critical in business of any sector or size. The marketing technology landscape continues to expand each year—with a 40% increase in tech solutions in the past year alone. This growth indicates a trend that is not going away.

Think of marketing automation systems, predictive analytics, A/B testing tools, website optimization—what do these have in common? They are all technology solutions that give you a competitive advantage.

As a CMO, you don’t have to be a tech guru. At Workfront, our tech stack has 30 different pieces of technology. I don’t consider myself an expert in any one of those, but someone on my team IS the expert for every platform. I have enough understanding to know what’s working, what’s not, and to influence what we buy and when we buy it.

For CMO-level leadership, you need to have a solid foundation of leading tech platforms and how they work. It can seem overwhelming to know where to start, which is why I wrote this article to share three ways tech helps a marketing director be an effective leader.

Practical Tip: Be familiar with work management systems that increase efficiency through technology. An effective marketing tech stack shouldn’t be limited to products that just effect demand generation. That’s what we do at Workfront with our work management software to collaborate in one place. Learn about other technologies that improve work processes and enable seamless measurement.

4. Acquire cross-functional marketing domain knowledge

A CMO is responsible for branding, demand generation, creative services, events, customer advocacy, customer marketing, public relations, and content development among other things. As such, a CMO requires a broad base of knowledge across all these areas. You won’t qualify for a CMO job if you rank as a “10” in one area but a “2” in several others.

As you work your way through your marketing career, you’ll inevitably find a primary area of expertise—for example, in digital marketing. But at some point, you must branch out—taking responsibility for new areas like field events or PR. If you want a CMO job, you need to demonstrate you understand all the aspects of marketing.

Practical Tip: How can you gain more cross-functional experience? Volunteer for special projects in your current role. Be the first to raise your hand for a new project, especially if it is out of your marketing comfort zone . As you seek to expand your experience, you’ll educate yourself for future marketing leadership.

5. Actively develop leadership skills

The difference between a CMO and a manager of a marketing department is that you’re often no longer the subject matter expert. The value of the CMO comes from leading the team, setting proper priorities, motivating, and inspiring people to do their best work—not being the expert of every detail.

Over the course of my career, I’ve played the role of almost everyone who works for me, which helps in managing them, but it’s important to surround myself with a team with strengths beyond my own. For example, some people on my team have much more experience with digital marketing than I do. It’s important for me to recognize that and to use that to our organization’s advantage.

As a CMO, your boss, the CEO, values leadership. In a 2017 PWC survey, 88% of US CEOs say that leadership is a “very important skill” and 35% say it is “very difficult to recruit.” While some hard skills are more easily acquired, few candidates rise to the task of developing leadership—a highly valued yet difficult-to-find skill. In part, it’s because they don’t spend time developing those leadership skills. Read, study, take classes, assess yourself, work at it.

A great marketer will often fall short of the CMO chair if he or she is not also a leader who can inspire a team to do great things .

Practical Tip: Sounds simple—be a leader. But how do you actually learn leadership if you don’t feel like it is innate to you? Fortunately, all leadership skills can be learned, teaches Brian Tracy, best-selling author, professional speaker, and success expert. In his Forbes article, he outlines eight leadership skills you can learn—choose one to work on. If you’re still not sure how to start on your own, look for an online leadership course. And the best way I’ve found to develop leadership skills is to find a mentor, someone whose leadership style and skills you admire. Seek his or her advice. Meet together, at least informally, regularly. Learn.

Wherever you are in your career, continue, or start, building these five skills to prepare yourself for that CMO job. Don’t be like the unprepared high school senior. The closest she’ll make it to Ivy League halls is buying a Harvard t-shirt. Don’t settle for the CMO shirt either. With proper planning, focus, and work you can reach your career goals.

This article was originally published in MARTECH ADVISOR August 3, 2017 bit.ly/2unOy4t  #CMO #marketing