The top skills of CMOs? Industry, Digital, Sales and Marketing Strategy.
During my paternity leave, I had a lot of late nights thinking about what skills I could develop next. I thought it might be valuable to look at CMOs on LinkedIn and see the types of skills they listed. In any case, I thought, it might give me an idea of areas of my own skills that are lacking. Several nights later, and many spreadsheets, I had discovered some interesting observations.
Although LikedIn profiles are autobiographical, there is no indication of the accuracy or truthfulness. Also, there is no way of knowing if these people are actually any good at what they claim. Not all profiles reveal how many endorsements people have. However, as people are "endorsed" for skills, and you can recommend skills of other users, I thought it would still be a good guide to the what CMO's consider valuable.
Hypothesis
My original hypothesis was that CMOs would have a relatively broad set of skills, and would major in marketing and sales, and minor in something like communications and brand. If there were industry skills they would be one or two skills at the most.So a skill set might look something like;
Marketing, Sales, Account management, Communications, Brand, Industry
Method
First I searched for people who were listed on LinkedIn as either "CMO" or "Chief Marketing Officer" as their job title. Using a profiling tool, I extracted the skills of over 700 profiles, creating more than 10000 skills, across the UK, the US, Australia and India. If I had more time I might grow this to cover more countries, and in more depth, but for now, it provides a strong enough set of data. Also, I didn't control for quality of organisation or profile. So there could be a few people claiming to be a CMO without that being the case.
I took the raw skills listed and then grouped them into major groupings. So "Marketing" and "Marketing Strategy" just becomes a "Marketing" skill. "Sales" and "Business Development" become "Sales" skills. This way any issues with misspellings or word order can be removed, to give a general view, as well as the specific view.
CMOs Who Are They?
Unsurprisingly, it appears there is a base of skills required, including marketing, digital, sales and strategy. The top 100 skills account for about 50% of all those listed. Some version of marketing, business strategy, brand, sales, an industry focus and a technical skill are included on most of the profiles listed. Perfect examples of this would be Michaela Chan of OOH and Tony Phillips of NewsCorp. Interestingly, leadership and management, whilst they are in the top individual skills, as a group the are outside of the top 10. There just were not enough profiles talking about their leadership talents, and instead focussed on different flavours of marketing.
However, It appears that CMOs are also incredibly unique with very different stories. A long tail of 2500 skills make up the rest. 1600 skills only appear once, such as Winemaking, Poetry and Weddings.
The largest number of skills claimed were industry focussed. Over 40% of skills listed by CMOs are industry focussed, such as FMCG, Banking and Sports. Some CMOs almost exclusively listed industry skills.Obviously reflective of the industries I looked at, but the data, for example had 58 people in FMCG and 50 in Telecommunications. Some profiles are largely made up of industry based skills, such as Margaret Wright, whose profile is predominantly medical focused (Healthcare, Medical Imaging, Radiology). This shows that, in order to be a top marketer for an organisation, you have to deeply understand the industry you are in.
Some type of digital marketing skills featured second with general Digital Marketing, eCommerce and SEO being the top 3 specific skills. Even CMOs with very industry heavy profiles still claimed some digital strategy as a skill. Look at Stephanie Tully, CMO at Qantas. Most of her skills are to do with aircraft and the travel industry, yet Digital Marketing still features. Sales/BD skills are third most referenced. As an interesting aside, the UK CMOs preferred to list sales skills over other groups.
The 4th most cited skills are technical non-marketing skills, eg XML or Autocad. Again, almost every profile featured a technical skill of some kind. A prime example is Mark Murray, CMO of BT Financial in Sydney, who also claims iPhone App Development on his profile.
After those top four, the rest of the skills become more diverse and varied.
Finance and Accounting skills are limited, as are analytics and data skills. It would appear that in order to grow into more rounded CMOs, these skills could be explored, along with leadership and people management skills.