We don’t know what a CMO is in B2B. And it’s a problem.

The managing director of a private equity group recently approached an industry colleague and friend of mine to discuss a CMO role at one of the firm’s portfolio companies.?

The first conversation went well. Arrangements were made to introduce my friend to the CEO of the portfolio company about the vacancy. But as that first call was coming to an end, my friend asked for clarification that the role reports directly to the CEO.

“No,” came the answer. “This role will report to the CRO.”

My friend politely withdrew herself from the process.?

Why would you look to recruit a c-suite role and functional expert only to have them report to another c-suite role with a different (and sometimes conflicting) list of tactical priorities?

If your new CMO isn’t going to report to the CEO, you’re not hiring a CMO.

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A very good B2B technology company exited its marketing director from the business with the intention of hiring a CMO.

It advertised for candidates.?

After a couple of months with nobody hired, the company changed its mind. It wasn’t in fact going to recruit a CMO.?

Months later, the various members of that company’s marketing function - encompassing brand, performance, partnership marketing and product marketing - now report into four different members of the management and leadership teams.?

What might feel like a decent plan from inside each department, is highly unlikely to be conducive to a coherent marketing strategy, capable of injecting potent ‘customer understanding’ into the go-to-market strategy.

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These scenarios aren't rare.?

The majority of B2B companies don’t know what a CMO is or does.

“The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) will be responsible for leading the marketing function?in addition to delivering digital marketing strategies,”?reads the top line in a job ad.

The intent not so subtly embedded in this hiring approach betrays the fact that the digital advertising element of?any?marketing job is often the upper limit of understanding of marketing possessed by many B2B founders and bosses.

A second recruitment ad for a CMO required six responsibilities of candidates. Here’s the list, verbatim.

• Understands Google analytics, SEM, website keywords, social media, optimisation
• Growing online communities
• Coordinating with PR firms
• Email funnelling and re-targeting
• User acquisition for guests and hosts
• Branding and content strategy

?A third CMO role requires candidates to “work closely with our Head of Social to deliver community growth and produce articles, blogs, posts and presentations in collaboration with product and sales teams.”

That job description concludes:?“Experience with LinkedIn, Twitter and other community marketing platforms is desirable.”

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Here’s the worry: if businesses don't recognise the need for an experienced and strategic, customer-focused leader at the top of the business, then marketing has little chance of impressing the need for, or value of, its impact on what is a predominantly sales-led or product-led culture in the B2B space.

One seasoned CMO, who agrees this is a concern that needs addressing, told me there aren’t enough “proper B2B CMO jobs out there” and that often he has had to ‘settle’ for roles that are marketing leadership in name only.?

“We’ve probably all taken those ‘sales-support and not much else’ roles when perhaps we shouldn’t have,” he says.

?“In the absence of too many c-suite, leadership jobs you take what’s there, hoping you can mould the role to make genuine impact but you end up having to fight against a barrage of wrong-headed expectations.”

The ‘land the job first and fix it second’ strategy was one suggested by Professor?Mark Ritson?in a? Marketing Week ?column in January 2021.

Ritson advised senior strategic marketers preparing for job interviews to ‘pretend to believe in digital marketing’.

He encouraged serious candidates to lie during the recruitment process, get the job and then elevate the organisation’s understanding of marketing later.

“A job interview is a shitty place to try and educate the organisation recruiting you,” wrote Ritson.?

“My sincere advice is to go against your best instincts during the process and then, with a job secured, attempt to right the ship with some strategic heft and proper marketing knowledge.

“To put it more bluntly,” he said, “if you are a proper marketer, your brain might answer a recruitment question correctly but you will consequently lose the role to a lesser marketer. So, ignore the technically correct answer and go with the vocationally prudent one instead.”

“…every job ad seems to buy into the worst digital claptrap, so what do you do? Pretend you do too.” Mark Ritson, January 2021.

Maybe this felt like good, pragmatic advice in a difficult situation but the reality is that it just doesn’t work. There are two problems with it.?

The smaller problem is that good people (not just marketers) with solid expertise to their name don’t feel comfortable lying about what they do.?

By dumbing down to knowingly fit in with the wrong direction of traffic, they compromise on everything that makes them special.

For A-listers, it’s not just counterintuitive to do that to yourself in a job interview scenario; it’s nigh on impossible.

Then the larger problem.?

If, in getting hired, you’ve suggested your core marketing beliefs are built around weekly and monthly ROI connected to paid social posts, Google ads, Linkedin community engagement and a range of other digital promotional activity? Well, you’re in for a painful experience trying to slow everyone down to be educated on brand, let alone marketing’s potential influence on product and pricing.??

Just like the CMO quoted earlier said.

Yet if we don’t push this difficult agenda, our organisations will continue to misunderstand exactly what we do and why we’re here.?

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The fault behind this problem is not all on the part of ‘others’ (whether they be recruiters or bosses with non-marketing backgrounds).

We marketers have failed to properly own, promote and prove the role of CMO.

I meet a worrying number of B2B CMOs out there that don’t justify their job titles.??

Harsh and even nasty as that sounds, it does our discipline no favours at all to ignore this reality.?

Did you ever hear the one about the CMO that talks of his customers with contempt?

I’m serious.

A company recently asked me for advice on its content strategy. The company’s young CMO expressed reservations about changing things up on the basis that its customers are “boring” and “wouldn’t appreciate a different or more creative approach”.?

I'd already accepted during the meeting in which this took place that the company and I would not make a good fit.?

Still, I've never heard a CMO talk about his customers the way this one did. Far from being a ‘newbie’, he’d been in the role for more than two years.

The CMO remit is, above all else, to understand the customer deeply through insight and research and to then champion that customer. The young CMO’s assertions didn't come from any qual or quant data and felt utterly incongruous with the mission of representing or championing the customer.

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Our fault?

‘Their’ fault?

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

The question is ‘what do we do about it’?

Do we need an agreed template for the CMO role??

The CFO role, after all, comes out of the box and can be easily templated to a greater or lesser extent. Ask 100 people and you’ll get roughly the same answer.?

If I’m wrong about this please don’t write in, but I’d argue the same could be said of the CRO and the COO.

I recently asked a cohort of B2B marketing leaders in the alumni of Professor Ritson’s Marketing Mini-MBA what the biggest thing is preventing their marketing teams from realising their massive potential.

Among the most popular answers (short-termism; a lack of resource and capacity; a lack of budget; a lack of?strategy; no leadership representation or endorsement; sales focused rather than ‘growth focused’...) was this zinger.

“A misunderstanding of what marketing is or does”.?

Think about that.?

Take a moment.?

It’s pretty damning.

When I asked the same group to cite the 3 changes they felt they could ideally make with the most commercial impact on the organisation, their answers were illuminating (if not surprising).

“Increase investment in the ‘long’ part of marketing; an annual customer insight survey; the capacity and permission to be brave and try new things; switch focus from tactics to strategy; leadership involvement in initiatives; greater brand focus, better collaboration across the organisation…”

And so on.?

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Nick Eades?has been a CMO, a CCO and a general manager for a number of leading businesses including Dell, BT, Fujitsu, IBM and Psion.

Now an in-demand go-to-market consultant, Eades sees the problem only too clearly: “Justifying the CMO role means being the only credible voice of the customer - understand the shit out of that customer: why they’re buying, why they aren’t, what they’re prepared to pay for it and how they feel before, during and after.”

“Sadly,” says Eades, “in B2B, the role is splitting into various other departments and marketing is rapidly becoming the corporate comms and brand department. We’re losing everything else in the funnel.

Price and product, observes Eades, feel firmly out of reach to most B2B marketers; marketing ops is run by sales and "rev-ops is killing us”.?

“If you took social media and events and turned them off right now,” he asks, “what would you be doing as a B2B marketer?”

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For more than 25 years, Think Direct owner?Shane Redding?has advised B2B clients worldwide, helping them solve problems of every flavour - from mergers & acquisitions to improving sales and marketing efficiency.?

Redding is supremely positive about the future of B2B marketing but suggests it’s a challenge to suggest that a CMO role could fit neatly onto a universal template.?

“Every business and indeed every business model is different,” she says.?

“The needs for each business will be hard to replicate elsewhere. Capturing one typical CMO wouldn’t work for anybody in a time when the CMO remit has broadened and new skills are needed all the time.”

Redding agrees though that there are “core principles”.?

“A CMO has to be brilliant commercially and highly strategic. They also have to really understand the way the world's changing. And they obviously have to be the voice of the customer on the board.”

“Lastly,” she says, “the ideal CMO must be prepared to admit what they don't know and be ready to learn new stuff themselves. Every CMO should be addicted to upskilling.”

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In March this year,?Peter Weinberg?&?Jon Lombardo?of the B2B Institute wrote a column in Marketing Week magazine called?The ‘Flippening’ will usher in a Golden Age of B2B marketing.

I’ll put the link at the top of the comments. I advise you to bookmark it for the next five minutes you have free.

In the piece, Weinberg and Lombardo write about the reasons (and the maths) behind the optimism they feel for the future of B2B marketing.?

Their article will tell you all the right stuff; what you - a B2B marketing leader – need to do differently.

"...the challenging part: how the hell do you do it without losing your job?"

It doesn’t go as far though, as the very challenging part: how the hell do you do it without losing your job?

That part, my friends (if indeed you’ve read this far), will be made perfectly clear and easy, in accessible steps and with full support, in my Boring2Brave online course launching this Summer.?

Click the link below in the comments and then find the purple button on my website to register for more information as soon as it is published.