Growing Your Marketing Department
For most CMOs, growth is a mandate. Their team is expected to help propel the company forward by generating new opportunities, providing “air cover” for sales teams, developing materials that help close deals faster, and increasing revenue from existing customers. And that’s just a partial list of the growth requests. To meet these demands, CMOs must have equally growth-oriented departments.
But how to do this? Especially when talent costs are skyrocketing, attrition is out of control, and budgets remain tight. That’s the gnarly challenge we’ve discussed in CMO Huddles, and while there are no easy answers, there are a number of things CMOs can do to help themselves and their teams succeed. Here are six that emerged from our discussions.
Start with Strong Direct Reports
If you’re serious about building a department that can scale with your organization, you need highly skilled direct reports who are ready to build out and lead their own teams.
The alternative is to hire more junior staffers who can save you money in the short term but will cost you both time and scalability in the long run. It’s a tradeoff with a predictable outcome that should also be made clear to your CEO and CFO–real growth requires an upfront investment.
Become a CMO Trainer
One of the ways to attract skilled direct reports is to become a CMO who is recognized as someone who creates future CMOs. One huddler noted with pride that they had helped 6 direct reports go on to the CMO role.
Doing this means hiring talent who are promotion-ready and helping these individuals fill in their developmental gaps. Rotating your direct reports and/or underwriting training courses will help each gain a broader understanding of marketing and how the pieces fit together.
Limit Direct Reports to 6 or Less
This newsletter described the crisis of “meeting mania.” One culprit is that some CMOs have more than 6 direct reports which mean more 1:1s, more emails that you can’t ignore, and more evaluations.
In our huddles, several CMOs noted having 3 or 4 direct reports, enabling them to have more senior people in those roles which in turn meant the CMO could spend more time leading marketing and less time doing marketing. Ah yes, that’s how we put the Chief in Chief Marketing Officer.
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Grow Cross-Functional Players
Marketing has a silo problem. The folks that are driving demand don’t think about the brand. The folks doing PR aren’t thinking about sales enablement. The result is that the components don’t work together, limiting their impact, and these individuals aren’t becoming well-rounded marketers.
One huddler shared how they are fighting this by encouraging staffers to have “majors” (primary role) and “minors” (secondary role). The result is that employees are learning more, are generally more satisfied, and are readier for promotions.
Protect Your Team from Low Priority Requests
Most CMOs acknowledge that their team members are feeling unprecedented levels of stress. While many of the causes are outside of CMOs’ control (pandemic-related disruptions), there is one big thing CMOs can do – empower their teams to say “no” or “great idea but not now.”
The simple idea here is that your department has priorities that are fully aligned with organizational priorities and that your team has permission to push back on requests that don’t align with these priorities.
Empower All to Be Innovators
About 10 years ago, then-CMO of SAP Jonathan Becher established an innovation marketing team within his department. Six months later he shut it down, admitting, “It didn’t accomplish what I expected, as we were essentially segregating innovation to one small group. In fact, it created some resistance to change and innovation. We disbanded the group and focused on creating a culture of innovation instead.”
Creating a culture of innovation will not only help you attract and keep talent but also will ensure your growing team fulfills its mandate.
If you have other thoughts on growing your department, please let us know.
Chief Marketing Officer | Cybersecurity CMO | RevOps Leader | Chief Marketing Operations | Tech Stack Advisor | AI Enthusiast | Pipeline Creator
2yGreat article! Working on instituting and communicating the 4 team OKRs so that team leads have the power to prioritize and push back.
Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer | Business Leader | Communications Specialist | Pricing Professional
2yDrew Neisser - I was in those Huddles and you captured it perfectly! A recent decision my team and I have made is to turn to New College Graduates vs. searching for folks with 3-5 years experience. Perhaps we can get those bright and hungry folks to bring some fresh energy and hit the ground running.
CMO | AI Marketing Strategist | SaaS Growth Architect | Author Transforming B2B Marketing with Generative AI | SaaS and GTM Expert | Multiple Exits | Thought Leader
2yGreat article - I think the priorities are 1. Hire people that are better than you at what they do and 2. As you say, hire people with cross functional marketing experience. The best people I have had working for me were really good at not one but multiple elements of marketing - when they get bored they learn a new skill (really well because they are intellectually curious). 3. Also, culture beats strategy every day of the week. So getting a great culture fit is critical. I always mentally go through: Can they do the job, do they want the job, will they fit in with the culture
CEO | GTM Leader | CMO | Former Accenture, Microsoft, HP | Board Director | NACD.DC Directorship Certified | Private Directors Association
2yInsightful! And full of good reminders.
Vice President, Demand Generation @ Cloudbees
2y“While many of the causes are outside of CMOs’ control (pandemic-related disruptions), there is one big thing CMOs can do – empower their teams to say “no” or “great idea but not now.” And if there is anything to take away from the article, it is this. I couldn’t agree with this statement more. Thank you for the thoughtful piece! Wonderful advice.