Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With

I’m a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven’t been written yet.

Take SaaS, for example. Today, you can find scores of blogs — including mine — that talk about how to run SaaS businesses, how to plan SaaS businesses, and how to produce and interpret SaaS metrics. Twenty years ago virtually none of that existed. You needed to figure it out. And one of the best ways to figure it out was to spend time with other people who were doing the same figuring.

There’s a time for timeless wisdom and there’s a time for talking to other people who are doing the same thing as you are, right now. I think AI and the massive disruption it creates in marketing — from content to workflow to performance marketing to analytics — means it’s an awesome time to join a marketing peer-networking community.

I tell this to literally every CMO I work with:

Come to me for timeless wisdom (if not fleeting opinions).
Join Exit Five (or equivalent) to talk to peers who face the same challenges you do, every day.

That’s not to say that following thought leaders isn’t a great tactic, too. I keep an eye on Emily Kramer, Elena Verna, Carilu Dietrich, Alice de Courcy, and Jon Miller. And I can’t wait for Rand Fishkin’s rumored new book on Zero-Click Marketing. If there are other marketing thought leaders you think I should be following, please let me know.

All this is why I was thrilled when Dave Gerhardt invited me to speak at Exit Five’s Marketing Leadership Retreat on March 19-20 in Phoenix. Given the above, I knew I wasn’t going to be the person delivering fresh-from-the-trenches information on AI tools and methods. The audience is 100x more qualified than I am to do that.

So what did I want to offer up instead? Some timeless wisdom. Specifically, timeless wisdom not just on how to successfully do the CMO job, but on how to be the CMO everyone wants to work with.

Why that topic? And bear in mind it takes a lot for me to pick a title that ends with a preposition. Because I thought it captured the key to success in an important way.

It’s not just about doing the job. Yes, that’s quite hard already but if you only focus on that you ironically increase your odds of becoming a statistic.
It’s not just about keeping the job. And yes, there’s an art to that, a big part of that is simply remembering to market marketing.
It’s about helping the boss do their job which not only increases your strategic value, but makes you more “sticky” in your role.
It’s about doing all that while being the CMO that everyone wants to work with (EW2WW)

Why does that last point matter?

Marketing is inherently a service organization, so a strong internal customer service orientation never hurts.
Being the CMO EW2WW helps you keep your job. With a median tenure of 18-24 months, this should never be too far from a CMO’s mind. Belt and suspenders.
If everyone wants to work with you, it helps you find your next job. Board members and recruiters — your top two job sources after peers — will seek you out when the time comes.
It might well help you get promoted to COO or CEO. If everyone wants to work with you, they might well give you a shot at the next level.
It frames things as a positioning problem. And we know a lot about solving positioning problems, working backwards from a desired result.

Ultimately, I’m saying that CMOs should want to position themselves as the CMO EW2WW.

Put differently: “Marketer, position thyself.”

(Adapted without permission from Luke 4:23.)

With that as background, here are the slides from the presentation, embedded below, and downloadable here. I had a fairly miserable time in Gamma building them so apologies for the upside-down funnel, some of the formatting, graphics, and mechanics (e.g., the absence of copyright notice and slide numbers). There is only so much time I’m willing to spend explaining to a chatbot what expression to put on the reflected image of a face in a mirror. And once you drop into PowerPoint to make changes, there seems to be no going back.