Chief Marketing Officers Can Show You How to Be a Successful Leader
Do you want to lead an organization one day? You had better get started now if you do. Your job is to be ready by having the skills and experiences that will make you a successful leader. There’s a job in business today that can give you the skills you need.
Successful company leaders are often tasked with making changes that produce results. They put together the plan for their company and then execute it. That sounds a lot like the world of successful Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) today. You might want to see what makes these marketers successful.
Liz Miller, is the Vice President of Programs & Operations, of the CMO Council. The CMO Council is an organization of 6,000 senior-level marketers from around the globe. The CMO Council recently released a study entitled “Renovate to Innovate: Building Performance-Driven Marketing Organizations.” The report outlines several keys to CMO success. Here’s why CMO success is key for your leadership success.
I spoke with Miller. She’s passionate about the excitement in the world of marketing today. Marketing today is in the midst of change. Today’s chief marketer isn’t the old art director of yesterday who rose to lead a marketing group. The old marketing days of having a far flung group of employees reacting to a sales request or creating PR in isolation are gone.
Today’s business is strategic. Business leaders need to know where the opportunities are in new markets. They want to know what works to retain customers. The answers require cross functional partners that collaborate. What holds these partners together? The marketing department.
Miller says, “The CMO has become the functional glue and can reach across all the functional groups with tactical strategies that enhance the core value of the company.”
How do successful CMOs do this? Two behaviors stood out in their research. Great CMOs outperform good CMOs in leading change and they’re results oriented. They often set stretch goals for themselves and others and often deliver beyond expectations.
They also avoided a typical mistake. Miller says that when you get a new job many people think they need to substantiate why they were chosen. They make big changes without understanding their companies and customers. Unless you listen to the business values and goals of your company, you will get it wrong. The outstanding CMOs spent their first 90 days listening to their employees to understand their business so they could then move quickly.
Listening was critical. One CMO had 30 employees and didn’t know what they did. By listening, the CMO learned what they did, their strengths and uncovered operational challenges. Time spent listening allowed the CMO to identify the needed change and lead it to a successful conclusion.
The most successful CMOs were quantitative and could understand and explain the metrics they used. Miller says, “It’s not about learning how to make a Facebook page. That’s tactical. It’s knowing how to measure the traffic and quantify how it impacted your business.”
Women wanting to lead organizations need to be quantitative. They have to influence. They need operational and bottom line experience. That’s what successful CMOs have. If you get the skills that successful CMOs have mastered, you’re going to be well on your way to lead an organization one day. With those skills, I predict you’ll be successful at it, too.
Maura Schreier-Fleming is a sales strategist and founder of Best@Selling, a sales training and consulting company. She wrote Monday Morning Sales Tips and works with sales professionals who want to sell more and get more business.
