Great post. I recently spoke with someone who runs a software consulting firm. He built his business by referrals, and he was complaining to me that he was having trouble finding new clients, due to a poorly managed strategic relationship with another company that was supposed to channel referrals to his company. I told him that referrals-based businesses are non-scalable, and that if he wanted to acquire more customers he needed to build out a leads funnel--essentially, a marketing function to capture leads. I even sketched it out for him (and wrote about how to build one here: https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-leads-funnel-to-supercharge). But he didn't see the value. I think that a lot of non-marketing executives are focused on the upfront expenses inherent in marketing, and ignore the long-term revenue gains that are generated from effective marketing campaigns.
I see Generative A.I. as really impacting advertising, marketing and sales. Perhaps marketing most of all. If your CMO is not keeping up with the times, you have a real problem.
You referred to Korn Ferry as an “analyst house”… they would probably describe themselves as being in the “human capital” market, i.e. headhunters.
You said “The only solution is to fix the incentives and conditions that CMOs work under. And that means rebalancing the role to emphasize strategic, long-term, and empirical decisions.” I agree with this and the expectation of the average CEO, who the CMO usually reports to, is to drive short term sales. This is also the primary value that the head of sales expects of the CMO/marketing function. So part of the challenge is repositioning the CMO role to be a strategic function, but that will make it vulnerable to the foibles of quarterly earnings focused CEOs so I think there has to be a balance between strategic and tactical, ie. what business are we in, how to we grow the business and effectively creating awareness and demand for the sales team to convert.
Excellent assessment. The CMO is a business function. Understand that and everything follows.
Great post. I recently spoke with someone who runs a software consulting firm. He built his business by referrals, and he was complaining to me that he was having trouble finding new clients, due to a poorly managed strategic relationship with another company that was supposed to channel referrals to his company. I told him that referrals-based businesses are non-scalable, and that if he wanted to acquire more customers he needed to build out a leads funnel--essentially, a marketing function to capture leads. I even sketched it out for him (and wrote about how to build one here: https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-leads-funnel-to-supercharge). But he didn't see the value. I think that a lot of non-marketing executives are focused on the upfront expenses inherent in marketing, and ignore the long-term revenue gains that are generated from effective marketing campaigns.
I see Generative A.I. as really impacting advertising, marketing and sales. Perhaps marketing most of all. If your CMO is not keeping up with the times, you have a real problem.
Great post, Adam.
Hi Adam
Great article.
You referred to Korn Ferry as an “analyst house”… they would probably describe themselves as being in the “human capital” market, i.e. headhunters.
You said “The only solution is to fix the incentives and conditions that CMOs work under. And that means rebalancing the role to emphasize strategic, long-term, and empirical decisions.” I agree with this and the expectation of the average CEO, who the CMO usually reports to, is to drive short term sales. This is also the primary value that the head of sales expects of the CMO/marketing function. So part of the challenge is repositioning the CMO role to be a strategic function, but that will make it vulnerable to the foibles of quarterly earnings focused CEOs so I think there has to be a balance between strategic and tactical, ie. what business are we in, how to we grow the business and effectively creating awareness and demand for the sales team to convert.