3 strategies that CMOs can use to enhance their likelihood of success 

By Steve Boehler – Founder, Mercer Island Group

1. Develop Effective Proxies

The job has intense breadth and stress. It’s so hard to keep up.

And because they’re so busy, CMOs often have trouble finding the time to do the few really critical things necessary to succeed.

To succeed, CMOs need to build effective proxies for themselves. Not a bunch of mini-me folks running around. Rather, direct reports are knowledgeable enough, have similar values, have similar ways of evaluating what’s a good idea or a bad idea, or a good plan or a bad plan so that you can have confidence that they can handle things.

This isn’t just delegating; it means building people so you are confident that they are going to represent the company and the organization the way you need them to.

2. Ensure Resource Alignment

Resource alignment plays an enormous role in the success of a company. But it’s hard! A common mistake many CMOs make is that they don’t put enough effort into making sure ALL marketing resources are aligned with the business needs of the company. The marketing organization is expected to accomplish what the C-suite expects, and that takes great planning and process.

Yet many marketing organizations fail to ensure that expectations are aligned from the C-Suite all the way down to the activation level.

CMOs need to make sure their organization has a prioritization process that accounts for all external resource investments (like advertising and media budgets, PR, performance marketing, etc.) as well as all marketing staffing.

They need to ensure that everybody in marketing knows their role and how that role adds up to those bigger objectives that the C-suite needs marketing to accomplish.

A clear linkage from the C-Suite all the way to activation.

Alignment is the strategy that enables every penny to work as hard as possible and the marketing organization is spending their time and resources rowing in the same direction as the rest of the company.

3. Be a Good Partner with Your Agencies

Agency executives see much more change on a daily basis than marketers because they deal with a broad range of industries and clients. They see a wider range of issues as well as a broader group of potential solutions. Learning how to better partner with agencies can be a real ticket to success for CMOs.

One of the first orders of business for a CMO should be to launch a client-agency 360 assessment of what is working and not working in the client-agency relationship. What is the agency doing well? What does the client do well as a client? And, of course, what opportunities do each team have to be even better partners?

Another key step is to have routine top-to-top calls with the CMO’s agency counterpart. Keep the agency in the loop early and often.