The role of B2B CMOs has expanded significantly over the last few years while adapting to new technologies and driving incremental growth. This crucial impact helped CMOs secure a seat at the leadership table. However, the elevated status comes with high expectations and a host of new challenges. To keep their seat, B2B CMOs must become executive leaders.
Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
About two-thirds of US CMOs say the role of marketers has grown and taken on more importance in the last year, continuing a two-year trend, according to a February 2022 survey by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, commissioned by Deloitte and the American Marketing Association (AMA).
- B2B CMOs now play a crucial role in leadership. As a result of marketing’s ability to guide a company through the pandemic and drive growth, CMOs have earned a well-deserved seat at the table.
- But they risk losing that seat as the role continues to expand. CMOs are required to focus on growth and a host of other obligations. If they’re spread too thin and can’t deliver results, they’ll lose the seat.
- B2B CMOs must be great executives in addition to being great marketers. They must effectively influence and communicate with various audiences and continually strive to elevate their roles.
B2B CMOs Have Earned a Place at the Leadership Table
During the pandemic, successful B2B CMOs played a crucial role in many companies, gaining influence with key company stakeholders in the process. These CMOs took on a greater strategic role and launched go-to-market strategies to support business growth goals. They also improved external communications and established stronger internal engagement. When things went well, the B2B CMO officially joined the leadership table.
B2B CMOs now have more presence and influence in leadership. In a January 2022 Chief Outsiders survey, 80.0% of CMOs believed the expectations around the CMO’s role in driving growth had shifted.
These executives are now proven growth drivers. CMOs interviewed for this report said that their ability to drive growth during the pandemic resulted in a permanent shift in the expectations around their roles. B2B companies now expect marketing to drive growth.
According to a January 2022 Salesforce survey, 94% of marketers worldwide think their role is critical for driving growth. Further, many CMOs are solely responsible for their company’s growth. In Chief Outsiders’ survey, over 70% of respondents said that more than half of their company’s growth will fall directly on the CMO.
Successful B2B CMOs know how to communicate. During the pandemic, executives leaned on CMOs to engage with prospects and customers in ways that had never occurred to them before. Buyer behavior was changing dramatically, and companies needed to adjust quickly. B2B CMOs started using business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing tactics to attract and engage prospective customers. They effectively adjusted in order to understand the needs and expectations of customers and their markets.
At the height of the pandemic, B2B CMOs served as the glue in the organizations, aligning the needs of customers, colleagues, and the community.
—Margaret Molloy, Global CMO and Head of New Business Development, Siegel+Gale
Despite the fact that they were tasked with keeping audiences engaged via digital technologies (in the absence of face-to-face connection), CMOs demonstrated they could perform—and perform well.
The Place at the Table Is a Double-Edged Sword
CMOs are expected to generate revenues in addition to demand. They must focus on brand equity for buyers and prospective talent. They also have to ensure engagement across the buyer journey—and the customer lifecycle. They’re tasked with investing in the right marketing technology stack and showing ROI with easy-to-understand data. And they need to do it all with the same—or fewer—resources.
Generating Pipeline and Revenues Is Imperative
Generating Pipeline and Revenues Is Imperative
CMOs must now contribute to revenues. Prior to the pandemic, the focus for many CMOs had been demand generation. Since then, they’ve transitioned from managing a cost center to leading a revenue center. Now that CMOs are committed to growth, they’re also responsible for pipeline contribution and sales generation.
To build pipeline, B2B CMOs need to brush up on B2C strategies. Even before the pandemic, B2B buyers were becoming more like B2C buyers when researching and considering business products and services. Today, most B2B buyers prefer and expect a B2C buying experience with an autonomous, self-serve buying process. If CMOs can’t change their digital content strategies to include B2C marketing tactics, they might not bring in quality leads.
Branding Is Now in the Spotlight
Layer on demand, pipeline, and a heap of branding.c The pandemic significantly disrupted business operations and go-to-market strategies. The types of products and services on offer also shifted. CMOs found it difficult to stand out from the competition and gain visibility and awareness in a crowded digital space. As a result, 51% of businesses in the US and Canada changed their branding strategies, according to a March 2022 survey conducted by Pollfish on behalf of UpCity.
B2B CMOs are tasked with building brand equity. B2B buyers changed how they view brands and started expecting a B2C buying experience during the pandemic. In the B2C model, branding plays an important role in establishing trust and a human connection to attract buyers. If buyers don’t like the brand, CMOs will struggle to build pipeline and close deals.
B2B CMOs must also help define the brand to attract prospective hires. And the brand needs to reflect an authentic point of view on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In another page taken from the B2C playbook, B2B CMOs need to include DEI in the business voice, the storytelling, and the messaging.
Shift Focus to the Customer
Retention and the customer experience are key. It’s not enough to generate demand, contribute to revenues, and focus on brand—customer satisfaction and retention have bubbled up to the surface as additional important parts of the CMO’s responsibilities.
It’s easy for many B2B customers to switch to another vendor, so building customer loyalty is important. B2B CMOs are more responsible for the customer experience and creating content that drives user adoption and advocacy. In turn, brand advocates drive demand.
The Evolving Marketing Technology Stack
Marketing technology is the most important and difficult purchasing decision. CMOs rely on marketing technology to justify investment, navigate privacy regulations, and prove revenues have grown. Seven out of 10 marketing leaders plan to invest more in marketing technology to help reach their revenue goals, per a June 2022 report by CMO Council and KPMG.
Privacy concerns and changes to tracking are complicating the landscape. B2B CMOs need to consider identity resolution solutions in their stack. With the deprecation of third-party identifiers and new data privacy initiatives, CMOs will need to have the right technology in place before Google phases out third-party cookies in Chrome and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) on its Android devices.
It’s necessary to have—and show—marketing ROI. CMOs must explain to financial executives what will deliver ROI—and how potential marketing budget cuts could impact their top line. It’s not enough to use marketing technology to execute campaigns; they must show marketing’s value to continue to produce results.
Generate More Value With the Same—or Fewer—Resources
A lack of control can create delays and hinder marketing’s ability to act on opportunities, which could hurt ROI. If CMOs build new strategies but the team is unable to execute due to lack of budget control, CMOs will have a difficult time achieving their goals.
In addition, 60% of the marketers surveyed have a marketing strategy, but only 24% tie their marketing budget to their strategy. Without alignment, it’s much more challenging to justify expenses or show ROI, and this can slow progress. Consequently, marketing programs fail—not because of a lack of results, but because the value of the programs and their corresponding budgets aren’t clearly articulated to finance.
For many B2B CMOs, there’s an unrealistic expectation for their teams to do more with less. Marketers have too many core functions in their roles, and 52% of the survey respondents indicated that the greatest challenge they face comes from a lack of dedicated resources. Core marketing includes things like content creation and distribution, customer engagement, digital marketing, event management, graphic design, public relations, and sales enablement.
The survey also found that almost 60% of B2B marketers handle five or more core marketing functions. Plus, project requests have increased by a dramatic 81% since the start of the pandemic, but 43% of marketers said their budgets have actually decreased since then.
B2B CMOs and their teams also now spend more time on noncore activities. The role of the B2B CMO has expanded, and it’s likely to continue to do so. Instead of focusing solely on new business and customer engagement, they’re getting pulled in multiple directions.
Nearly two-thirds of B2B marketers worldwide are actively looking for a job or are open to new opportunities, according to the same survey. Meanwhile, 62% of B2B marketing managers worldwide are concerned it will be difficult to hire and retain talent in the current labor market.
What’s a B2B CMO To Do?
B2B CMOs are now expected to deliver on promises related to growth, brand, customer experience, company value, and ROI. But the only way they can do so, without spreading themselves too thin, is to be great executives—not just great marketers. They need to have a shared understanding of expectations. They must effectively influence and communicate with various audiences: executives, prospects, customers, their own teams, and other employees. And they need to continually elevate their status.
Guidance for CEOs and Other Executives
Set clear expectations.
Set clear expectations.
Company executives and CMO candidates should be in clear alignment on the role and its responsibilities. Will the CMO focus on branding, demand generation, revenues, or some combination of them all? Executives must understand the organization’s needs and the value the CMO can provide. These expectations must be established from the start to avoid a mismatch or general confusion.
It’s better to be aligned than to be right. The process of identifying the different options around your go-to-market strategy and then aligning the leadership team around them is a critical piece.
—Sydney Sloan, Stage 2 Capital
Establish and maintain trust.
Establish and maintain trust.
B2B CMOs need to build trust with executives to be successful. A CEO may have confidence in a new CMO, but the pressure is on the CMO to deliver what’s expected of them. If the CMO fails to achieve goals or hit deadlines, they’ll never earn trust.
Without trust, CMOs will feel excluded from the leadership team and will likely act that way. That leaves them perceived as something less than a full member of the team.
Remote work can make it difficult to build trust, so it’s important to get the leadership team and marketing teams together in person. CMOs need to keep the momentum going to keep people engaged and focused, especially in an uncertain market.
Lastly, CMOs also need to bestow trust. “You can’t win by micromanaging. You can’t have your hand everywhere. Once you’ve successfully crystallized strategy, set metrics, and set a budget, check in, but let go,” Daniel Bernard, CMO at SentinelOne, said. “If your people can’t execute, then you have the wrong people.”
Be the subject matter expert in your market.
Be the subject matter expert in your market.
Successful CMOs are the most knowledgeable about their market. They’re the ones others rely on to explain what’s happening in their market and how it’s behaving and performing.
CMOs know their audiences at a macro-level—and how their needs tie into market trends. This lets them bring a broader context to go-to-market planning and execution. It also helps them anticipate the future and see emerging customer needs, competitive threats, and possible disruptions.
Most B2B CMOs face urgency around growth. Marketing is a growth engine grounded in a strategy based on real market and customer insight. It shouldn’t be random acts of marketing, an embrace of the next shiny thing, or blind fealty to agency guidance. Marketing should always tie back to a fundamental insight about a company’s market and its customers.
Focus on Buyers and Customers
Listen, simplify, and connect. For the marketing and business strategies to be effective, they must be grounded in real customer market insight. If B2B CMOs understand their addressable market, they can branch off into new prospects and go from there.
CMOs should spend more time with customers; this effort should be ongoing. Gary Survis, operating partner at Insight Partners, noted the importance of talking with customers in the midst of macroeconomic disruptions but cautioned against perfunctory queries about pain-points. These types of questions often lack complexity and result in superficial answers.
CMOs also need to streamline how they implement their go-to-market strategy. “Buyers crave simple experiences that make their jobs easier. Yet so many B2B companies have a complex array of offerings, sometimes with very unintuitive nomenclature,” Siegel+Gale’s Molloy said. CMOs need to simplify messaging, and product offerings need to be described in plain words. Or as SentinelOne’s Bernard suggested, oversimplify.
The CMO is at the center of key functions around the organization. “CMOs really do become the connective tissue. That’s part of the role—to connect the dots and stop the wrong things from happening. Your job is to sit at the heart of all this and help make sense of it all—then take that to market and help it stand out,” said Peter Thomas, global marketing and communications director of innovation at Accenture UK.
How To Elevate the B2B CMO Role
Take risks. B2B CMOs provide direction, but they should also drive experimentation and think creatively about their category and their differentiation. CMOs should know how to take risks that won’t threaten their position but could result in something great for the business.
I challenge people to look at other industries. Get outside of your B2B comfort zone and think about new ways we can grow
Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO at Brightcove
Focus on metrics. The CMO needs to have absolute control over marketing metrics in order to show ROI and demonstrate marketing’s value to the business. The CMO should know the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell leadership about the health of the marketing initiatives; have facility with the numbers; and know how they relate to the broader business.
Successful CMOs are analytically strong and can understand metrics intuitively. They know how to stay ahead of potential challenges, such as the deprecation of third-party identifiers.
Navigate complex and rapidly changing headwinds. CMOs will face headwinds in the market; they need to be resilient and flexible. They should listen carefully to the customer, their own teams, and the business. They must scrutinize every dollar and ensure that every technology investment is necessary. They need to have a finger on the pulse of buyers and be able to predict a downturn in spending so they can prove the value and worth of their products or services.
Successful CMOs have a good view of the market dynamic—including markets tangential to the one they serve. They understand the macro market view, the different options in the markets, and their competitors’ ability to catch up.
“The pandemic has actually brought some positives with it that we have to learn from. If we only revert to the way we were before, then shame on us because we haven’t learned anything,” Brightcove’s Smith said.
