Marketing Is Like Engineering

Finding the right marketing leader continues to be difficult. Various studies have shown the average tenure for CMOs anywhere from 18 months to four years, with technology CMOs on the lower end of the spectrum. What’s striking about these studies is that they consistently find that the marketing leaders have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. I have also heard that recruiting the right CMO has been taking companies longer than expected – sometimes taking over 6 months to a year to find the right fit.

Why is that the case? Having worked with (and in) a number of technology companies, including as head of marketing, I have found that the fit in marketing is much more complex and harder to measure than other roles in the executive team. And, not surprisingly, it comes down to your organization and the kind of marketing person you need versus what you want.

No Canonical Organizational Structure in Tech

Unlike many other industries, where roles have been defined and refined over decades of operations, technology companies are like snowflakes – no two organizations are exactly the same. What I’ve found is that the structure of a technology company is highly dependent on the personalities at the top. For example, where is product management? Does it reside with engineering or is in the marketing organization?

Or maybe it sits in its own place.

What marketing encompasses in each organization varies widely as well. The scope of marketing can range from just being corporate and brand to driving product initiatives and sales. Marketing can sit at the same level as the other executives; other times it resides within sales (uh, the “CRO”)… or even product.

That also goes with the definition of roles. If you ask 5 senior leaders at different technology companies what product marketing is, you’d probably get 7 different answers. A product marketer at Apple is different than someone doing product marketing at a B2B company like Oracle or SAP. The same goes for product management. In several engineering-led product development organizations, product management sits under engineering with no real influence on product strategy, while other organizations treat their product managers like mini general managers.

What Kind of Marketing Person Do You Really Need?

For many senior leaders in technology companies, marketing as a practice is not well understood. If you peek under the hood of a marketing organization, you realize there are a lot of diverse activities that sit in marketing, each requiring a unique skill set and approach. To help senior leaders understand these complexities, I tell them that marketing is like engineering. In a software engineering team, there are different types of roles – architects, QA, Devops, etc. Each role has different activities and expectations, requiring different types of people. Not to disparage the importance of testing in development, but would someone who ascends the ranks in QA be the right person for CTO?

Marketing is the same. There are marcom people, creative branding types, PR experts, demand generation (aka “growth marketing”) nerds, marketing operations managers, product marketers, and so on. A good branding person generally doesn’t do sales enablement. Nor would you expect a demand generation person to handle crisis communications.

Marketing leaders often grow from one of these roles, and it’s important to understand how that impacts their point of view on how things are done or what their strengths are. I remember a comment a CEO made to me when he was talking about his former CMO, who had a performance marketing background: When there was a need to reposition and rebrand the company, the brand strategy and activation plan looked a lot like a demand generation plan.

The ideal CMO candidate has the kind of background that will contribute the most to what you need marketing to do. But what is really important is finding a CMO who knows what they don’t know and can bring in talent or external agencies that make up for that.

Not understanding the diverse disciplines of marketing leads to a mistake I’ve seen several organizations make when hiring a CMO. It is really easy to be seduced by big consumer brand experience and a background of doing sexy ad campaigns. While that experience is appropriate for consumer tech (especially D2C), is it really appropriate for your enterprise software company with a focus on security? Or your corporate travel technology platform?

Culture Fit With the CEO (and Organization)

Finally, what really drives success is marketing’s ability to handle its relationships with the rest of the organization. That is especially true where the CEO is concerned. As much as data and demand generation has become important in showing marketing’s contribution to success, the soft skills of working with a CEO are still paramount. Marketing and communications scale the CEO in public and throughout the organization. The CEO has to trust that marketing will do its job of articulating the CEO’s vision and messaging.

In the end, the right fit can be complex. This point was brought home to me when I served as interim CMO for a consumer electronics client, a Silicon Valley division of a larger organization. In addition to turning around the marketing organization, I was also helping to recruit my permanent replacement to lead marketing.

The challenge was multifaceted:

• The parent company had a “traditional” culture more suitable for aerospace, communications and legacy media. This was not a Google with slides and a ball pit.

• The company already had its exit, so the upside was limited compared to a pre-IPO situation.

• Part of the turnaround was a need to update marketing strategies and tactics to be more suitable for digital rather than legacy channels. The head of marketing needed to be up to speed on the latest digital marketing thinking at the time.

Clearly these were requirements that could not be easily described in a job description. I had to find someone who could fit the culture of the more mature parent company, already achieved her or his own personal financial goals, yet who was also up to date on the latest marketing strategies. Working as the interim head of marketing helped me understand the nuances of that situation. Needless to say, the search took 3x longer than expected, but we eventually found my replacement, who it turns out was a big fan of the technology.

Having an outsider-insider view of the situation helped out quite a bit. It’s not a typical situation for a head of marketing to want to hire her or his replacement. But it’s a good way to make sure you find the right long-term hire for your situation.

If you’re curious to learn more re about finding the right CMO, feel free to reach out to me directly.