Why new CMOs need to be CSOs (Chief Synthesis Officers)
From the moment a new chief marketing officer starts a job, the expectations for improved marketing performance are outrageously high. The CEO is looking for simultaneous upticks in brand metrics and demand generation. The head of sales wants leads that almost close themselves. The HR chief is expecting instant improvements in Glassdoor ratings and an influx of highly qualified recruits. And of course, the chief financial officer is hoping for increased yield on a smaller budget offering the advice, “only spend money on things that you can measure.”
To find out how a new CMO works around these unrealistic expectations, I interviewed Paige O’Neill, the CMO at Sitecore, a global software company known for its content management system offering. Having tackled the new CMO challenge for a range of tech companies, O’Neill believes her success springs from the ability to synthesize all of the information thrown her way into an action plan relatively quickly. Describing her role as “chief synthesizer,” O’Neill advises other freshly minted CMOs to do their homework, find the anomalies and bring these to the attention of the CEO before enacting a plan. Without his or her support for a new direction, you’re done before you’ve started.
A big part of getting off to a good start is making sure you’ve got alignment on priorities and understanding, who are the key stakeholders that you should be listening to drive those priorities. Does that map to what you heard during the interview process? Hopefully, there aren’t too many surprises. Then it is about being in lockstep with your management and marketing teams and usually the sales team when it comes to marketing and the key areas of focus—and charging forward to drive that agenda relentlessly.
I certainly have had the experience where sometimes the CEO‘s priorities don’t necessarily align with the priorities the rest of the organization thinks marketing’s priorities should be. It can be a delicate balance to strike, but I tend to approach all these processes by coming in, having conversations with people that are in critical roles, listening to what they’re telling me and then going back to the “chief synthesizer” role.
It’s about synthesizing all the input and then being able to go back and have a dialogue with the CEO. I’ll share what I hear from the business, here’s what the data is telling us, and here’s what you’re saying. These things don’t necessarily reconcile, so let’s talk about what that looks like from a prioritization standpoint and what we really think is essential for the business as we move forward with me in this role.
Often, I find that once the CEO hears what’s coming from the business he/she might be willing to have a different kind of a conversation.
It’s human nature to start to skew the data towards either what you think it should be or what you want it to be, but I think that you must come in with an open mind. When I’m going about the process of having the conversations and finding data that might be different than what I thought it was going to be, I know that’s where I need to spend the time drilling down. I’ve learned that over the years because honestly, earlier in my career I might have been more prone to go down a path where there probably was confirmation bias playing some role in the decisions I was making, but then I learned through trial and error that that wasn’t necessarily the best thing for the business.
