Marketing’s Identity Crisis & Unified Revenue Leadership with Emma Clayton

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO.

Of the CRO Collective, and welcome to.

The CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed.

Thanks for listening.

Now let's go mix it up. Welcome to this episode of the Siero Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna. I am the founder of the Sierra Collective and. And you know, there is a. I'll say, sort of like. I don't know if I'm characterizing it properly, but let's just call it for the sake of some, you know, making it provocative. There's a crisis in marketing in the B2B space right now. Why do I say that? Well, I say it because I think it would be hard to disagree with the reality that marketing has sort of become almost like split up into little pieces, you know, and it lost some of its leadership unification. And having sold marketing my entire career and having a marketing agency of my own, you know, I have a perspective on this that's not just an observer. I'm in the middle of it, you know, and I saw an amazing post on LinkedIn about a month or so ago, maybe a couple months ago, from brilliant woman named Emma Clayton, who made this sort of provocation. You know, she's leaving Pavilion. You know, she has this strong opinion about the community's position, positioning around marketing, and I'll let her characterize it, but it was really provocative and it was really insightful. And I was like, wow, what a smart person. What a great post. And then it resulted in all this stuff and turned into a lot of conversations about that particular topic, which I think is an important one in, as we watch the way B2B is evolving. So anyway, I thought I'd invite Emma to come on and we talk about it because I have a lot of opinions about this. So here she is.

Thank you. What a lovely intro. Yeah. Loads to talk about. Yeah, let's talk about. Let's start with the post.

Let's. Let's do that. You know, so if you don't mind. I mean, I was. I was actually going to read the whole thing, but I thought, you know, I'd rather have you summarize it. In more fresher way. So what was the post? And importantly, as you contextualize it, sort of, what was the impetus for the post?

Well, I've been in marketing for 26, 27 years and I've been a consultant for eight. And so I've seen what great marketing is and I've seen how marketing over the last, I would say six years, probably maybe the last three for sure, has eroded into something I don't recognize anymore. But I joined. I mean, you've mentioned the community. I tried to keep them nameless. But you went out there and you.

I'm, I say I'm out there.

I love it. I love it. So I joined Pavilion looking for somewhere.

And just to be honest, I know I have no negative opinion about Pavilion at all. I don't. I think it's a great platform and it's good like anything, even like mine. Everyone, everything has a sort of ups up of good things and bad things. I just know that, you know, it was. And again, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure I'm CL clarifying this, that, you know, Pavilion is a big community. There's a lot of people in that community and a lot of people that are in my followers. I have, my 15,000 or so followers are in Pavilion. So, you know, when you made a statement, plus you have a big reputation, right? You're not like some little mouse, you know, you're, you're, you're an expert. So it had an impact. And I think that's an important thing. And not specifically calling out a platform as much as the implications of what these sort of larger groups and how the collectivism formulates around a certain discipline. So that's, that was my point.

Yeah, 100%. And look, I don't have any, as we call it in England, beef with anybody. You know, we say beef.

Yeah, love it.

You say beef.

Oh, sure, yeah.

So, yeah, I just saw somebody at a dinner having a great time, good conversations, and I looked up Pavilion, I'd never heard of them, and thought, hey, this looks good. I was probably only two years into the SaaS tech world and I thought, great, I'll go and I'll really expand my network, my horizons, and actually my own understanding of how this sector works. Having come from pharmaceuticals, very highly compliant industries of healthcare and professional services and finance and fintech. So I joined Pavilion and I was with them for a year. And I mean, the post just came from a real reflection as I was canceling my membership that morning, it was a Saturday morning. I was sat on my sofa and I just, I'm just going to reflect and that's what I do. My posts are all just reflections of what's in the moment. I don't plan them, I just sit and write them and post them.

Today I just start writing.

I don't create because people want to create. Oh, I've got to put a post out today. These days. I don't post. These days, I post twice. Right. It's just, it's amusing for me. And I thought, actually, why, why do I feel. I seem to be the only person that feels like this? And so I just thought, I'm going to put a musing out there. And I didn't actually tag them in because I didn't want to be provocative. I didn't want to start any. You know, I really dislike that rage bait. I don't like. You come and have a fight with me.

And it read that way. It read that way. That's what I liked about it. It was very classy and very clear and it was clearly not a provocation. You were just making a statement about a space that you obviously feel very passionate about.

Yeah. And I, I mean, I attended their courses, the CMO school, and it was run, interestingly by a CRO who used to be a cmo. But I didn't learn anything. And okay, I was thinking, well, maybe because you are experienced, you know, we all live with that imposter syndrome of what could I possibly know more? How do I evolve? And I did it again. I did it twice. And I thought, yeah, no, this is still the same stuff. And I thought, I'm not learning anything. But then I really reflected on it and thought, what has happened to marketing? Like, this isn't marketing, this is how do you keep the CRO happy? How do you keep the board and the CEO happy? This isn't how do you connect with your market? How do you go and position in a market and build value propositions and differentiations and strategic thinking that really fits into what I call the impact zone, where you've got a customer and a market need and you've got the business needs and the business need is revenue, like we're all there to make money. But isn't it better to do that where you bring in the market and the customers with you instead of just going and shouting at them, hoping that you're going to drag a few in? And what I can really see is businesses hit a plateau when there's only so many people you can drag into your world. Of come and buy this thing if you haven't captured hearts and minds and all that was missing.

Yep.

So I just thought, actually, I don't want to be part of something that is teaching what I fundamentally disagree with. And it goes against all the principles of what really good excellent marketing is. And why am I paying for a membership where I don't like, it's an emperor's New Clothes for me. And so I just thought, okay, I'm leaving because this is the problem. This is part of the problem. And you're right, we are in a crisis. The marketing profession is in a identity crisis, a perception and a branding. Like we've, we market out, but we never market ourselves in a profession. And so I started to do a lot of research on why are we here. Like, I don't recognize our profession anymore. And I thought, well, this is part of the problem. Then I started looking at VCs and how they are looking at CMOs as disposable CMOs. And I've written lots of different articles bringing together like what's the cmoch and what's the cmo, CFO disconnect and what's their perception of us versus how we should be showing up. And so there's this, there's just gaps everywhere where marketing has sort of shrunk into this very siloed, alienated, misunderstood, misaligned, sidelined profession. But actually I like if you're a marketer now, you're seen if I say to someone, hey, I'm a marketer, they think I just do the promotion, which is, you know, one quarter of a marketing mix, which is one quarter of what marketing does. So that's like 16% of what marketing is. And I'm afraid, actually I'm now having to say, actually I'm a business strategist because that's what a marketeer is. They're a business strategist. They set the vision, they set the objectives, they set the strategic levers, they understand the market. They do all that market orientation before they even start to do any tactics. And you know, marketing is this hamster wheel of tactics. And then we do a bit of measure and test and grow. And businesses are not progressing and growing and they're falling over and not viable because they do not have people like me, who is a real old school strategic commercial thinker sitting on that board and they've sort of almost been pushed out of the way in favor of a CRO or teeth growth Chief Growth Officer or they're put under the cfo. It's like, we don't know what to do with marketing, so we're just going to put it in all these different places and chop it up and put it here because people don't get it. They think it's just, you know, a few carousels on LinkedIn and a brochure for the sales team and I think Pavilion feed in that narrative. And I just wanted to say, hey, I can't be part of the erosion of a profession, of a community that is, you know, putting the ink on the paper and signing the death warrant. So I'm kind of out. And that post sat Warren for 36 hours just in my own network of people. And it was only when one of the UK chapter leads picked it up and commented on it, but didn't just comment on it, tagged all the senior leadership team across the world into the post that that then went viral. So crazy I had to turn the comments off. And it became vicious. It became a very binary us versus them. The argument, the reflections were not had. It became about one person, well, me and one person going head to head with a whole big crew of army like fight, fight, fight behind it. I've heard on reflection that there was a Slack channel dedicated to it for the entire weekend looking at how they could totally decimate my opinion. And then my inbox was then full for. Because, you know, these posts go on and on for days. My inbox was full for an entire like 10 days of people saying, A, I agree with you, B, I'm sorry you've been treated this way, you know, and C, actually, thanks for saying something because our marketing profession is in crisis, but we don't say anything because it's in such crisis. We were scared. And I didn't see anybody talking about this bubbling crisis until I sort of almost lifted a lid on it by saying, guys, this just doesn't feel right anymore. Like, I don't know what we're doing anymore. And what that's then done is, you know, it's mobilized marketeers that feel the same way. Senior marketeers who go, yeah, do you know what? I'm taking jobs that I could have done 10 years ago. But what it's also done is create. Created a lot of vociferous response from a camp who don't want to believe that the community and the leader they're following have got it wrong. And so they're doubling down on the narrative and becoming quite vicious. And, you know, we're calling me out and, you know, there were some really poor behaviors that came but, you know, all you need to do with that is sit back. Like you said in a classy is something that I always try and do. You just got to sit back and let people hang themselves or drink their own poison. And I think the truth will always rise to the top. And interestingly, that post was actually back in. I think it was end of Jan, early Feb, and people are still talking about the post. People are still creating content around the content.

I see it all the time. And I could tell, you know, there's a certain sort of McCall, it a. A fingerprint, if you will, that when I see marketeers posting something about things, I could tell that there's a relationship it has to what you sort of originally started. So look good for you. I think it's great. Yeah, I love it. I think it's good people talking.

It's got people thinking.

And I don't think you were saying anything that obviously if, you know, if I scream in the woods and no one yells back, well, then obviously I'm not talking about something important. But if I scream in the woods and I get yelled at by a thousand animals, well, I, I hit a nerve, right? So why is that? Right? And I think that's a good thing. So I, I think it's great. Like, I. When I read what you did, and again, I think you and I probably have majority agreement. I mean, we can get into. Actually, I have a really interesting way I want to talk to you about this, but generally speaking, there's no question about the fact that I agree with you that marketing has become this weird thing. And I have a strong opinion about why. I'm just curious what you think, like, if you were to summate as you will, why did that happen? What happened that made it this way?

So I wrote a series called who Shot Marketing?

Which, yeah, that started as a mystery series thing you did. It was awesome. That was great. Yeah, it was really great.

I. Yeah. So, well, I did the research and I was like, okay, where did. Where did this start? Who. Who has, you know what? Who. Who are the stakeholders in this? And the more that I was researching and building the story and the narrative around it for a white paper, actually, I thought, actually, this is more than a white paper. This is like a. It's the story that needs to be told, which is why I made it into, like a crime series. And it is about, you know, who shot marketing? Mary Marketing's on the floor. The vc, the cfo, the CEO, the CRO, the recruitment companies, the AI bots, the professional Organizations, like, they're all implicit in this room where marketing's been shot and is, you know, bleeding out. Like, who's responsible? And so part of this series was to go around and look and check in on each of them and the relationship that they've had with marketing over the years and their contribution. But actually press pause if you haven't read it and you want to read it and you want to get to the end.

Yeah, that's okay.

But the big grand reveal, spoiler alert, is that actually marketing's done it to itself. And so it was, it was like.

A suicide in a way.

Yeah, kind of. I kind of didn't really know how to close that because, like, how do you do that? But it was like a death by a thousand cuts. But we sealed. Yeah, we, we, yeah, we did it to ourselves. We, we basically, we didn't stand strong and firm against all the challenges that were coming to us and the changing market. You know, there is some responsibility with the professional organizations who've been asleep at the wheel and are just there for selling courses and, you know, selling the letters after the name. I've bought into that, but I feel it's the way to differentiate in the market. Because actually what's happened is the, the profession has been flooded with people who are not trained and educated and qualified and have taken a HubSpot course or a Google course, no offense to anyone that's done that, but then would class themselves as a senior marketing leader and are now leading teams and organizations. And that is scary. Like, I'm okay with you coming into the profession, taking your hubspots, doing, doing the role, but when you step into a senior leadership role where you're driving profit and margin and customer acquisition at a board level, I have a problem with that because what happens is you're not going to perform at the level of what marketing is. You're going to be very tactical because that's what those qualifications and accreditations take. And you probably haven't had the investment in leadership training to be able to stand up and have those challenges in a boardroom and know how to operate at that level so that you have got gravitas in that room and you've got the ability to influence with credibility, but also with your softer skills. And what's happened is people have looked at marketing, gone, oh, well, that's a bit shit, isn't it? We're going to sideline you and we're going to bring someone else in to do that role. And that's what's happened with the splitting of marketing because we haven't been able to hold ourselves to the standards that are really needed to be able to say we're a growth driver. We have become a cost center because that's all we've known. And we're watching younger generations come through, you know, going into their YouTube stations and saying, hey, I made millions of growth and revenue. You just need to do this, you know, f the establishment and the qualifications, you can do it this way. And it's really attractive to people that want to do the quick wins, the quick money making, but you just look at it and go, that's, that's just going to fall over because there was no gravitas or foundational strength or quality in what they're doing. And customers are clever. Like, we are really insulting our customers in our markets to think that that's an option. But sadly it happens and then that narrative is fed. You know, we, we look at unicorns and we go, look, they did it that way. So we can do the same, but different company, different organization, different market, different sector, different people, different everything. You know, it's really hard to build those unicorns. You know, it's right place, right time, right product, right funding, right backing, right mindset and it's hard to emulate. But yeah, we've got a real crisis of like, let's call it like incompetence in our profession.

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And thank you.

Yeah, that's why it's going on.

It's great. So I got so many things I want to talk about now, but you just really laid it out, so I'll just kind of lay out. I agree with everything you just said. I think the elements that I, I tend to be very, like, I look at the core, you know, primal things that drive stuff, because ultimately that really is what drives things. Right. You know, things like survival and fear. Right. Those are all really, ultimately underneath every single thing. And I think that if. I would say, if you look at the entire B2B business space over the last 10 years, maybe, maybe even 20, I think economics, it's always the follow the money sort of thing, I think is a very important way to look at the world we live in, particularly because in the Western world, the economics of our society and that give me. I'm, I'm a capitalist. So I'm, I want to make sure everyone understands where I'm coming from with this, is that it drives behaviors. Yeah. And so I think what happened, if I look back on it, really a forensic look back when the Internet was created, it opened up an opportunity for scale unseen before and opportunities to grow businesses in ways that were never done before. And the economics of that particular platform allowed for a lot of people to experiment with it in ways to get money as quickly as possible out of it. It became more of like a machine. Right. As opposed to like. So I, I'm, I'm, I'm a student of marketing. You know, I've, I, I grew up in the 70s and the 80s and I went to college for art and advertising, design, marketing. I was around when the first big holding companies were created in 1985, I went into the advertising and marketing industry as a salesperson and I sold into marketing space for my entire career. So I've been connected to all the holding companies. I worked as an executive at two of them. I was involved very deeply in the way that these different solutions are formulated and how they're purchased and how they're deployed, how they talk to marketing, how marketing people talk to clients. I have an agency, I've been running it for 20 years. We serve large B2B and B2C companies. You know, I'm very steeped in this. I'm not some observer. Plus I've sold this stuff my entire career. You know, there are a few things I could say I feel like I'm an expert in, but this is, this is one of them. So you and I are talking about this from an informed perspective. And I could tell you that when the Internet came out, it created a frenzy. And then I think the second wave of the Internet was the SaaS industry, which produced this repeatable marketplace which was never heard of before, that you could create products that people could immediately purchase online. Boom. And you could repeat that over and over again and it created a economy and literally it created an entirely new economic infrastructure which is the SaaS and let's say even programmatic sales sector, which created an entire industry of investment community that understood that this model could be replicated through purchasing of specific businesses that fell into a category of product that could be sold quickly and had a.

Marketplace.

Solution that could be quickly deployed, quickly purchased and quickly turned over rapidly enough so that the numbers would climb enough that the evaluations of that business would allow us to go get more money. And this was the thing that changed all this. If you, you, you and I both look back at the amazing marketing of you. Look, I mean granted I'm not crazy about these product but you cannot deny the amazing power of Procter and Gamble and how they invented this entire idea of building brands around just literally nothing. Like they formulate some sort of category. But it was all marketing. That is how they went to market. They created a image, they created a story, they created a value proposition. They wrapped it in everything and they put it on the shelf and it created, it was, it's a brilliant way that they were able to take products. And the greatest brands in the world, the consumer brands, I think is really where marketing is really most utilized properly are the ones that build value from messaging and through value proposition and through the construction of an idea and an image and an emotional connection, those things can be sustained forever. I mean, you look at Nike and Coke and all these, I mean, these are products, they're perennial, right. Because of this. Right. And they're not even that different. I mean, a Nike sneaker and an Adidas sneaker, if someone gave me the both, I mean, it's a sneaker, you know, but there's something about the way that we've imbued those products with a certain image, and marketing is completely responsible for that. Now you take a product that can be sold in the marketplace, someone can click on it, give you their credit card number and buy it. Marketing, that proposition is not as valuable anymore. In fact, the time that you and I both know it takes to build that kind of equity, it gets in the way of the objective that these companies have. They want this stuff to happen a lot faster, you know, and if I want to create a brand, you and I both know how long it takes and how much time it takes and effort it takes to do that properly. And we also know that once it's done, it's sort of like embedded in the DNA of the consumer. Like you can, that's it, you can sit on top of that forever as long as you maintain it. And that's where the big opportunities are. But that's long term thinking. Most of the businesses that you and I are in right now, it's all, what's going on next quarter, what's going on this next month, how do we get our valuations, when's our B round, when's our C round? And so when you create an environment like that and all the money is being poured into those types of businesses, it makes sense that marketing would be thought of more as a hammer and a nail and a screwdriver, as opposed to a foundational part of the way in which we go to market. And, you know, the companies that did both were amazing, right? If you can do both these two things at the same time, have the most, I think, in my opinion, probably the most valuable proposition you can have today in the world, which is a combination of immediacy and purchasability, as well as brand and affinity. And, you know, there are companies that get this right. There's no question about it, just that it's not the norm. You know, it's not the norm. And so what I saw what happened and to kind of reflect what you said, marketers, what they did was, yeah, I said they're sort of complicit. But this is where Fear comes in is that marketers still need to work. They want to play their trade, they want to get jobs, they want to maintain their profession. And as it changed, they just changed with it. Okay, I'll become a tactician, I'll become a search engine optimization expert, I'll become a Google Ads expert, I'll become whatever the case may be. All the, all the different like sub industries are created out of this stuff. And so you had a schooling of 10, 15 years of tactician training in marketing, which we called marketing, which evolved from PowerPoint presentations and collateral creation to advertising to placement and performance marketing to search engine optimization, which I think are those things are really valuable without the foundational component of who are we, what do we do? Who do we, what are we solving for? What's our positioning in the marketplace? What are we carving out here? And without that, those tactics become so necessary that if you turn them off for one second, the entire brain goes away. You have to survive on that stuff. And it's a very, very difficult survival. But weirdly, someone who's good at those things becomes very valuable in the marketplace because, you know, they sort of found a place where they can create this sort of value proposition for themselves. Like, I can run your ad programmatic ad campaigns better than anybody can. I could do performance marketing better than anybody can. That's a very valuable person in that environment. But the marketer, the thinker, the philosopher is useless in that framework. And I think that's where we ended up. And I think that now when we have even more complexity in the marketplace and even greater opportunity to be able to sell people things faster and faster, which we know now, the consumer is smart, like you said, they don't like this stuff anymore. It's sort of becoming clear that there needs to be a little bit more philosophical, you know, reasoning around this stuff. And I think that's where we're at right now. And that's what sort of had me start my business, which is around the CRO. We can get into that. You know, I don't talk about that with you, but I just want to like get your thoughts on that little sort of story I just walked you through. And your thoughts are on that if it's resonates with you or not.

Yeah, 100%, that's exactly what's happened. But if I can just add to that, what's then happened is those great individual contributors that have got their niche are then really good at what they do. They deliver their outcomes and so they're promoted rather than Understanding all the rest of the different elements.

They don't have like a holistic understanding. They have a specialty and they become a CEO based on that specialty, which is not bringing enough of.

That's when it falls apart.

I get your point because the board.

Or the CEO will go, hang on a second, you were brilliant, like what happened. But they, they can't make that transition. And they're calling themselves a CMO when they're not really a cmo. They're just somebody that was brilliant at SEO or paid media or you know, whatever it might be, engineering, you know.

Incredibly valuable skill sets and make a huge difference. But they don't encompass what marketing is as a whole. It's a piece of it.

Yeah. And so when you go up into the leadership role, what do you do? You dial into your comfort zone and you forget everything else. But a really good, strong CMO will understand, like a puppeteer, which elements of marketing are needed at what point of growth in that particular company. And you're right, you don't really need a CMO puppeteering everything until you get to at least a series A, probably series B. You need a really good generalist with a few specialists driving that forward. And actually I'd argue that the founder should be that CMO because they are so passionate about what they do. They can do the value prop and the same.

I said that the founders are usually, in my opinion, they're like the best source material.

Yeah. But then when you grow up and you know, you get to that sort of late series A, early series B, that's when you start to need because you've proven your product market fit, you're getting to a point now where you are able to scale great. That's when you need the strong CMO to come in and go, right, I would put a bit here and put a bit that understanding the nuances of the segmentation, the targeting, the position in the market, the stages, the growth, the channels, they get it. And that's where I think we've gone wrong, is we've just gone, great, let's put you in charge of the whole damn ship. And it's like we're going into an iceberg.

Yeah. The way that we're marketers are being incentivized is they're getting rewarded for doing something really well that doesn't necessarily represent the whole of what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah, there's that age old saying, what got you here is not going to get you there.

That's right, that's right. It's our motto here at the Sierra Collective. In fact, I love that. So let's do that. Because I do want to get into more. Like if we kind of, you and I both thinking like storytellers here, right. Get to a point where we can talk about what to do about it, which I know you have a lot of thoughts of. I do too. But I want to just for a second, kind of go off on a tangent on another topic which I think is interesting. And that is this idea that you mentioned it in your, in your writings, that the CMO is to some degree sort of being aspirationally looking to become a Chief Revenue Officer. And I think that that's. I could see that there's some wisdom to that. I have a lot of opinions on what CRO should be doing, as you probably understand, and also why they should be doing it and what's going on that I, I'd say like, I'll throw like a, let's say a postulation at you. We'll see where we go with this. Right. So the reason why I even started this whole business is, you know, similarly. Right. I came to a somewhat similar conclusion. And that is I looked at the larger picture. Right. Marketing, as you and I both know, is a component of a business. It's not all business and revenue, which is, I make a distinction between revenue and sales. It's a much different context. Right. Marketing is certainly, in my opinion, it's a revenue generating part of the business, not a cost center, and it's not being used that way. And I think that what's happened is similar to my earlier story. We have a siloed and misaligned revenue model that we've been deploying into the marketplace for a very long time that just doesn't work anymore, which is we have a marketing expert and a sales expert, customer success expert, and they're all sort of out there deploying their respective departmental goals and they're being measured differently many times. The stuff that the way marketing is being incentivized to deliver results many times is being done for the purposes that you and I just discussed. And they many times have no translation to sales at all. They're sort of like weirdly not connected to what the sales process is like. And so they live like in this sort of parallel universe. And so the companies that I saw that did really well was where there was someone who had the wisdom to understand that all these pieces should be working together as one thing. They're part of a. It's an engine really. It's not a bunch of parts, it's an engine. And if one of the pieces of an engine breaks, you have to fix that piece of the engine because they affect all the other pieces associated with it. But we didn't build it that way. We built our organizations based. Each one of them can sort of run independently, strangely. And that just shows a problem with the model. And my postulation and the way I built my business is the chief Revenue officer, sort of that person who can sort of piece together this whole thing and create a revenue engine with a singular leadership. Which the problem is that we have too many leaders. So as a result of that, we have this by sort of like, you know, fragmentation of different agendas all being rewarded in different ways, that having one leader oversee the entire revenue and who has. Okay, I want to make clear, has not a sales focused expertise, which most CROs do, but a business focused expertise and understands the role that marketing plays in the whole thing and deploys a marketing, a marketing initiative or a marketing function that is an integrated one that includes all the stuff that you and I are talking about so that that becomes more realized and that the CRO then ascends to someone whom could be that person. This requires them to have a certain number of qualifications and competencies that are different than the current profile of a CRO, which tend to be people that come from sales and don't come with that. Right. And they're rewarded with that title because of their sales acumen as opposed to being rewarded for that title because of their business acumen. So my, my, my theory and successful. I'm happy we're training people to think that way and finding people who do. And as a result, we're finding people who come from different parts of the business. So the sales CRO is still certainly part of the equation. But I'm finding a lot of CMOs who are great at this job rev ops people who are great at this job because they come into that role with a much more holistic view of the business. So to that end, right. The question I get a lot is, well, what do you do about marketing then? Like, what if you have a CMO and a CRO and you're a model, Warren, what's the relationship they have? And it's a really provocative question. I have a lot of answers to it. But I think whatever that looks like, however, you should decide to make that work within your organization. One thing is clear that I would say, but it's a mandate, is that marketing needs to have a much more elevated role in the way the business is run than it does today. Regardless of how you construct it. That means that that CRO needs to have a philosophical agreement that that's the case. They can't be one of these sort of sales only led cheap revenue officers. That's going to create a problem. And so I just want to throw that out there because I know you mentioned in a lot of what you talk about the CRO as one of the, you know, you even kind of characterized the CRO as one of the people who might be the one holding the gun. Right? So I'm just curious like what your thoughts are on that general and how it fits in or squares with your current viewpoint on things.

Thank you so much again for listening to the Sierra Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the Zero collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible.

A couple things to note.

If you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a Chief Revenue Officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue Officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring Chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they.

Win in the role.

The Serial Accelerator Course. We kick off the next one in May mid May 2025. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn just DM me CRO accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information, give you a brochure of the course. So again, CRO Accelerator Course 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great and you'll see some more information about it. On the website.

Thanks.

Gosh, there's a lot to unpack them. I guess the first thing that I would say is when I look at the role of the CRO, that, that goes back to the role of what I would have said the CMO would have had in better times. Okay, so fair. What are. But, but what I would then add to that is that in every single person in an organization, whether there are two of you or 2,000, two of you should have a revenue target at some point. You should have it. Even the reception.

100% agree. Yes.

Everybody, because you're, everybody should. Otherwise, what are you doing? You've got to think like that.

You have to be tied to a revenue outcome.

100%. So I then asked the question, well, do you need a chief Revenue Officer to do the role of what a good old school? And that's not me being purist. That's just what the role would have been before it sort of got diluted.

Had it been left to its devices and ascended the way it should have been, it probably would have turned out that way in some other version of reality. Yeah, okay.

And 23% of CMOs become a CRO. So I can see like I, I, I've labeled that as capitulation. And I'm going to explain what I mean by that because there were some people really dining out on their content when they did that and got really mortally offended. You haven't, by the way, because you're a grown up. But there are some things.

It's a great point. I mean, it's a really great conversation. I'm not trying to protect any turf. I may change my whole point of view on this over the last three or four years because I don't look how many things that I think were true 10 years ago that I don't think are true anymore. Right. And so yeah, if I'm not open to thinking differently, then I'm, I'm lost, you know, but I, I'm not there yet. I still do think that what I'm doing makes sense. However, I think you and I are probably, probably in more agreement on this than we are in disagreement about it. But I agree with your point. I think that CMOs, if they were left to do the job that they were capable of and they ascended to have sort of level of holistic expertise and that was taught more. You know, I look at it almost like, you know, you look at like these older generations of, if I may say, you know, you look back at like, you know, let's say Eastern Europe or other parts of the world where, you know, there was a lot of wisdom that was passed down through generations from people to people about, like, you know, things like what kind of remedies you should make and the kind of food that you should eat and the kind of ways to take care of certain things. And it's passed down and. And that stuff stays in inside of the culture because it's very taken care of. It's like, here, before I pass on, you really need to know how to do this thing. I think that some of that sort of apprenticeship is gone. The great marketers are real superstars. They just. They didn't make it downstream. To a lot of people that run marketing takes. I think they're being hired to be specialists. So I know where. I don't want to get off on that, but I think that that's sort of like a lot of what you're saying is that there's a purity in the profession that's been diluted.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that. So. So that's my first point. And I look and I go, okay, well, why have they capitulated? Why have they gone? And it's because the CMO role has become secondary and there are communities, you know, Pavilion one. Sam Jacobs language is. You know, he talks about ascending to the CRO role from a CMO role, which is really telling because what that does I. The message is that you go up to a CRO, it's the one above. And so, you know, people are looking around going, hey, listen, this marketing profession's dying a sorry death. It's getting kicked, battered and bruised, hey, listen, I'm going to get some power. I'm going to get better money, I'm going to get more prestige, I'm going to get better influence if I step up into the cr.

Follow the money. You follow the money, you follow the prestige, and you.

That is where I've got the problem. Because actually, all they're doing is stepping back into what they were.

Look, that gets to. And we don't need the survival part of the equation, right? Which is that, you know, we're in an environment, we have to survive. And so I have to kind of capitulate to what's going on. And, you know, it's not easy for everybody to make a stand on stuff because they're. They have to kind of continue. If I've been in marketing for 20 years and all of a sudden it changes, what am I going to do now? I'm going to become a Dentist. I mean, I'm a marketer. That's what I do, you know, so.

I have a lot of people considering that at the moment. Plumbers, dog walkers, florists. I mean, I'm getting loads of people going, I'm just going to go back to being a hand profession because that's where the money is going to be in the next five to 10 years. And we know I'm qualified to do it. We're going to go do that.

So true.

Like marketers are brilliant for seeing what's over the horizon.

That is fun.

Apart from our own.

They're, they're much more, they're very good at prognosticating the future than. I agree. Because marketers have to think long term. Have. You have to. Right. You have to look at the head, at trends and okay, so again, you.

Know, that's like, that's seen in the board as like, you know, stargazing and, you know, a little bit of mediumship around the crystal ball. And so again, you know, the facts, the figures, the numbers that the board, the vc, the CEO, the CFO want to talk about. Like we're over here stargazing, predicting the future and they just look at us and go, what the hell? Like, we need to do this now because survival is about the quarter. And I get that.

Yeah, that is the way it is.

There's, you know, we don't have to be binary about this. And the really good marketeers will be able to lean into that conversation and talk numbers just as much as stargaze.

Yep.

So that's the one point I want to make. The second is that like, I don't know why we keep creating all these new roles. Because the chief revenue officer, the chief growth officer, chief brand officer, chief customer officer, that keeps coming. They're all the CMO role that used to be what it was or a sales and marketing director before, you know, we had chief anything.

Yeah.

And what used to happen in my day is I'd have my marketing team and my launch team and my brand teams and my PR and comms and like all of those disciplines would set and report to me and then we would have, I grew up in pharma. So you'd have the medical team who were bringing products to market through their clinical trials and phases. You'd have clinical, medical, regulatory. You then have the sales team. The way we handled, you know, bashing down the silos is we'd have cross functional teams. Like, what's happened to those? Why do we suddenly have to have one person Ruling everything because those skill sets are so different. Not one person can have the skill sets to have good credence to all of those disciplines. And so what we've lost is the ability, the soft skills, the leadership skills that we were all invested in once upon a time before budgets were caught and it became this very cut down to the gristle of an organization. We can't invest in people and growth and development. But when that was happening, people were taught how to have constructive conflict, how to work together, how to collaborate, how to cross functionally align, how to build strategic plans together, how to execute, how to hold each other to account, how to generate the results and become a high performing team. Imagine if we invested in that instead of creating all these new roles that are 180, 200, 300,000 pound roles, like you'd actually have more profit in your business. So that's where I've got a bit of an issue, like let's just go back to teaching people how to just be good, decent leaders. And what you've got in a lot of these organizations is toxicity, demotivation, disengagement, unclear because the wrong people I think are in charge trying to fix the problem that actually if we took a step back was never really wrong in the first place. It was this new economy that you've talked about that's come in and taken the noise away from what bloody brilliant used to be. If you just remove that noise and go, okay, great, let's remove that. Let's go back to how this used to operate. It worked. There's nothing wrong with putting that model and those frameworks back into these new economies and new markets for them to accelerate in growth. It's proven, it's tested. Capital economies have been doing this for years and decades. And all this time like why are we wanting to change? And the change is creating disruption and chaos and uncertainty and fear. And we know that that's when bad behavior happens, that's when people are making the wrong decisions, they're making decisions from the wrong place. And that's where I think we've fundamentally gone wrong. And we keep trying to put sticking plasters by creating all these new roles, but you know, break down what the CRO role is. I have no issue with, you know, those people and their role. But actually all that's happened is you've taken a CMO label off and put it with CRO role.

Yeah, it's similar, you know, all of.

Those different people working together under, we used to call them a golden triangle.

Sure, I get It. I think everything you said is spot on. I just want to make sure that there's something you mentioned in that that is important because I see this a lot and I understand it. I'm sensitive to the reason why this perception seems to come up which is what you mentioned this sort of like a pushback on the CRO that I'm referring to as being this sort of like unrealistic unicorn person. Right. And I actually had a really great debate with somebody on this show about this topic, very smart person about that same point. And I want, I'm sure, I want to really like make sure I emphasize this point of view on that. I'm not professing or claiming or making some proclamation that this CRO needs to be this sort of like all knowing, all powerful person who can run a sales organization, run a marketing organization. That's. That's ridiculous. That's not, that's not any. No one should do that. That doesn't make sense. I'm talking about somebody whom. And again I think I kind of. Two things that I would sort of put a point onto it. One is misalignment, which I think is a cancer in businesses, right. You have this sort of misaligned revenue functions which you have these three things running around that, that to me is like that's a, that's the cancer that needs to be fixed. That's one thing. And if we all agree, which I think most do, okay, fine, so let's fix it. So that means that you need some kind of roll up, right. Of that and you need someone overseeing it. That, that would be one solution for that. The second part is what does this person do? Like what's the difference between revenue, leading revenue and leading marketing or leading sales. Right. What you mentioned before, this idea of the sales and marketing leader who might, I think was like the precursor to the CRO I'm talking about. This is someone who had a really good understanding of how these two things work together. They had a larger, bigger picture understanding of the way marketing and sales related and they, they, they gave respect to both aspects of. Understood that when they made the cocktail that there needed to be a certain amount, both of them in that cocktail for it to work. And they didn't dilute it ever. They didn't. That's how I view the CRO role is not someone who's responsible for those things in terms of execution. They're responsible for finding someone, if I may be blunt, like you. I want you to run my marketing organization because I know you're going to be brilliant at it and you're going to bring to it what I need. So I'm going to. I'm. I'm not going to find somebody who's a tactician and say you're an amazing performance marketer. I'm going to make you my cmo. No, I want to find someone who is a marketing expert who will run my marketing organization that I. That will talk to the sales organization the way that I know that you know how. So it's about finding the right people, constructing the right competencies. And the reason why I sort of doubled down on this idea of someone running it is because I do think that what happens is this is like where I think the human part comes in is that when we have a bunch of people that are running different groups of an organization inside of one system and they all have a C suite title, it's very risky to assume that they're all just going to get along and work together. What ends up happening is. I do see this a lot. I see a lot of things where, you know, factions are created around the way people are incentivized and it becomes easy to kind of break down. And if you just have one person being like kind of the overseer, not the doer, but the overseer, it reduces the risk of that happening and it increases the possibility that the engine will be more uniform. So that's all I'm trying to solve for really is the alignment problem. Right. Not find a unicorn that can do everything. They don't exist. And I wouldn't purport to look for anybody like that. So that's one thing I want to say. So I think it's an important distinction to make about the way that I view that role. Not as a superhuman, you know, it's just a smart person that knows this stuff, you know.

Yeah. And I don't disagree with any of that either. I think we're pretty much saying the same thing because actually it's not about titles. No, it's about what is about role. And what are we trying to do?

What do we what the outcome? And I think to do here.

And maybe just our approach is just a little bit different. Maybe you're a bit more modern than me and maybe I am a purist. I don't know. But the way we would handle that Warman is we would just have good old balance scorecard with behavioral, you know. Are you being an asshole this month?

Exactly. No question. That's where the other stuff comes in. It's like having Grown up and then.

Performance management, you know, no question. And none of this goes on in the organizations that I've been in.

I agree. There isn't, There isn't. And I think it has to do a lot with. I do think again, I'm very much a sort of a bit of a cynic, if you will. You know, it's money. We've uncovered an economic engine that is extremely attractive to the business community right now. I mean, this is a crazy juggernaut. I mean, you have companies that can become billion dollars in valuation in two years today. It was unheard of before, like the way that we can do this. And it's very attractive to organizations that want to get return on investment. And so businesses, the digital, let's call it like the online or the SaaS, business model is no different than a stock market portfolio that, you know, you can invest in and the products can yield a good return. And when they're looked at that way, they're just treated that way. So I sort of think like there's a way I speak to my, my clients who are CEOs, founders of companies. I say you have to figure out philosophically what you want to be. So let's say, for example, you're a founder, you're a brilliant person and you created some solution that's really amazing to solve a problem that's really amazing. Okay, you've reached this point where you've solved this problem. Was the impetus for that a, because you believe that this problem is an important problem to solve and you want to be someone who solves it, or is it because you think this problem could make you a lot of money? Solving this problem made a lot of money. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong either one. I'm saying it's just be honest with yourself. Like if you look at the marketplace, you go, wow, this business would be great. I can turn this thing around in three years. I can exit in three years. I can make a lot of money with this business. Okay, that's the philosophy you have. So you're probably going to run an organization that's going to reflect that. Whereas if I want to be like the number one solution in the marketplace in 20 years, it's a completely different philosophy and you're going to run your business differently. And I think that's the point at which founders need to reconcile with themselves. Like, what's the real longer term purpose? And when I speak to my clients, I'm like, what is it you want to do? And if they say to me, yeah, you know what? We think we could be acquired in five years, that's fine. I mean, I don't have an opinion about that. But then you have to build a business that's going to get you acquired in five years and it's going to look a lot different than a business that you want to be around in 25 years.

I wrote a book about this last year around the difference between high performance culture and human led culture and you need both. So whilst you've got a plan to sell in five years, that's a real high performance culture. That's the, you know, how are we going to get there, what are we going to do, where are we going to play strategic perform, call each other out. But the culture's gone, people are burned out, the culture's gone, it's toxic. We're teaching, you know, you burn a.

Lot of coal doing that. Yes.

Like you, you have passengers along the way, like you take people out but then equally you'll have. Our British NHS is like this, you know, you have these culture, human LED cultures. And again it's like, be nice to everyone, agree tacitly with everybody, no challenge, be nice, say the right thing, don't say anything at all. And so what happens is you have this culture of being nice, but then you don't perform. And what I argue for is what's wrong with learning that cerebral how to drive a business with the heart of how we lead the people through that. And I think you can do both.

I do.

What I'm looking at, I agree is businesses that are just really toxic, but firing ahead and getting the money in and forgetting about the people or the people that are just about the people and absolutely delivering that fall and then going out of business because you know, they don't challenge or have constructive. And so what I'm doing, saying and I went off and trained in all of this so I could be a better leader and I could help other leaders be better leaders, is, you know, we've got to be able to learn how to humanize the growth because actually we go faster. And it's proven. There's so much research to say when you really consider the blend of the performance and the culture together, you go faster, you go quicker, you go more aligned and actually without that toxicity that really takes a toll on everybody and their performance and their productivity, like that's the holy grail. And so I guess I'm arguing for like, let's just stop being absent minded, short sighted and ego driven with Everything we're trying to do in this space, because actually there is a better way. But for some reason we're not investing in people. Like, I even wrote an article about, you know, you look at the Martech industry and how much money goes into Martech in organizations globally. Like it's going to become a $2 trillion industry by 2027. I think it's something like 500 billion now. Like, imagine if we invested even 25% of that into people. Like, wouldn't we be more productive, happier? Like, this global bullshit that's going on at the moment would be softened. And like, I just think we're investing in the wrong things for the wrong reasons. And I think we all need to just take a breath, go do a yoga class, do a meditation and come back calmer and cleaner and just a little bit more considered in what we're doing instead of this growth, all costs. Go, go, go. The people. Like, okay, it's just wrong for me and I just can't sit back and watch it happen because I just. It's a car crash. But also, as a mother, like, my kid's about to enter this workforce in the next five years. I don't want her coming into this.

Yeah, I know.

Like, it's not a nice place to be.

My daughter just graduated college this weekend and I feel the same, you know, like, they're so innocent, you know, when they come out of school and they have these bright ideas about people and stuff. And it's like, I understand that, you know, like me and you are confronted with reality and we adjust. But I agree.

And I spent 17 years bringing her up to be a really, really good person. I don't want the workforce and all of this nonsense changing her.

Right.

Because, you know, she is a good person and she'll do great stuff in her life. But I, I just don't think any of us want to sit. Like, we're not designed to sit in this for a long period of time. And yeah, do you know what? Money is brilliant. We want to earn the money, but not at the cost of people. And like, people just. And the planet. Right. Like, I'm not a big woo, woo, spiritual person, but I just think there's got to be some common sense and some balance in what we're doing.

There's no doubt. And I, I, no doubt. I agree. I've seen that we've created a beast that. Look, the good news, I think is this, that these sort of things, they burn themselves out.

Yeah, they do, they do.

You said it Already. Right. I mean, people, everybody in this equation isn't going to survive this, you know? Right. I mean, think about it. How many people can work like this and how many people. And the other side of it too, that we didn't talk about, which, I don't want to get too much into it, but it's just an important part is the consumer themselves. They're tired of this too. People don't want to be sold to like this anymore. They're sick of being barraged every 24 hours with stuff. And, you know, it's.

They're judging organizations based on how they treat their staff, no question.

And so I think there's like a lot of things where everybody that's in this ecosystem, including the marketplace that we're trying to sell to, we've cannibalized our own audiences. And it's good in a way. I think that when we start to see the backlash from the consumer shutting their phones off and not responding things anymore, it's a message to us to like, okay, I think we, we, we got it. Everybody made a lot of money and, you know, maybe that wave is over and we might not do it anymore. You know, I think, I wonder if.

That'S what all of this is at the moment. You know, sometimes when you go through these real monumental moments in history, you see that there was a period of real fear and uncertainty and unsettling times. And you know, you see in society and politics a lot of this disturbing stuff going on. You know, I've just been going through like the bullshit revolution with my daughter for at gcse. Like, I wonder if we're in this moment bubbling and we're deciding like, what we want to be as a generation for are.

I think with that, we're definitely in the middle of a. We're sitting in the middle of two new paradigms. And you know, it could be long, so it could. A matter of fact, I think that the, the world moves fast, so things change quicker than they used to. But I still think that it takes a long time for certain longer term things to seed themselves. So I do think that we're in the middle of a, A, like a, almost like a, A, a tectonic plates of two larger things happening. And I think that it may take a long enough time that there are certain people that might have an entire career inside of this transition, but it's okay. And I think that what I'm seeing is this, like all the things that are happening in the marketplace are a response to this. Either sublimated you know, subconscious reality that we've reached peak nonsense and then the more aware not reality that we reach peak nonsense. And I think these voices are, you know, disruptors are, are coming for. And I think it's good. I, I sort of like mixing things up a little.

And I guess that if, if this has resonated with anybody listening, I guess it's, you know, they, you've got a voice as well and you can, you can stand up and say, okay, let's move quicker to what this new world is going to be because this is really uncomfortable and very distasteful where we are right now. And change brings out some really bad behavior in people because it comes from fear. Like you were saying, survival and fear. Like if we've got a little bit more certainty and more of us, you know, coalesce around what the new vision and the new world is going to be because we want a better world for our kids and the next generation. Like, get your voices together, come together and create this new. Like, like, we've got the marketing revolution have gone. You know, we're building that. Like, what's on your code of excellence? What does marketing now need to be in this new generation? So they're just letting it figure itself out. Like, let's just go create and make it happen because we can't sit around moaning on LinkedIn crying about how, you know, bad marketing's being kicked and punched. Like, let's just go and make the change, right? We've all got a voice, we've all got the ability to be a catalyst. And so I would just say, you know, as we wrap up that, that, that would be my plea to everyone. Like, like, let's just all be part of the, the change that's needed.

Well, you certainly are. I mean, you put your voice out there and I understand, but I worked for a, a company in the UK for a couple years and I did note the culture is, you know, different there. It's much more polite and, you know, sticking your neck up is not as, you know, you know, us. Everyone's a big out of big mouth in this country, you know, and it's good or bad, you know, But I appreciate it. I think it's great that you took a stand and you put your voice out there and you took the hits and, and you took them for a lot of people and you did it with class and I think you made amazing points and your message is great. And I'm so glad that we met and we're talking and I know, we'll be talking more. So what are you doing now? And what, how do people like. What's your, what's next for you now? How do people work with you or what are you trying to accomplish?

Yes, I'm just helping businesses just do better things, just be better. You know, just everything we've talked about today. Because I've got the background of being a marketer. I started in sales. Actually, I didn't say that at the beginning, but I did five years of sales, which is again why I really understand like, yeah, how, how this stuff works. But yeah, I just help exec teams C suite who, you know, put those plans together. But to rally the people behind in a, in a, in a more aligned, constructive, collaborative way, that's everything I do. I went and studied organizational psychology five, six years ago and I just blend the two together. Now. How do you do cool strategies, but really lead from, from the best place that you can instead of dragging people along and in that toxic world. So that's what I do so people can come and find me. And if they, if any of that resonates and think we need a bit of Emma in our organization, then yeah, hit me up.

Okay. Well, this is great. As I expected, I knew we'd have a great conversation and this is a lot to think about. Thank you so much and I look forward to talking to you more and really appreciate you.

I'll be back if you'll have me. I'm sure there's so much more.

There is. We could do another three hours on this and we will. I have some thoughts on how we can do that, but thank you so much and we'll see you soon.

I'm on. Look after yourself.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CRO succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@thecrocollective.com that's thecrocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.