#04: The Path To CMO

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Hey, what's up? This is Dave Gerhart and you're listening to DGMG Radio. Hey, for this episode of DGMG Radio, I wanted to pull in a live session that we did earlier this year with Wendy White, who's a CMO at a company called Tiger Connect. This was called the Path to cmo. Get a ton of questions in the DGMG community about career path, how to become cmo. Not that there's some magic recipe, but a lot of people come up through different backgrounds, product marketing, demand gen, brand comms, and had an awesome conversation with Wendy. And I know a lot of people think about like which path are you going to choose in marketing early in your career? If you're at that point at all, listen to this episode. I think it's going to be super helpful for you. If anything, it'll just. It might Just feel like some therapy. So here it is for DGMG Radio. This is the path to cmo. Well, thank you for doing this. This is something that I kind of just, like, had this idea last week because, I mean, you're in. You're in the group, right? But, like, I think the number one question that I see, I get a lot of, like, email responses, like, to my newsletter. I have a thing that's like, hey, reply back and let me know what you're up to. And, like, the number one question I get is probably about career path. And I wanted to do a session on this because I thought we could. We could answer a ton of questions in an hour. A. And so, like, shout out to. To the people that showed up, like, we'll give them priority. I want to. I don't want to make this about, like, Wendy and I telling career stories. I want to make this, like, therapy hour. And we'll take your questions. So if you can be brave and ask questions. And we're. We're not here to. To expose anybody, but this is like the inner circle. This is like marketing therapy.

That's what I promise to be vulnerable and. And, you know, tell the truth.

All right, good. So I want to make this about people's questions. And so what I would love to do is if you have questions, put them in the chat for Wendy and will be the moderator of this, and I'll call you up. And if you're here, ideally, I'd love to have you on audio and video and ask your question. There was 686 people that registered for this. Like, I've done a lot of webinars for, like, companies and stuff. I've never had that many people register for something, so maybe we'll do more of these. But there's like, a hundred or so people here, and I want to prioritize those questions. So anyway, let's just start here. And Charlotte, we're gonna. We're gonna go to you in a second. If you put your question in chat so then I can. I can read the question and then I'll. I'll call. But so, Wendy, I'm. I'm going on a ramp. But my initial statement and question to you was, number one question is path to cmo. And. And. And there's a lot of nuance in career that I realize is, like, you know, whether that's, like, the privilege of being a white male in tech and me growing my. To. To my position. Like, but what I think. What I think that can be most Valuable for people today is that the question is more about like, hey, I'm in product marketing and I want to be CMO one day. I'm in comms and I want to be CMO one day. I'm in demand gen. And so if we can help people navigate that stuff today. But maybe Wendy, want to kick us off and just talk really quickly about like your path to cmo? What, what side of marketing do you come up? Did you come up through.

You know what? I have a weird path. If you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see I used to be in the army. I did propaganda development in the army. Psychological operations. That's where I started.

Wait, what?

Yep. So think of that as like marketing in the army, marketing to civilians, marketing to the other side, et cetera. And so, you know, that's where I got my start thinking about audience planning, thinking about your channels for how you communicate. And my channels were things like drop leaflets from planes or send out a loudspeaker crew to surround Noriega's compound. Things like that. That's actually truly where I started. So I know that's weird. And then I went to grad school and got an mba and that's where I started, like, the data side of my career too. My career was mostly the comms. Comms into product marketing. And then I think that the data side begins to become important. So I really love the demand gen side. Looking at the data, understanding cause and effect, understanding do a thing, get a response. That feels great. I would say my career is kind of chapter one, Chapter two, Chapter one, very comms, very messaging, brand analyst, relations, et cetera. Chapter two, become a marketing VP in a startup and have to go deep and hard in every aspect of marketing, become very t shaped very fast in a lot of areas and then heavily reliant on data. And so, you know, my path has a little bit of everything in it, which I think for a CMO is a good thing because you kind of want to, you know, you want to know where your strengths and weaknesses are and you want to know where to surround yourself with great people in areas that you really want an expert. And like, if you're, if you've done everything, you have a good sense of what does good look like and how to go surround and build those people around you.

Okay, these are great questions coming in Madison. I think, at least for me, like, one thing I used to think about is I used to, like, I used to be obsessed with like trying to know everything in marketing. And I'm gonna, okay, I want to be a marketing leader and so I gotta know everything about product marketing and I gotta know everything about demand gen and I gotta know everything about content and you will never survive. What I know now is you'll never survive. There's just too much. It's always changing. You'll never be an expert. And for me, what was really liberating for me, like when I went to drift, David Cancel was the one who pushed me to be like, you're clearly great at storytelling, communication, copywriting. He's like, you will get to the next level by being great at that and then like learning about the other areas, like use that as your leverage. And so that was really liberating because I was like, okay, great, I'm going to become great at this storytelling and comms piece, but I'm going to learn enough about product marketing and about demand gen. And I think we one opportunity that you have earlier in your career is like, if you know you want to be a marketing leader one day, start to observe the people around you. Because I've never done demand gen, but I've worked with two very bad ass people and I observed how they think. And so even though I've never done demand gen myself, I feel like because I've seen those other people, I have a sense of what good might look like and then I could go and look for, look for some of those things. And so I think like to not feel like you have to be a master of everything. I know there's a bunch of different examples of CMOs that have come up through every different type of background. And so I think it becomes like understanding those other. Just you have to understand those areas. You're as cmo, your job is basically you're the GM of marketing, like as a business. And so you, you have to be able to talk about everything and understand how everything works, but you don't have to know how the sausage is made all the time. Okay, let's go to some of these questions. So this is one that I see a lot and it's, what are the biggest differences between what a VP of marketing contributes and what a C delivers to the business? So Wendy, this is different in every company, I think company stage. But how do you, how do you answer? What's, what's the difference between a VP of marketing and a cmo?

You know, you can think about that like every stage of your career, your team and your impact on the organization or the industry changes. Right? So a VP of marketing probably going to be A deep functional expert in the given area. And their first team is marketing. Their first team is their peers. Maybe if they're, you know, a demand gen person, their first team includes their sales vp. But that's who their first team is. Like that's who they plan with that, that's who you work with as a cmo. Your first team is not your marketing team. It's your peers at the CMO level. It's your executive leadership team. And you're thinking about the overall strategy and growth of the business, not just about your functional area. And that's the difference. Put cmo, you got to put your head up and look left and right and you've got to be a seat at the table executive in that business.

I also think some of it is also weird nuance. Like a lot of startups have a VP of marketing and that VP of marketing runs marketing. Like that was my title at Drift. I was not cmo. I think cmo, I appreciate when founders don't like give out huge titles early on. And so I think there is a difference between VP of marketing and a CMO. And I've seen VPs of marketing with 20 years of experience and then get promoted to CMO later. I think there's some kind of like, I don't know how to articulate it, but there's, you know, do you know what I'm trying to say? Like there's some, it's a magic moment.

When you, you know, when you join the executive team and you're not just listening for things that impact marketing, but you're influencing and leading discussions about the strategy for the business, the market, the product strategy. Like that's it, your, your seat of the table shifts to being your first team is being run the business, not run your function.

Okay, Madison, do you want to come off mute and ask your question? I'd just love to hear it from you firsthand.

Yeah.

Hey guys, a question that I always read about and I hear quite a lot at my startup is the thoughts on a generalist versus a specialist, what to hire for. I'm sure it's different at every stage, but for someone who wants to become a cmo, which route would you recommend?

Well, I think to Dave's point, there's not a lot of room for generalists until you get to be a little bit more senior. Unless you are very junior and you're the right hand person to everybody getting assigned projects and then you become a little bit of a generalist. But that's very task oriented, right? So I really like what Dave said earlier about knowing where maybe that ikigai, that you know, the what is good for the business, what is, you know, what am I really good at and what do I love to do. Follow that until you get to a more senior level. Really build your personal brand, your reputation, your deep experience and your, your strong contribution to the business in a functional area. And then left, look left and right. Start branching out, bring things in. It's okay to make a lateral move. You do not always need to go up. You can go left or right if you want to learn a new area and broaden your skillset. But, you know, I'm a big believer and be a functional expert until you're, you know, further in your career.

I think you're, I think you're right. And as a, as a manager coming up, I was obsessed. I love the books and about like the power of being an athlete and being a generalist. And I think that is, that is ultimately that the end goal. And I think of myself as a generalist now. But I think Madison, like, I think the strategy is like being a specialist is like your Trojan horse to becoming a generalist, if that makes any sense. And so it's like, if you can become that, like Madison, what's your role? Right now?

I lead the brand at our startup.

Okay, so like, if you can become like the most badass brand, team and leader, that's going to be the thing that elevates you to the conversation of like, huh? I wonder if Madison can also run comms or product marketing. And now all of a sudden you're like, like, I think that the spec, the being great in the, in that one area is going to be the thing that's going to, going to elevate you. I think brand is a perfect example. I think sometimes it can be too niche. Like if you were saying like your thing is SEO, I would push you to become a expert in content and use that as your, as your leverage. But I think you would be the CMO that came up through brand. And as you continue to evolve now you got the brand thing down and you got to learn like, well, how does product marketing work? How does the demand gen thing function? And so like when you know you'll get the shot by being able to like go interview somewhere and be like, hey, look, I've spent the last X years running brand. I think I can run marketing because I've done that. I've seen how this is run. We collaborate with product marketing here. Eventually someone's going to have to take a chance on you and promote you into that spot where maybe you haven't done those things before, but that's the, that's where you grow the most. And you'll be like, you know what, it's not that different to what you've done on the brand side. It's just, you know, might have different names and different goals.

Yeah.

Thank you guys. And Wendy, you know, you kind of helped me as well, moving laterally. I'm thinking about moving into life cycle. So that, that helped a lot. Thank you.

Do it. Life cycle is fun and it's high impact on the business. I love it.

I'm going to dig through questions, Wendy, while you answer this one from Samantha. How important is an MBA now for a CMO role?

You know what, I would have answered that really differently 20 years ago than I would today. Just to date myself a bit, you know, 20 years ago, I really thought it was important. I thought companies, when they were looking for people even at kind of, you know, especially larger companies at that mid level, they really wanted to see an MBA today, especially in sas. I could care less about somebody having an mba. What I want to hear, I want to. What I value way more is, you know, are they intellectually curious, are they action oriented, are they a collaborative player, Are they, you know, just smart and ready to engage and this kind of the softer skills, way more important. Do I need them still to be functional expert? Yes. But do I care about that mba? Almost nothing. So unless you're on, unless your goal is to be like the best brand marketer in cpg, like go work at Clorox or Proctor and Gamble or to go get that MBA and go work on Wall Street. I wouldn't bother as a B2B marketer.

Candid advice. Shashank, you are up next on Wendy and Dave Radio hour.

Hi, nice to meet you guys. I work in a pre series a company, very small team of 30, 35 people in the entire company. Very recently, after the funding, we set up the team in marketing. So we have just four people. One is, I work as the senior manager marketing. We have an assistant manager marketing, one graphic designer and one content person. It was a very challenging first quarter wherein there was a lot of skilling, teaching the content person, SEO, getting everything in place. Now the team is pretty well set and I think our next challenge from India would be expansion to gcc, EU and usa. So I would just like to know your thoughts. What is an ideal team when we do this? How to stay relevant as a cmo because last three, four years I've delved into a lot of stuff including product marketing, SEO, strategizing, etc. And now I think from B2C to B2B.

Thank you for the great question. Shout out to you for being here and for being the curious one to come on and ask. That's already like how to, how to upgrade your skills. Like you're here, like most people are not here, are not spending the time like trying to learn about this stuff. And so I think there's so much stuff online today about marketing and like content is, there's plenty of it. But I think how can you continue to learn and then take those things and put them in play? So like, oh, I heard, I heard Wendy say something. I'm going to actually go try that like on Monday and I'm going to write like, I think that's the type of mindset that you have to have. I'm going to answer your team question thing because somebody asked this in the Facebook community this morning and I thought about a different way to ask it, to answer it, which is I think that for a small company, early stage startup, the team, the marketing team has to be built around the marketing funnel. And what that means is like, and I've fallen in this trap, like hired a writer, hired a social media person, hired a product marketer. And you're like, why are we not making product, we're just creating content. Why are we not making progress towards our goals? Where it might have been like snowflake or I saw a slide that I really liked from a marketing org, which is like the layout of the customer journey, right? So how do people find you and how do people buy from you and then like the layout of the roles that you need in order to achieve that goal. And so okay, you're gonna need a writer, you're gonna need a designer, but like who's executing on revenue type of campaigns. And so my answer back to that, Wendy, I'd love to hear your opinion would be like map out the customer journey and don't, don't just pick off roles that you've heard somebody talk about on a webinar. Like demand gen product marketing. Think about like almost the jobs to be done of your potential customer all the way to the end. I think that the most badass startup marketing teams I've seen are like small teams of three to five people who are working on solving a specific job. Like get people to our website and get them to convert. Not like we're just blogging Three times a week. What do you think, Wendy?

I love, love, love that answer because it is about like, what outcomes are we driving along our funnel and who's doing that? And you know, when you're very small, you stretch some of those roles over two or three pieces of that. You know, you might have a product marketer who's really thinking about product market fit. They're writing the product positioning. They're probably doing the social media because it's about the big. They're looking at the data. You have a demand marketer, you might have somebody that's, you know, doing all the case studies, content, et cetera, but you're really thinking about that customer journey and constantly watching the data until you're really sure where your product market fit is. So totally watching the journey is exactly the right answer.

Okay, I'm going to go to this. I feel like this place is just buzzing. Like, I do feel like a radio host right now. I need like a board. Like, okay, this question is from anonymous attendee. Oh, anonymous attendee. I'm just kidding. Is it ever a bad idea to take a CMO title? If you have the option to take a CM title at a young age? Small org. But there's a good chance you won't get a CMO title in your next role. Should you take it? Is it better to take it than to take a lower step in the next role or keep a director? I think that's too much. Into the weeds in your own head about your perception of either being an imposter or what it might look like. I would take the title. Take the the highest title and the most pay that you'll give you would be my honest to God answer. And you know what? If the next company you go to, because a lot of times the the titles are based on company. I know that like Leela Srinivasan who was the CMO of SurveyMonkey and then went to Momenta. Whatever they do now and then she went somewhere else. She was a director at LinkedIn and had like a team of 100 people. Right. And so like I think that nobody's going to judge you by the title every. It's all going to be relative to company size. What do you think, Wendy?

Same. 100% good. Don't worry about the job. The title of the company is. Is worry about the job. If this is a CMO title, great. Your next job probably won't be like, fine, who cares?

Okay. Related question from Alberto. Alberto asks, what do you think is a better path to CMO working for a small business, around 5 million gross a year or getting into big tech or a Fortune 500 company. Wendy, what do you say?

Geez. Well, okay, you look, go look at my LinkedIn profile. I have done all of the above, gone back and forth. I was like employee number 17 and the head of marketing at a series A startup and then went back into big company for a while and then back to being a cmo, et cetera. I think it matters. What skills are you putting, what arrows are you putting in your quiver, what tools are you building for yourself, what market and job understanding against the kind of things you love and want to do. That's what matters. You can do that at any size company. But yeah, but having said that, if you're going to go down market to a startup like a series A series B startup, like you know, that is hardcore stuff and you have to get like a fast masters in a lot of areas of marketing, you know. And that's very different than working at a big company where you have resources and maybe you're doing a small functional thing. So you just have to know like what kind of person are you? Are you like a hard charging get up, you know, make it happen person or you like navigate big company culture, navigate big problems, you know, in a small functional way. Like that's a personal choice. But you, and maybe you have the skill set to move back and forth. I do and I like doing different things like that, but not everybody does. And so just remember it's not just about like building your resume. It's also loving what you do while you're doing it.

Okay, there was gold in that answer. I was scribbling notes. One thing you said was like, I think that for people in their career, nobody's going to care whether you went for to Fortune 500 or a startup. You have to have a story about.

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Go check them out why you went there and what you got from it. And so like, you know, are you in skills acquisition mode? Like for me I had a story that I told myself. I went to go work at HubSpot and I was like, I want to go learn from a bigger company. It was 1500 people. I want to go there and learn. And then I went to Drift for a different reason. And I also think so. That was a great comment. The other thing that you said is so true. Some of the people that I've seen fail the hardest at startup marketing leadership roles are the people who came from big companies and had a team that did that. And a team that did that and a team that did not. It's like this person doesn't even know how to log into Google Analytics. This person's never logged into Google Analytics in their life. And so, but at the same time, there's very startupy people that can come from bigger orgs. And so I think that's, that's gotta be.

I almost didn't get my first job as a head of marketing at a startup because I was, had been at Microsoft. And the attitude of the CEO is, well, we don't hire people from Microsoft because they really don't actually know how to get stuff done without having their team of vendors and, you know, staff running behind them. And I, you know, I proved differently. But like, that's an attitude because there is, there is, you know, different skills.

I like this one from Matt. Hey, Matt.

Yeah, so I'm coming from like a series a startup and first startup experience, joined as a growth marketing manager. And I think the biggest problem that I ran into as of late was getting over the hump that is like convincing the CEO that I can be a leader in the organization and hiring like an ad ops person, hiring a content writer and doing all these things. Do you have any advice around, can you become a leader? Can you convince the CEO or does it just make more sense to prove yourself and then move to another organization with everything you've learned and start as a leader, Start fresh almost.

I really love this question. I feel I sense a tiny bit of imposter syndrome in there too, which I suffered from early in my career. But I think I love this question because it's like, if you grow up inside an organization, there's both your view of yourself in that organization and the view of others of you. And you're navigating that. Right. And so your view of yourself could be a little bit of imposter syndrome of am I ready to be a leader? Do they? People see me that, can I claim my seat? And then the view of everybody else is, you're really great functionally at doing this thing. And they want to keep you in that box because they like having you execute and do that thing. So there's no good answer to this. I think this is all about your relationship with your executive team. It's all about your confidence and how you communicate and how you lead. There's not a good answer there.

Some CEOs need to be like, they need to be pushed almost. And it's hard because I've been there. Like, you have imposter syndrome. Like, I'm like, I don't know. I. I have no idea what I'm doing. But the CEO, I'm running marketing right now. And that was literally me at drift. And what I noticed is once I flipped my mindset to, like, you know what? I'm gonna go get this. I'm gonna push the CEO. That's when everything flipped. And he almost gave me, like, our relationship changed because he was like, oh, he knows this and wants it, because the CEO can't know everything about marketing. And so your life is easier as a CEO if, you know, I got Matt. He knows marketing. I'm not worried about it. I got Wendy. She's the cfo. She's got finance. Like, I would put yourself in the CEO shoes and think about, like, what they need out of marketing and. And. And manage up. I think CMO or not, the one thing that's helped me the most in my career is my ability to manage up. Like, Wendy's my boss. I'm telling Wendy the things I'm working on this week. I'm telling her where I need her help. I'm calling out things that I see that we could be doing. Like, the more you can manage up, the better. And by the way, and if you do that and the response is negative, then screw that CEO and you're not at the right place, like, and move on.

There's other great opportunities.

Yeah, go ahead. Maria.

Hey.

Hi.

Hi, Wendy. George. Dave.

Hello.

Hello.

Thanks for having me.

So, yeah.

Good.

Big question here. So I've been a VP now for about two years. I started with the company when we were a yee little startup, and now we are in our growth phase and just hit number 140 on the Inc 5000. So we've had a lot of growth in a short amount of time. Not going to say it was all marketing, but I've been here that entire time, so I'll go ahead and take a little pat on the back for that. But I've had a great team, and so I've been.

Come on, we love marketing here. We love marketing here. We're good.

I've been a VP now for about two years, and so I don't know if CMO is in the cards for me, but I certainly don't want. I want to keep any path open that is available to me. So I guess my question is, here I am, I'm in this VP role. What should I be doing and what other responsibilities should I be taking on to start moving me in that direction or in some sort of C suite capacity. Right. So I think that's a big question. My leadership team is super supportive. My CEO and CRO, if you talk about managing up, they're the ones that are always like, come to us with ideas. So I think the question for me, the last kind of year, I've just been kind of sitting back in my VP role and like, okay, I got this now, but what's my next step in order to get to that C suite level? Whether it be CMO or some other role that would be a support to this, to this company.

Can I ask Maria, do you work for the CRO or do you work for the CEO?

So I technically report to the CRO. I do my one to ones with the CRO, but the relationship that I have with my CEO is so fantastic. We meet one, two, three times a week because he's heavily involved in the marketing. So it's almost like my CRO is on the budgetary, operational side, but the CEO is on the marketing, brand thought, leadership, engagement side. So I kind of, I, you know, I technically report to my CRO, but my CEO is just as involved and we talk regularly.

So my advice really is to sit down with your CEO and say, and lay it out, say, here are the areas of marketing. You know, these are ones are aligned to the CRO and I'll continue to support that. These are the ones that are aligned to company and company strategy. What will it take for me to be a seat at the table? Cmo, I have the conversation and together with your CEO lay out a path.

Okay, great answer. And I have asked this question before, but I don't agree necessarily on what his definition of a CMO is. So I wanted to see, I guess what else is out there potentially that he's not thinking of.

This feels like this could be a great one on one. You should follow up with me and we should brainstorm your path.

Okay, awesome. Appreciate it, Wendy. Thank you.

Amazing. That was so nice of you. CEO could also just not get marketing.

And I think there's something there if this, if the marketing leader is doing brand and spending all that time with the CEO, what's going on? Is it a confidence issue in Maria? It doesn't sound like it. It just sounds like maybe is it a complexity issue for the CEO? Sometimes CEOs want to limit their number of reports because they see it having a report as complexity. Right. But the, the real issue here is, is marketing only a revenue letter lever? It is a lever for, for revenue and you should own A co responsibility with lever with the head of sales or the revenue leader, that's a partnership. But marketing is not just revenue. There's a lot more about the value of the company to your customers in terms of your brand experience, your customer experience, end to end, your customer life cycle experience. That doesn't necessarily nicely tie to working for a CRO. So I'm never a fan of that.

This is a great question, Holly. Can you, can you come on and actually talk to us and ask. And ask this one if you're, if you're around because.

Hi, Holly.

Let me, let me, let me get you. All right. Okay. Go ahead, Holly. Let it rip.

Yeah, so I'm really wondering, like, what is a reason that someone may decide, you know, the CMO path is not for me. I really want to be an awesome IC and just really focus on my craft, whether that is as more of a generalist or a specialist. I know we've already talked about that.

Let me take this one. The reason I don't have a team right now is because this is me. I'm. I'm done managing people. Done managing a team. Done. So I think, like, it says a lot about you that you are even have this thought in your mind because I think you, first of all, you don't have to progress. And I had this conversation, you know, a bunch of times with the CEO at Drift. Like, he's like, if you want to be cmo, you can do that. If you want to be IC marketing person, you can do that. We got both paths. Let's just have a conversation about it. And so I think like, first is like, for anybody on here, if you have not had that conversation with your, you with your manager, like have that conversation because those are two very different paths. And so some of the reasons not to go down the CMO role would be like, you have to be realistic about what your time is going to be spent doing. And so yes, you are going to get oversight to all the things in marketing and you can move all the levers, but you are the one managing the budget. You are the one doing performance reviews. You are the one managing, you know, all the team interactions and managing cross functionally. And you are the one at the exec off sites planning and budgeting and, and spending a lot of your time as the company grows doing more like human capital management than marketing. And that can be, that can be a part of the job that you love. And there's many people who are like, like who. That's how they are for me that's just not how I am. But I guess what I'm trying to say is be, be real about what does the CEO expect out of the cmo? And that means like, your job first is team and people manager. And so if you don't get out of bed and say, I love managing people, I love building up the careers of other people, then it's going to be very hard for you to be successful in that job because you got to do things like Wendy just did. Like, hey, I don't even know Maria, but I'm going to get on a call with her. You know, you, you, you have to have this. Like, Wendy's kind of been seeming a little bit out of it. I gotta. Even though my day's been shitty as, as you know, I've got lots of other things to do. I gotta go check in on Wende and you know, she's got some personal stuff going on and look, that's just not the stuff that I love doing. And so that's kind of where I'm at now. But Wendy, what are you gonna say on top of that?

I think the only thing to add on that is do not assume that becoming a people manager or a CMO is always the right career path.

True.

Based on what Dave just said. Said the word earlier. If you don't know what this is, go Google it. Ikigai, which is like, it's a Japanese word. I K I G A I. It's a Japanese word that talks about like, it's, it's essentially about bringing your whole self to work and to life. And it's also like bringing your whole self to work in a way that benefits your company and society and yourself and, and frankly, if the answer is that you really love being that functional expert and you, you, you're rewarded by it. You know, you're fulfilled by it. Why would you want to give that up? I spent like, I got up this morning at 7:00 and spent my time putting together 2022, planning spreadsheets and, you know, building models. Like, if you don't want to do that, do not become a cmo.

Seven in the morning.

Yeah.

I really love that.

I think so many people just like push towards like, oh, the cmo. That's the end goal here. And it's. So I'm in the middle of a transition myself. I start a new role on Tuesday and I've been sort of thinking a lot through this, like, what's that path I want to be on eventually? Like, I have two ways I can go depending on this role. So thank you both for answering that.

You know, the funny thing is like, you know, you say I love like my functional thing. I actually like building the stupid planning spreadsheet. I like that. That's why I'm good at this. Like, I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking about like a new area we could do. I'm thinking about, you know, like, maybe I to move some money like out of Legion into brand. I like that stuff. But you have to like, know that that's. That those are the expectations of the job.

But that's so important like that you know that about yourself. Wende like, and I don't mean that in a corny way. Like sometimes we just, we forget that we are all people in these jobs and people are all different. My wife and I are very different people like our routines and habits. We're very different. Different. You'll be the same in your career as a, as a manager. And so like, I think it's important to understand, to have an honest conversation about yourself. One of the best books that you can read is, is from Peter Drucker, old school management guy. But it's like 50 pages called managing Oneself. And just, it's like a very introspective look at understanding yourself and what are you good at and what are you bad at and what do you. What brings you joy and not. And those things are really important. Important. And so thanks, I'll check that out. Yeah, but thanks for.

Thanks for.

Thanks for hopping on. Somebody asked the question, can you, can you talk more about managing up? Wendy, how do you explain managing up?

Managing up. It's like that perfect balance of telling your boss what they need to know and keeping them from what they don't need to know. It's like the perfect balance. Right? They don't necessarily need to know the sausage. You know, how the sausage is made. But if the sausage has got salmonella in it, they certainly need to know that. Right? So it's like that. How do you keep them abreast of how you're leading and managing what they need to know to run the company or to run their function? It's empowering them to be the best at what they can do in their job. And it's not bragging, but you definitely want to show your results, give them a sense of that and also talk about risks to the business and things that aren't going well in a. A objective oriented way versus like the house is on fire oriented ways like that. There's like some interesting balance there.

Okay, let's go to Aziza. I like that question. Go ahead.

Hi.

So just a little backstory. I work for a seed organization and in the marketing team reporting to VP of marketing. And I am the director of growth marketing, which is like the only functionality around digital. But there is a lot of expectation around revenue and, and managing budget and like bringing in actual result from digital. So I spend a lot of my time on these calls. But my team isn't digital. It's all brand marketers and print and they have background like in different kind of marketing. So I spend a lot of my time I guess educating and explaining like why I'm doing this and how I'm going to approach that and what's my thought behind this and kind of like all of us collaborating on this. But at the same time I feel like it would be a lot faster if I could kind of execute instead of 70% of my time is spend more on explaining and justifying my strategy and less on execution. So it's just like a lot of meetings on education. So my question is, should I or should I not pursue to get my own almost department around digital since there's all this expectation around, or do I continue kind of trying to grow within this team?

It's so hard because there's like it could be internal ingredients but like I feel for you because it is exhausting when your job, when 70% of your job is spent explaining what, justifying what you're doing. And we've all, we've all been there. If I'm going to be real with you, I would say that the only reason that happens is because they either don't have an understanding of the role of marketing or don't trust. It's either lack of knowledge or lack of trust. And you could probably fix both of those things. But lack of knowledge could mean they're literally just. And this happens at a lot of companies. Marketing is just really not a priority. They're doing a bunch of different other things. And you're just trying to, you're over here like, hey, I'm trying to get updates. Hello. And that has to be changed by like you driving this. Hey, like I feel like marketing is getting swept under the rub rug. I feel like I'm spending 70% of my time justifying our strategy. Can we have a one on one and get on the same page about our marketing strategy together? Like, I think you have to just kind of rip the band aid in that sense to have a real conversation and if that's not the piece of it, then I would say it's a trust. If you feel like you may have had those conversations, then it's a trust thing. I think in both cases, you have to. This is the managing up part. You have to take control of this situation and kind of wrangle it to the outcome that you want. You agree with that, Wendy?

I do. And, you know, my first response was, maybe you should invite your peers to the Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group on Facebook.

I'll let them in free. Send me their emails. We'll get them in.

Because I think you nailed it, Dave. Like, there's a lack of education and understanding of appropriate, like, go to market. Modern growth. Go to market. And if you're spending that much time climbing the hill just to get them to understand it, maybe you're in the wrong spot.

Appreciate it.

Thank you. By the way, related. Brandon messaged us this in the chat. One of the best pieces of advice I got from an early mentor about managing up, this is back to the managing up conversation, is do everything you can to make your manager successful, which includes. Includes knowing what they're measured on and what their manager expects of them. When you take that mindset, managing up will become easier and you will become indispensable to your. To your manager.

Totally agree.

Alberto. Yes. We're getting the recording and you owe me 10 push ups. Okay, let's go to Kylie. Go ahead, Kylie.

All right.

Is this. So I asked two questions, Dave. Are you talking about the burnout one?

Yeah, yeah, we'll get to it. We'll get to them both. Do that one first.

All right, cool. So, yeah, my question was, have you. I think it maybe fits a little bit with what the last person was talking about, but have either of you dealt with burnout specifically related to marketing?

So there's never. No. Ever? No.

Yeah, I believe that for sure. And the disenfranchisement, maybe that comes with that, the subjectivity and then kind of connected with that is the. There's a lot of talk about CMO tenure, but I think it's true, even at, like, the VP level, that the tenure is a challenge. So your thoughts on that and how you've worked through that?

This is so deep. This is so deep. We're like, are we. Do we value ourselves as marketers? I've had this thought 100%, and I think you. I mean, it's personal. I think this has to be a personal story that you tell yourself. And so for me, I feel like I have a Longer term plan. And I can see where I'm at on that path right now. And so, and so yeah, there's been every quarter I've gotten burnt out. Like burnout is real and it's hard, especially as a marketing leader in this. Like most of us in here are like B2B SaaS types of companies. It's like you got to grow every single month, every single quarter. Why are you not growing? And by the way, it's not enough to grow 10%. You know, your uncle's business down the street, if they grew 10% a year, that'd be amazing. But like in this world they're like grow 30% and 40% and 50% and investors want more. And so like that is a hard, that is a hard grind. And so I think you have to have a really clear story about what you want. Like maybe I'm using this as a platform to like eventually run marketing for some amazing nonprofit. Or you're using this as, hey, you have a great salary that you're making as a marketing leader. You're using that to pay for your kids college and to make sure and to like buy your mom a house because she put you through school or whatever. And that's your, your story. I think for me it's been about having some type of story. Wendy, what do you got?

Burnout is so real, especially right now. But I've had burnout just personally because I pushed myself so hard. Not related to the pandemic and everything else that's going on right now. So if you find yourself giving snarky answers, rolling your eyes when people ask you questions, feeling like you're mad all the time, it's likely burnout. You're burned out with how your environment, how things are going, whatever it might be. And that does relate to the CMO or VP of marketing tenure because there is this like, and I'm going to be Gartner fans, but Gartner has their hype cycle. Like there's this period of inflated expectations. And when you're new to a job, you're fixing all the low hanging fruit, you're improving on what was there before and you look like a little bit of a hero. And then suddenly like all that's done and you run the business and you're working on your growth strategy, your demand gen strategy. And demand gen is not the same as lead gen. You're not buying needs anymore, nobody needs to do that. You're suddenly things are taking a little longer or your trajectory is not what you want. And so there's this constant tension. You got to manage through that. And today's point, having a good understanding of your 1, 2, 3 year plan and where things fit gives you a lot more acceptance, and so you feel better about yourself. The burnout is real, though. And if you're feeling that, talk to somebody. Talk to somebody, because you may need to get yourself out of that environment. Or take a break. Break.

Or take a break. Take a break. Oh, my gosh. It's like the number one conversation that I've had with my teams over the last three years is like, begging people to take time off. And because. Because what happens is every. And everybody gets in this mindset, and I got. I get in that mindset too, which is I can't take. I'll take time off after this. There's always something, right?

There's always something I can't.

Or like, I can't take time off right now because Wendy just took time off and she. No, no, you have to take time off. Because when you take time off, you come back to work and you realize that nothing changed, Everything's okay. Like, the business didn't go down, your team still loves you. There's plenty of to catch up on. You'll be fine. I think you have to go and come back to. To do that. So reminder to like. And. And this is. This is one of the hardest things, because you have to take control of your career at some point. And, like, you have to be the one who's like, I'm gonna manage myself before. Before I get burnt out. And so, like, have that real conversation. And I suck at that. Okay. One thing that's popped up a couple times right now in the chat is this question around Wendy. How do you make sure the CEO sees the value even of marketing, even when sales has an outdated view of what marketing contributes? We aren't just events and giveaways.

What everybody loves the stocks, retailers.

But it seems like there's something deeper going on at all those places.

Everybody loves the socks. Isn't marketing complaining about sending socks Frisbees? Yeah, okay, whatever. Definitely have been in situations where sales wants to treat marketing as a service org. You know, put my tablecloth out at my event, run my charity golf tournament, things like that, you know, those things are important. But that whole concept of your sales and marketing and actually customer success are the three legs of a. A revenue triumvirate. And you're a revenue team member is an important idea to communicate at the executive level. And so one way to do that is bring data, data, data, data. Like, show the data. Have a clear strategy about how you're talking about your, your goals and your plan. Like, you know, have a vision and communicate that consistently and constantly.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard. Like, if you're, if you're at a company that. My take is, like, if you're at a company company and the CEO doesn't believe in marketing and sales doesn't believe in marketing, that's a company that has not believed in marketing and you're just there, like, running, like, just doing whatever they think marketing is. The only way that's going to change is if someone could be you. Maybe you'll quit and go somewhere else and be happier. The person after you. Someone has to be the one to say, hey, I got thoughts that we're doing marketing wrong. Can I get an hour on, on the CEO and sales leader schedule? And like, this is your shop shot and it could go terribly wrong and they might hate it or they might miss the mark. But, like, I think you got to take that. You got to take that swing. If even if they don't agree with everything, they'll at least, you'll at least gain the respect of like, oh, this person clearly, like, thinks about marketing and wants to, wants to be involved in owning the strategy. And so I think somebody's got to, like, make the presentation. Here's what we need to stop, start and continue doing in marketing. And like, here's how we're going to measure this, this, and here's how we should be thinking about. I think a lot of, a lot of other leaders in the business actually don't know how they should be thinking about marketing. It'd be like hiring me to run engineering. Like, I know that, like, it's good if, like, people make, if we release new code and ship new products. But I couldn't tell you a thing about how it actually gets done and what right things to measure and spend time on. So you gotta, you gotta push that. This is a good question from Samantha. Wendy, what do you think about the impact of remote work? Will it have an impact on career trajectories? I've been remote for years. Do you think remote work limits your career opportunities or increases them?

I think remote work increases your opportunity to go to any kind of a company you like or want to work for. I have also been remote almost exclusively for the last 10 years, and it hasn't limited me. And I certainly don't think that as a leader it limits the leadership opportunities or the success of the people that work for me. But it takes a special kind of team environment. It takes work, really important, deliberate skills around building a great culture and collaboration with the remote team. But personally, for me, I think it's all about making sure. As an example, if you are in the office and you've got a few people in the office and you've got team members that are remote, don't let the water cooler create favoritism. Keep those remote people equally engaged. Don't share information locally that you wouldn't share on the larger team. And you have be super present. And then for me, I make it a real deliberate goal to plan with my peers. When do you guys can be in the office? Let's go be there together, right? And stay engaged. But also do things like I do coffees, I do lunches, remote coffees and lunches with people in the organization. Still want to build that personal relationship, even if you are remote.

It's hard though. Like you said, that water cooler can be often a bunch of bs, but like that, that's how people get in front of people, unfortunately. So I think if you're at an organization where things are quote, unquote, fair, I know that the system is rigged, obviously, but like, then it should be about merit. It shouldn't be about who's schmoozing with with who. And that's where I think, like, that's the one thing about marketing that is great though, is like you can align yourselves to very clear, measurable goals. And like, go beat the goals. Like, the most black and white thing that you can have is the goals and go smash your goals.

I had a few years ago, I had an employee that worked for me who I never, never met in real life in three years. And she was consistently a top performer. Never met her in real life. I didn't care. I didn't care.

Michael says I've heard executives refer to marketing as a black box, learning how to speak their language and simplify marketing. Something I've constantly had to work on as long as they use the word black box. That just tells me that they don't know what marketing is responsible for and they don't trust it. And so I think I've seen this go away overnight when hiring, like the right person to hire. I'll give you an example. The CEO that I, that I worked with, he loved this one designer. This is not a, this is not related to career path, but I'm going to give you an example. He loved this one designer to the point where as Long as you said that designer made that, the CEO would bless it. No worries. I know it. Wendy worked on it. I'm good. Wendy worked on it. I'm good. Right.

Seen it.

The ultimate level that you want to get to as marketing as a org, as part of the overall company is, is the CEOs like, oh, Wendy's in charge of marketing. It's not a black box. I trust her, I trust Wendy. They're never going to know all of the details, all of the nuts and bolts and how marketing works. But when they say marketing is a black box, that is, that to me is code word for I have no idea what Wendy is working on and what their goals are.

Lack of trust.

100%.

That's exactly a trust issue. Exactly.

How would you fix that? How would you go punch that right in the nose?

Definitely transparency with your peers about how marketing is supporting the joint OKRs that you have like, and taking joint OKRs with your peers that you have a united front. You know, I have joint OKRs with the sales leader, I have joint OKRs with the customer success leader, I definitely have joint OKRs with our product leader and I have joint ones with our HR leader. Like, have a joint okr, have a meaningful impact on every aspect of the organization and talk about it in a data and transparent, like OKR driven way. That's the best way to do it. Marketing is not.

Transparency is such a good, it's such a good way to look at it. Because what I didn't understand earlier is like, I don't have to be, I don't always have to be right. And beating my goals as the marketing leader, I have to know what's going on and identify like, how we're going to solve those problems. So like, I've seen marketing leaders miss all of their goals. Goals, but the CEO is really just looking at you. Not they want you to hit your goals, but they want you to be able to articulate how we're going to get there. So look, we're so far behind in pipeline is different than we're so far behind in pipeline. But here's the six things that we got to do. We're doing this one now. This is what we're doing now. We're meeting next week to talk about this. They want, they want marketing to feel like they have a clear goal and a plan to get there. It's not about like, so, so in order to do that, you have to be transparent about your victories, but also what's not working. Because remember, marketing is A business function. It's not just you. The business needs marketing in order to hit their revenue goals. Right. And so you have a responsibility to be transparent. This is not working. We need to invest here. It's going to be, hey, CEO, I've seen this. It's going to be literally impossible to hit this lead goal because we just literally don't have enough budget. I can show you the math. Like that's the level that you have to be transparent with the execs and the rest of the management team. And you can start doing that whether you're the CMO or not. You can do that in your section of marketing. If you're the content manager, do it there. If you're the product marketing manager, you can do it there. And I think that's like a muscle that you can start to build.

Dave, what about this one? As a cmo, do you let your team know what you're doing, such as your daily to do list all the time?

No, no, I used to. I used to because so we would. Everybody in the marketing team would like put in what are they working on for the day. This is not to be Big Brother, but just to be like I'm working on. The designer would be like, I'm finishing shipping that new landing page today in this great. And I would list out the things that I'm doing today. But then like there's like, well, I can't list the things that I'm actually doing. Like having a surprise one on one with Wendy to talk about like how things are not going well, meeting with the CEO on a plan because the company is about to be acquired and I'm spending six hours of my day working on that. And so I just completely stopped sharing what I'm working on. But I'm very, I'd be very present in the like actual conversations. And the way that I would stay in the loop on things is I would share in my one on ones privately with the team. I would share the things that I'm working on. Not broadcasting it publicly but like in our one on one I'd be, I'd have a more candid conversation. So I'd also be tell Wendy what I'm doing. And the best bosses and managers I've had would share that. Not always at the like secret transparency, parent level. But what do you think, Wendy?

100%. There's a lot. Again, your first team is your peers and at the executive level and there's a lot of running the business type stuff that's just not appropriate to be that transparent on, you know, it's hard.

It's hard. Also, part of like wondering what the boss does is just like part of work.

What do they do? What do they really. What are they working on? All right.

Hey, but yeah, that's true. That's such a good mindset. I think a lot of people fall in that trap of like work fam, Work friends. Like yeah, once you, if you're going to be the CMO, you have no friends at work.

FYI, that's 100% true.

You might have work friends, but at this, at some point, you know, you have to have hard conversations. Doesn't mean people can't like you. But your job, you cannot be. Your job is not to be the, The CMO is my, is my friend. I don't, I don't think that's the right mindset and I don't mean you have to be a jerk. But like am I wrong in saying that?

No, you're not at all. The last one we have to answer, somebody said what's the next job after cmo? And I really want to say the answer to this, which is I told my mom yesterday I think I should go be a CEO because I actually know how to run the business.

You do.

Another event a week ago I said I wanted to be CRO because I really understand revenue generation and I understand growth. Right. If you're a data driven CMO and you're really plugging in at that level, there is no limit to what you can do. Remember I said move left or right in your career if you're a functional expert. That's, that's true at the executive level as well.

Love it. Okay, I'm going to give a rapid fire answer to this one from Suraj in Alberta. How do we conduct one on ones with direct reports and with superiors. First I would Google like how to run effective one on ones. There's been a ton of good like first round review HBR type stuff written on this. But like I think a really the other book, you need to go and read this book. It's called the Coaching Habit. And in that book there's seven questions that they give that's like that you should ask in every one on one. And like if you just literally stick to those seven questions you will have a very good conversation. But I think it's very simply like if Wendy was my manager, I'd be telling Wendy, here's what I got done this week, here's what I got done last week, here's what I'm working on this week and here's the two things that I need your help on or we need to have a discussion about. Okay, I gotta, I'm wrap up because I want to give you. Wendy, two minutes. Thank you everybody. This was amazing. Send me a message if you. If you think we should do this more regularly. It seems like it, it'd be a helpful thing. We can talk pretty pretty real about this. So maybe we'll do another one in, in a couple weeks. Okay. Wendy, you're awesome. Thank you so much for doing this.

I loved it. Thank you all.

I'll see you later.

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