Marketing's Shift from Output to ROI Focus

This article is so relevant given the pace of change marketing leaders navigate today. We're being asked to drive growth, lead AI transformation, manage increasingly complex customer journeys, and demonstrate measurable business impact, all while the role of the CMO continues to evolve. A few things stood out to me: - Many CMOs still struggle to secure the resources needed to maximize marketing's impact. - The definition of the top marketing role varies widely across organizations, creating confusion around responsibilities and expectations. - Marketing's value isn't always clearly understood internally, which can affect influence, investment, and strategic alignment. She makes an important point that building marketing's credibility inside the organization isn't just a communications exercise. It's about consistently demonstrating how marketing contributes to business outcomes, collaborating across functions, and earning a seat at the table through impact. As marketing continues to expand beyond brand and communications into customer experience, growth, analytics, digital transformation, and AI, our ability to connect our work to business results has never been more important. Marketing may not be the only function that has to continually prove its value, but those who do it well are often the ones best positioned to drive meaningful change. #MarketingLeadership #CMO #CustomerExperience #Growth #BrandStrategy #DigitalTransformation #AI #Leadership

I'm sure your algorithm has served you this one too: "The CMO is dying." I'd offer a different take. The CMO isn't dying. It's being renamed by companies working through a real problem. We've reached a point where new C-level titles get created faster than organizations can absorb them, usually with good intentions. But without a clear mandate attached, a new title can just add a layer to the org chart and leave people unsure who owns what. The better move is spending less energy inventing more seats at the table and more energy defining the mandate & its KPI's, as well as the right person to deliver on it. Farshid Master wrote one of the clearest breakdowns I've read on this. His point: companies aren't eliminating the marketing function, they're relabeling it -- Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Commercial Officer -- while the accountability underneath stays the same. His conclusion is worth sitting with... the title was never the asset. The mandate, authority, and reporting line were. I'd add another layer: this isn't only a mandate problem, it's a recruiting one. Not every CMO has been a business or strategic thinker who happens to sit and have grown up in marketing. Some have spent a career running campaigns, full stop. If you're looking for a true growth marketer- you can see the difference before you ask a single 'values' question. Look at the scope of roles they've actually led. Have they intentionally moved through brand, social, performance, ecom, and the tech infrastructure underneath it? Or stayed on one side, never learning to conduct the whole orchestra? That's where interviews should probe: not "tell me about a campaign you're proud of," but how they've balanced short-term pressure against long-term brand building/CLTV. Titles won't fix that. Hiring for range will. Marketing has a critical stake in P&L management. Brand heart. P&L spine. That's been my operating principle since I was lucky enough to report directly into a Brand President with an incredibly strong financial background early in my career. Article link in comments ⬇️.

The fractional CMO conversation changed in 2026. Not the cost question. That one has been settled for a while. The question I keep getting now is different: what does the CMO role actually need to do when AI handles a significant portion of execution? Here is my honest read after running this model for eight months: The role split into two distinct jobs and most companies have not noticed yet. → The first job is strategic: positioning decisions, audience prioritization, offer architecture, messaging hierarchy. AI does not do this well. It requires judgment built on real client context. → The second job is operational: content production, channel management, reporting, campaign setup. AI with the right operating system handles most of this at a level that would have required a three-person team two years ago. The math on fractional now looks like this: one strategic operator with an AI stack produces equivalent output to a full marketing department at somewhere between 40 and 60% of annual cost. The question is not whether fractional beats full-time on economics. It does, clearly. The real question is whether your company can be a good client for a fractional operator. That means: clear decision rights, a defined measurement framework, and a founder who distinguishes between marketing strategy and marketing opinions. Companies that figure that out get compounding leverage. The ones that do not cycle through vendors and wonder why nothing sticks.

There are four points between $5M and $50M where marketing has to fundamentally change. Most companies only do it once. That is why growth stalls. $5M to $10M. Marketing is a bet. The CEO is still the primary storyteller. Every campaign is a test. The right move is a small, sharp team focused on one or two channels that convert, and a founder who is still visibly in the market. $10M to $20M. Marketing has to become a function. Someone owns it who is not the CEO. Measurement gets built. The customer story gets extracted from the founder's head and written down. This is the transition most companies fail at, because they hire a Manager when they need a system. $20M to $35M. Marketing has to become a machine. Multiple channels, defined roles, monthly performance reviews, real attribution, a marketing operations layer. The CEO stops approving individual assets and starts approving frameworks. $35M to $50M. Marketing has to become a portfolio. Brand, demand, product marketing, customer marketing, ops. Each with a leader. The CMO or fractional CMO is now a leader of leaders, not an operator. The mismatch problem is this: companies try to run $25M marketing at $10M revenue, or $10M marketing at $25M revenue. Both fail. The first burns money on infrastructure the business cannot yet support. The second stalls because the infrastructure needed for the next stage is not there. The transition is not a headcount question. It is an operating model question. The org chart follows the model, not the other way around. Which of the four transitions is your business standing at right now? #MarketingGrowth #ScalingStrategy #RevenueGrowth #MarketingTransformation #BusinessScaling

If your marketing team still has 40 people, you're going to look ridiculous in 24 months. Not because marketers are bad at their jobs. Because the job itself is being restructured under everyone's feet, and most CMOs are still hiring like it's 2021. Another content marketer. Another ops person. Another demand gen lead. Every hire is a bet that the work stays the way it was when you learned it. That bet is getting worse every quarter. The shape that's replacing it is already visible in the best AI-native companies. One high-leverage IC connects customer insight, data, brand, channels, experiments, and outcomes end-to-end, using AI to do what used to require six specialists and a lot of Slack threads. The advantage is no longer being marginally better than AI at writing a landing page. The advantage is orchestrating the whole system so it compounds. Be the architect, not the brick. I know how this reads. "So you're saying fire marketers." No. I'm saying the org chart most CMOs are defending was built for a constraint that no longer exists. Coordination used to be expensive, so you hired humans to absorb it. Coordination is now nearly free. What you need is judgment, taste, and the ability to run a system. The 100:1 company is coming to marketing before it comes to most functions. $100M in revenue, a handful of operators, zero traditional GTM headcount. The CMOs who see it early will look prescient. The rest will be explaining a budget line item to a board that already knows the answer.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗠𝗢 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗱. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱. For a long time, the CMO was responsible for owning and growing the brand. The "We Killed the CMO" article makes the point that the traditional CMO role has been broken apart across the organization. I agree. Think about this, today: • Product 𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚. • Sales 𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙨 𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙪𝙚. • Customer Success 𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙨 𝙧𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. • Data 𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙨 𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙨. 𝗦𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗠𝗢 𝗼𝘄𝗻? Marketing isn't just about running campaigns anymore. It's about making sure every part of the business tells the same story and delivers the same experience. The CMO owns the system that helps customers 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿, 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, and 𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲 the brand. 𝗠𝗬 𝗣𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗧 𝗢𝗙 𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪: We didn't kill the CMO. We killed the idea that growth is a marketing problem, because it's not. It's a business problem. The new role of the CMO is to connect brand, digital, customer experience, AI, and technology into a single growth system. The new CMO needs to evolve from asking "How do we improve marketing?" to "𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻?" That's the job. #MarketingLeadership #BrandStrategy #CustomerExperience #ArtificialIntelligence #BusinessTransformation

Having led marketing and revenue for several different organizations, here are 5 things I’d tell new marketing leaders. 1. Align with sales. Marketing should do everything they can to support sales efforts. 2. Have a revenue mindset. Your role isn’t about shiny ads. It’s about helping the company drive QoQ and YoY revenue and account growth. 3. Know your ICP and what drives conversion. Know your audience and personalize your messaging to them. Get to know intent signals and buying behaviors. 4. Be a revenue architect. Put the right tracking, technology and workflows in place to create better success for yourself, the company and the customer. 5. Be data-driven while creating a likeable brand that offers a superior customer experience. Implement and track the metrics that matter while building a brand built on customer experience. Obsess on CLTV, NRR and CSAT. From the heart and experience. Not AI.

What would we do if we weren't afraid as marketers? I'll tell you what some consumer retail brands do. They slap a headline/tagline combo platter on AI-generated images and call it a campaign. They ship it,  focusing largely on lower funnel messaging, move on, and then wonder why nobody cares. Here's what a fearless alternative could look like: You pick up the phone and call your sales peers. Yes, sales. The people who actually know which markets are moving and which ones are stuck. You turn on some live consumer activity in three key markets to support distribution points. But here's what gets interesting: You think of the event as a creative content capture opportunity and set up the event accordingly. You then distribute that "real" content in a way that causes people to stop scrolling, creating fuel for every market. Not just core. All of them. Test. Learn. Optimize. Scale.  Suddenly you're not just making ads. You're tackling a core business challenge and marketing isn't a cost center, it's a growth driver. And you're building a relationships across the organization.  That's the approach to campaign that almost never happens. Because it requires talking to people outside your department. Because it means admitting marketing doesn't have all the answers. Because it's harder than opening an AI image generator and picking the least offensive option.  Most brands choose the easy path. The safe path. The path that looks like work but produces nothing memorable. Fine is fatal. The brands that break through are the ones willing to do the uncomfortable thing. Cross the silos. Have the awkward conversations. Build something that actually connects. What campaign died because it was too hard to coordinate? #ChallengerBrands #BrandStrategy #MarketingLeadership JUICE Creative Group  Photo by Brian Erickson on Unsplash

When Timothy and I wrote the book Smarketing it seemed to us that the bringing together of sales and marketing departments would help organisations deliver better performance. Clearly this was a good idea because after we wrote the book we saw the rise of a new job role within the corporate world the CRO. A person responsible for delivering revenue - and an umbrella for a joining of sales and marketing.., However, we have seen that in practice this is a difficult thing. Marketing builds relationships at scale, that’s the hard part, sales simply has to “go and close the business”… tends to be the view of marketers. Marketing gives us a huge list of “leads” that are, in reality, worthless because they never want to talk to us… tends to be the view of sales. The problem is that these two departments have very different agendas and joining them together seems impossible. We all know that salespeople who seem to be helpful, knowledgable and likeable outperform those who don’t, but delivering this is often at odds with a “coherent corporate comms strategy” because the idea of everyone going off and doing their own thing may not be in the company’s best long-term interests. So, leaders are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either produce loads of dull corporate outreach that doesn’t engage, educate or inspire (but is safe and “on brand”) or set everyone free to publish what they want and get loads of visibility (and conversations) and sit waiting for the inevitable - Ratner’s being perhaps the best example of this. So, how do we reconcile these two opposing requirements? Azpertilo.ai does exactly this. It takes on-brand content that fulfils strategic goals and rewrites it in the voice of the individual person so it actually gets read (and believed) by their audience. So, how much of an improvement might this give? Well, I have 15k followers and I often get more engagement than (for example) IBM who have 20m followers. Not because I’m 1000x smarter or the posts are 1000x better but because I’m not a corporate. Imagine this, scaled across your organisation and you’re starting to see the size of opportunity here… #socialselling #sales #digitalselling #marketing #AI  

In this week's CMO Brief: - Boards are cutting marketing headcount and calling it AI efficiency, proof or no proof. - At the same time, the function keeps absorbing more scope than any single title can defend, which makes it an easy target the moment budget conversations turn. - The response to that squeeze isn't to shrink quietly. Brand has to prove it drives business outcomes, not just awareness. - The CMO seat itself expires the moment that proof goes missing. - And it gets personal at the individual level too. If you can't market yourself, why would anyone believe you can market the company. The 5 posts below aren't five separate warnings. It's one story about what marketing gets measured on now, and the CMOs still standing are the ones who moved first. 📖 The CMO Who Won't Cut Headcount for AI Is the Next One to Go, by Nicolas Roquefort-Villeneuve. 36% of CMOs expect cuts in the next two years. AI is the stated reason. Provable savings is the real ask. https://lnkd.in/epiQtyJ4 📖 Things I wish someone had told me before I said yes to owning all of marketing, by Mridhu Varshini. Own the whole function and you stop being a marketer. Your team moves at the speed of your clarity. https://lnkd.in/eTJxuyk8 📖 CMOs need a modern approach to brand, by Gartner for Marketing & Communications. Brand strategy has to link straight to business outcomes, not just awareness, or it stays a target. https://lnkd.in/eVRDwFGp 📖 The CMO Seat Has An Expiry Date, by Namrata Balwani. Marketing gets asked to act commercial and still gets treated like a support function. That mismatch is what actually gets people replaced. https://lnkd.in/e3ANSNdv 📖 How do you hire a CMO who doesn't market themselves? by Gabe Larsen on LinkedIn. A CMO's first product is themselves. If you can't make people care about your own ideas, why would they believe you can do it for the company. https://lnkd.in/eh8CpydX #CMOBrief #CMO #MarketingLeadership #AIMarketing #B2BMarketing