CMO isn't dying, it's being renamed and redefined

The best compliment I've ever received in an executive interview wasn't about my leadership. It was about how I measure marketing. A recruiter once asked me, "As a CMO, what marketing metrics would you know cold?" I answered. She stopped me and said, "That's the best answer I've heard. Not just for this role. Ever." What stayed with me wasn't the compliment. It was the question. Because it exposed something I still see today. Too many marketing conversations begin with impressions, clicks, leads, conversions, and campaign performance. Those metrics matter. But they aren't how CEOs, CFOs, Boards, or investors evaluate whether marketing is creating value. They want to know a different story. Is marketing helping grow the buyers we care about? Is it increasing share in the markets we're targeting? Is it influencing revenue? Is it becoming more efficient over time? That's the story marketing should be able to tell. Campaign metrics are supporting evidence. Business outcomes are the story. If your dashboard would look the same whether or not the business grew, you're measuring the wrong thing. Strategy First. Always.

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

Unpopular opinion: Your marketing team isn't the problem. Your Go-To-Market strategy is. Here's what I see constantly in B2B organizations: Marketing is busy. Campaigns are running. Targets are being hit. And yet, revenue still isn't keeping pace. So leadership looks at the team. The thing is, the team isn't broken. The foundation is. There's a critical difference between assumption-based GTM and evidence-based GTM. Most companies build their Go-To-Market plan around what they believe about the market. Not what their own data actually reveals. The result? Motion without momentum. Campaigns without conviction. Execution without a map. When Go-To-Market starts with campaigns, you're already behind. When it starts with revenue opportunity mapping...Ahhmm...identifying where growth is most likely to come from, and why, everything downstream gets sharper. Messaging lands differently. Channels perform differently. Conversations convert differently. The question most growth leaders are asking is: "How do we generate more pipeline?" The question that actually changes results: "Where is our real revenue opportunity and are we even pointing at it?" That shift in thinking is where precision begins. 🎯 If you're a CMO or growth leader carrying the weight of underperforming revenue, this isn't about working harder or hiring differently. It starts with a better strategic foundation. And that starts with a different question. —— Have you ever led or been part of a team that was genuinely busy, but not driving revenue growth? What did that feel like from the inside? Drop your experience in the comments. I read every one. Or DM me if you want to talk shop.

You aren't firing your Marketing Manager because they failed. You are firing them because you asked a bricklayer to design a skyscraper. There is a toxic, expensive cycle happening in B2B tech right now. It usually looks exactly like this: Phase 1: The Panic Hire A founder feels behind on revenue. They need marketing. Instead of defining what marketing actually means for their specific product, they hire a junior operator, give them a "Manager" title, and a tight budget. Phase 2: Random Acts of Marketing Because there is no strategy, the founder defaults to tasks. "Build a landing page." "Launch a newsletter." "Post on LinkedIn." None of these tactical tasks ladder up to a unified revenue architecture. They are just disconnected noise. Phase 3: The Blame Game Eight months later, the pipeline is completely flat. The founder concludes that "marketing just doesn't work for us," fires the employee, and starts the exact same cycle with someone new. Here is the operational reality check: Strategy must always precede hands. You cannot hire a tactical operator and expect them to magically become an architect. Deciding your core audience, selecting your top two revenue channels, and defining the friction points takes deep, executive-level strategy. Running the day-to-day execution of those channels takes an operator. Founders often resist this because strategy feels "slow." They want someone in the seat immediately, shipping tasks. But here is the brutal truth: Shipping the wrong things fast is the absolute fastest way to kill your company slowly. Founders and CEOs, look at your marketing team's current workload. Are they executing a unified revenue strategy, or are they just crossing off a list of random tactical tasks you handed them? #GoToMarket #StartupCulture #Founders #MarketingStrategy #BusinessStrategy #Leadership #GrowthArchitecture #RevOps

After nearly two decades in marketing, across organizations of all sizes, I've noticed the same pattern. When growth stalls, the instinct is often to optimize the most visible thing: Redesign the website. Increase the ad budget. Post more on social media. Hire another marketing person. Those things may absolutely need attention. But improving each piece independently rarely fixes the underlying issue. More often, the gaps happen between departments. Marketing generates leads, but sales doesn't have a consistent follow-up process. The messaging on the website doesn't match what the sales team is saying. Operations are slowed down by manual processes that should have been automated years ago. Leadership is reviewing marketing metrics but they aren't tying back to revenue and profitability. Everyone is working hard. They're just not working from the same playbook. I've come to believe that marketing's most valuable role isn't creating campaigns. It's creating alignment. Alignment between strategy and execution. Between marketing and sales. Between technology and people. Between the customer and the business. When those pieces are connected, marketing becomes far more than content or campaigns. It becomes a scalable growth engine. Have you found that growth challenges are usually rooted in one department...or in the gaps between them?

I think the biggest lie marketers tell themselves is: "Clients don't want to pay." Clients don't hate paying for marketing. They hate taking unnecessary risks. I hear marketers complain all the time: "Clients just want the cheapest option." But after sitting in dozens of onboarding meeting with eCommerce founders, I’ve realized that’s rarely true. Most clients are more than willing to invest serious money. They’re just trying to answer one silent question: "Is this actually the right person to trust with my business?" Think about it from a founder's perspective. Their inbox is flooded daily with the exact same tired promises: "We’ll 10x your ROAS!" "We’ll scale your brand overnight!" "We'll guarantee 500% ROI in 30 days!" When the market is flooded with aggressive claims, clients naturally build up a wall. The marketers who win aren't the ones offering a discount they’re the ones who actively lower the client's perceived risk. How to Build Instant Trust The best media buyers and growth strategists don't pitch; they diagnose: They ask deep questions about margins, supply chains, and retention before touching Meta Ads. They map out realistic scenarios instead of making absurd ROAS promises. They position themselves as a strategic business partner, not a task oriented vendor. Clients don't hire you because you know how to publish Ads. They hire you because they trust your judgment to help them make better overall business decisions. That single mental shift changes the entire onboarding conversation. What do you think matters most when a client decides to work with you: price, past results, or fundamental trust?

💡 Marketing Then vs. Now: What's Actually Changed The Old Playbook A decade ago, marketing was measured by output: campaigns launched, impressions bought, brand awareness surveys. Success was often a gut call backed by a quarterly report. Fictional example: In 2014, a mid-size skincare brand's CMO greenlit a national TV campaign because "it felt right for the brand." The team measured success six months later by asking focus groups if they remembered the ad. And NOW - The New Expectations Today, marketing is expected to be a growth engine, not a cost center. Every channel needs a number attached to it — CAC, LTV, pipeline contribution, incrementality. Marketing teams are expected to work like product teams: testing, iterating, and shipping weekly. Fictional example: In 2026, that same skincare brand's marketing team runs 40 micro-campaigns a quarter across TikTok, retail media, and creator partnerships, with real-time dashboards showing exactly which $1 spent returns $3.20 in revenue — reviewed weekly, not annually. 🗞️ ❗ What This Means for the VP of Marketing and CMO Roles: CMOs are now expected to speak the language of the CFO. Boards want to know the return on every dollar, not just the reach. At the same time, they're expected to lead AI adoption — from content generation to predictive personalization — while still protecting brand integrity. Fictional example: When "Northlane Coffee Co." hired a new CMO in 2025, the job description included "own the P&L for customer acquisition" and "lead AI-driven personalization strategy" — neither of which would have appeared in a CMO posting from 2015. ✅ The Bottom Line Marketing's job used to be getting attention. Now it's proving value — fast, continuously, and in numbers a finance team will accept. The best CMOs today operate at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology, not just one of the three. #Marketing #CMO #MarketingLeadership #GrowthMarketing #MarTech #DigitalMarketing #MarketingStrategy #DataDrivenMarketing #AIinMarketing #B2BMarketing #Advertising #B2CMarketing #EmailMarketing #EventMarketing

Has anyone else noticed how many Chief of Staff roles are now reporting to CMOs? A year ago I would have thought that sounded unusual. Lately, though, I seem to see a new posting every week, and it's made me wonder what's changing. CMOs have never had narrow jobs. Long before today's AI boom, many of us were responsible for demand generation, product marketing, corporate communications, analyst relations, marketing operations, positioning, and more. But over the past several years, the role seems to have expanded in a different way. The conversations I'm seeing CMOs pulled into today go well beyond marketing. Revenue forecasting. AI strategy. Go-to-market planning. Product direction. Customer success. Pricing. Sales execution. Board discussions. Marketing has become much more tightly integrated with virtually every part of the business. Looking back over my own career, that's probably the biggest change I've experienced. The challenge isn't that marketing has become more complicated. It's that fewer of the most important decisions can be made within marketing alone. That made me wonder if the growing number of Chief of Staff roles is a response to that reality. Not because CMOs need help running marketing, but because they increasingly need someone who can help drive strategic initiatives across functions, keep priorities aligned, and ensure that critical work doesn't stall between departments. I don't know if that's the whole story, but it certainly feels like something is changing. I'm curious what others are seeing. Have you noticed this shift in the CMO role? If your marketing organization has a Chief of Staff, what prompted that decision? And if it doesn't, do you think it's only a matter of time? (image via Shutterstock)

Have you heard of Super CMO? As every job evolves, marketing is evolving too. It has become far too important to be left solely to the marketing department. Look at like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. They communicate product updates, shape narratives, engage with users, and influence markets. Many engineers and technical leaders now play an active role in marketing. We all know why. Product development and marketing have become inseparable, that’s it. Marketing is the operating system of growth, not just a department anymore. This shift of course has given rise to the idea of the Super CMO. A Super CMO thinks in ecosystems. Traditional channel-first marketing is becoming obsolete. Today’s marketing leaders need to have diverse quantitative and qualitative skills, an entrepreneurial mindset, commercial awareness, and a deep understanding of technology and AI. Most importantly, they work across the entire organization. They collaborate closely with sales, finance, business development, logistics, product, engineering, and customer success. Marketing used to be something that happens after a product is built. Not anymore. It is deeply involved in shaping product innovation, identifying new business opportunities, influencing strategic decisions, and driving long-term business growth.

OH CMO, WHERE ART THOUGH?? Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies have a CMO. On the surface, that might seem shocking and ridiculous. It’s not. But it is important. Finally organizations are realizing that marketing is about growth - both in the short and long term. Traditional marketing and sales have to be aligned. Throw in data, insights, activation, and training and development, and what emerges - for the traditional marketers who get it - is not a diminished role. It’s an expanded role. Because what often replaces the CMO is a Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, or some other expanded definition of the responsibility. Those who suffer from the Title Trap of saying, “that’s not marketing” will never get to the C-Suite. But those who embrace and pursue the expanded responsibilities? They will. Go drive growth. For today AND tomorrow. That’s where the real opportunity is.