CMO Influence on Business

You Hired a VP of Marketing. They Are Writing Blog Posts. A company I worked with last year brought in a VP of Marketing. Strong resume. Real strategic chops. Compensation north of $200K fully loaded. Six months in, she was updating the website, formatting sales decks, and writing the monthly newsletter. Not because she lacked strategic vision. Because there was no team beneath her, no budget to build one, and no infrastructure to execute against. Leadership was frustrated. They hired a senior marketing leader and pipeline hadn't moved. She was frustrated. She was hired to build a growth engine and instead she was an expensive pair of hands. This is what I call the seniority inversion. You pay for strategic capability and consume tactical capacity. It is one of the most expensive staffing mistakes in the middle market. And it happens constantly. The economics tell you why. A full-time CMO at the mid-market level commands $300K to $600K in total compensation. First-time CMO hires fail 66% of the time. Not because of competence. Because of a mismatch between expectations, infrastructure, and authority. When a company hires a senior marketing leader without giving them budget, team, or a seat in strategic conversations, the outcome is predetermined. The leader drowns in execution. Leadership concludes marketing isn't working. The cycle repeats with the next hire. The fix starts before the job description gets written. First, decide what you actually need marketing to accomplish in the next 12 months. If you need strategic leadership to build the architecture, hire or engage for strategy. If you need execution capacity, hire for execution. Do not hire a strategist and hand them a to-do list. Second, match the investment to the infrastructure. If you are not ready to fund a team, a martech stack, and a real budget, a full-time VP or CMO is not the right investment yet. A fractional leader who has built this before, paired with targeted execution support, delivers 80% of the strategic value at a fraction of the cost and risk. Third, give the marketing leader access to the conversations that matter. Revenue meetings. Pricing discussions. Client retention strategy. You cannot ask someone to drive business growth while keeping them out of the business conversation. The seniority inversion is not a hiring failure. It is a structural design failure. And the company, not the hire, usually created it.

After 9 years in marketing, I've finally come to a conclusion. This is the 1st marketing problem of B2B businesses: Skipping crucial steps to chase quick results. Here's what it looks like in practice: - Running outbound campaigns without a target market - Building a CRM routine without revenue objectives - Publishing content without a desired positioning - Writing a homepage without a clear messaging You understand the pattern: Doing (marketing operations) without (strategic input). It's like choosing the walls' color while your house doesn't have foundations yet. And all the marketing problems stem from this lack of clarity. - How can you focus without knowing what to achieve? - Why would prospects listen if you don't know what to say? - What will you say if you don't know who you're speaking to? Now here's the truth: Clarity doesn't come from a magic illumination. You get clarity by answering the right questions, one by one. Here are the 4 levels of B2B Marketing to help you: 1. Always start from Business Strategy Marketing must be aligned on the objectives and revenue targets of the business. Otherwise, you're building an art & craft department. 2. Turn it into a Marketing Strategy When the business objectives are clear, a great CMO will define a 'game plan' on how to achieve them. This step is the combination of strategic decisions (positioning, messaging) and planning (roadmap, budget). 3. Choose Marketing Tactics accordingly With the strategy in place, the next step is to choose actionable marketing activities. They need to make sense based on the target audience and desired positioning. 4. Run Operations to apply those tactics Here, it's not about answering questions anymore. It's about consistently executing marketing tasks and iterating based on results. You need the right skills, discipline, and clarity on what to do. *** Follow me Pierre Herubel for daily marketing tips. Join my free 5-day email marketing course (click "visit my website")

Today I'd like to share a personal reflection on unintended consequences One of my proudest moments in my 11 years building Bloom & Wild was creating the concept of opting out of marketing for sensitive occasions, such as Mother's Day Mother's Day is the most important commercial period in the year in our business and so a focal time for our marketing efforts, especially over email. We used to get a few customers every year emailing us and asking us if we could skip emailing them about Mother's Day (as they found it a difficult and sensitive time of the year), and then resume once the occasion had passed So in 2019, we came up with the idea of giving customers the ability to opt out of email marketing. The response was phenomenal - we had 17,000 opt outs within 24 hours, received widespread press coverage, and even had an MP raise the topic in parliament. Off the back of this, we created the Thoughtful Marketing Movement (https://lnkd.in/d56SH8n), and encouraged other companies to adopt the same practice. Nearly 200 companies signed up to our movement, and many much larger companies such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and Boots didn't sign up but adopted the practice. I really felt that we had made a difference not just to our customers, but to the wider population. So back to the topic of unintended consequences... Our inboxes are now all inundated with opt out emails. With Father's Day coming up, the emails are coming thick and fast. And I worry that something that was intended to make people's lives better at a difficult period has instead done the opposite, as the flurry of emails themselves saying "would you rather not hear about Father's Day" probably draw more attention to the occasion than the regular marketing does. That's why we’ve decided that having been the first brand to start sending opt out emails, Bloom & Wild will now be the first brand to stop sending them, starting this Father's Day season. We still want to protect our customers' experience, but having seen the impact of such wide adoption of opt out emails, we think there's a more thoughtful way. Going forward, we'll proactively ask our customers a few times a year, away from sensitive occasions, if they'd like to opt out of occasions they find sensitive, and will send them to our flexible preference centre: https://lnkd.in/eMjySXBG to do so. I'd encourage other members of the Thoughtful Marketing Movement to do likewise and am happy to share our experience of how we've implemented this change. #carewildly

After spending close to a decade in a VP or CMO role, my opinion about securing alignment at the management level has evolved, but I remain focused on two main points. (1) Marketing must own the pipeline model and directly support revenue creation (net new bookings, expansion, and churn) for the entire company. (2) The only way to tie a GTM team at the hip is for the GTM org to own a core set of numbers together. Marketing is often the tip of the spear, but the entire lifecycle matters. Ultimately, the second point is the most important. We've officially coined the Jellyfish GTM metrics as "gasoline metrics," they cover marketing, sales, and customer success. We are all responsible for the entire lifecycle. Would it be easier for me to focus only on my team? Yes. Is aligning across multiple people, opinions, objectives, and metrics more challenging? Yes. Which option is going to push towards healthier, more productive growth?

Can a fractional CMO be long-term? Absolutely. And more companies should probably plan for that instead of apologizing for it. The reason "long-term fractional CMO" sounds strange is that the category got invented as a bridge. Something you did while you were between full-time hires, or while you figured out whether you really needed marketing leadership. The word "fractional" itself implies an incomplete version of something. Like you're getting 40% of a real CMO. That framing is wrong. For plenty of B2B companies in the $5M-$50M range, a senior fractional CMO working 10-20 hours a week produces more strategic value than the full-time mid-level marketer they could otherwise afford to hire. Better pattern recognition. A broader network. More direct advice, because the fractional isn't managing their own performance review. That advantage doesn't evaporate at year three. Or year five. What happens at year three or year five is the CEO or board starts feeling like they should "graduate" to a full-time hire, even when the business is working. The pressure is almost always optics. What the org chart is supposed to look like at Series B. What investors expect. What peer CEOs have done. Peer pressure and optics rarely translate into a legitimate business reason. There are of course very good reasons to make the move to a full-time CMO: 👏 A category-defining initiative that needs someone in the seat every day 👏 Growth past the point where a fractional can scale their attention across the business 👏 A CEO who wants daily marketing partnership, not weekly If you're a founder or CEO working with a strong fractional CMO and the outcomes are there, stop treating the arrangement as provisional. Invest in the relationship. Build an execution team underneath them. Tell your board this is the design, not a placeholder. The best marketing leadership for your business is the marketing leadership that actually works.

Most people think a Fractional CMO just builds strategy slides. In reality, that’s only ten percent of the job. What really matters is what happens after the slides are done. A Fractional CMO isn’t there to just plan. They turn direction into action. They lead teams, align partners and bring structure to scattered efforts. They make sure every move connects back to the business goal. Most marketing teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because no one owns the full picture. A Fractional CMO fixes that. They bring focus, accountability and clarity across the board. They help leaders see where to invest and where to pull back. They simplify what’s overcomplicated. They build systems that make marketing work smarter, not harder. And they make every campaign and every dollar count. That’s where the real impact happens. When strategy becomes part of how the team operates every day. It’s hands-on leadership that creates momentum. It’s experience that turns plans into measurable progress. The truth is simple. Marketing rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails when execution loses direction. A Fractional CMO reconnects the two and keeps them moving together. That’s the real value. Not slides. Not theory. But leadership that drives consistent growth. Every business has ideas. Few have focus. A Fractional CMO brings that focus and turns it into results.

Marketing is the only effort that operates upstream of choice. It happens before preferences solidify, before trust is assigned, before categories are mentally organised. Marketing’s job is not to close transactions but to shape the conditions under which transactions become easier, cheaper, and more repeatable. This is where AI will not weaken the case for marketing, but rather solidify it. the profound truth it will expose is that when brands go silent, everything else has to work harder. Without marketing : -Price sensitivity increases. -Sales cycles lengthen. -Retention weakens. The absence of marketing creates decline more reliably than its presence creates spikes. Marketing, in this sense, is not persuasion but ‘probability engineering’. It does not guarantee outcomes but it alters the odds at population scale. Its most valuable output is memory. My column Simply Speaking Storyboard18 this week.

I recently redesigned the marketing operating model for a $350 Millon B2B software company — and it reminded me just how context-specific org design really is. One of the most strategic (and overlooked) decisions a CMO makes is how to design the marketing organization. It’s tempting to replicate what worked in your last company. But in B2B software, there’s no one-size-fits-all. What worked for a $20M PLG business may not suit a $100M enterprise SaaS platform. 1. Design for business outcomes, not headcount. Start with goals: new segments, enterprise expansion, category leadership. Org design should mirror business intent — not legacy structures. 2. Build capabilities before filling roles. Ask: Do we have strong demand gen, lifecycle, product marketing, content, partner marketing, ops, and analytics? Capabilities come first — roles come second. 3. Structure around your go-to-market motion. If your growth lever is partners, embed partner marketing early. If it’s PLG, prioritize lifecycle and in-product activation. For enterprise, double down on ABM, field marketing, and enablement. 4. Where should Product Marketing sit? There’s no single right answer: In product-led orgs, it makes sense to sit within product to shape narrative from the roadmap. In sales-led orgs, it’s more effective aligned to revenue to sharpen messaging and enablement- drive pipeline velocity. What matters more is the evolution toward GTM solution marketing — cross-functional teams that bridge product, sales, and marketing to tell customer-centric value stories. 5. Build for agility, not bureaucracy. Your org should flex across geos, customer types, and growth motions — without needing to reorganize every time strategy shifts. 6. Invest early in Marketing Ops, Data & Analytics. This is your engine room. From attribution modeling and lead routing to campaign performance, experimentation, and forecasting — high-performing orgs are built on strong ops and data infrastructure. Ops is not a support function. It's a strategic growth capability. 7. Culture, collaboration, and clarity are non-negotiables. No structure works without trust across sales, product, and marketing. Shared KPIs, aligned planning, and a performance mindset are critical. Bottom line: Design for outcomes. Build capabilities. Leverage data. Stay context-aware. Your next marketing org shouldn't look like your last one — it should reflect the business you're building. #B2BMarketing #MarketingLeadership #CMOInsights #MarketingOps #MarketingAnalytics #ProductMarketing #GTMStrategy #MarketingOrgDesign #SaaSGrowth #B2BSoftware #GrowthLeadership #ModernMarketing

Marketing rarely struggles because teams are not working hard enough. More often, the challenge lies in alignment. There are many moments when performance dashboards look impressive. Traffic is rising, engagement appears strong, and campaigns seem to be running at full speed. Teams are active, focused, and confident about the progress being made. Yet when revenue results arrive, the impact is far less significant than expected. That contrast reveals an important reality: activity and progress are not the same thing. Modern marketing environments often reward motion. More content is produced. More tools are adopted. More channels are activated. But increasing volume around an unclear strategy usually leads to louder noise rather than meaningful growth. The teams that generate real results tend to work differently. They start by defining the outcomes they want to influence. Instead of focusing only on impressions or clicks, they track indicators that reflect business performance, such as pipeline contribution, customer lifetime value, and revenue velocity. Practical marketing is not about reducing creativity. It is about directing creativity toward clear commercial outcomes. Every campaign begins with a defined purpose and a clear understanding of the business result it is meant to support. The latest newsletter explores this shift in detail and examines why outcome-focused marketing consistently outperforms activity-driven execution. For teams navigating the tension between staying busy and driving measurable growth, it offers a timely perspective.

“Fractional CMO” is the official title. It’s also incomplete. I work with B2B founders ($3–20M ARR) who’ve built something real — and now feel growth getting heavier instead of clearer. They don’t need more activity. They need alignment. By the time I come in, the problem usually isn’t effort. It’s blurred ownership, soft positioning, and revenue systems built on momentum instead of structure. In practice, I’m not just a Fractional CMO. I’m also: • Brand Architect (when the company outgrows its story) • Revenue Translator (when sales and marketing speak different dialects) • CEO Confidant (when pressure has nowhere else to go) • CRO Thought Partner (when pipeline feels unpredictable) • Pattern Spotter (before the dashboards catch up) This isn’t a fit if you want campaigns without accountability. It is a fit if you want clarity before speed — and a growth system that compounds. If that’s the stage you’re in, we’ll recognize it quickly.