Well, it could mean many different things to many different people. Let me offer my perspective.

The days are long gone when the top marketing leader in an organization is valued for how well they render logos on donut boxes. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role is vital in today’s organization…or it should be. Today’s CMO in a forward-thinking organization is charged with building the brand, generating leads, driving revenue, leading sales, improving the customer experience, and dramatically-enhancing overall organizational value. And in, some cases, they rise to become CEO. They should not be subordinate to sales but, rather, forge strong relationships with the sales organization to help make them better and more successful. They confidently interact with and depend on finance, IT, ops and customer service. They act as point-guards for the organization, helping to understand processes and technology, improving both to acquire and retain customers and drive both employee and customer satisfaction in the process. Today’s marketing executives are transformative. They’re change-agents who act urgently but not recklessly in “taking-the-hill” to strengthen a company’s brand in a way that creates loyalists and advocates among customers and employees. 

Position Overview

Organizations call their top marketing executive a variety of things…CMO, SVP, VP, Managing Director. Whatever they call it, the top marketing executive should be a member of the Executive Leadership Team and must build the brand, generate leads and revenue, lead the way for sales, improve the customer experience and participate in the creation and execution of the firm’s strategic plan.  The CMO must be resourceful, wise in their movements…a “business athlete” who’s able to adapt to any style of play to win while being out-manned and out-spent. While the CMO is certainly not expected to be a CFO, the person in this position must know key financials, the elements of profitability and vital revenue/expense metrics. The person in this role must always act to help the organization make money, save money, do something better and increase organizational value.

Very Simply

If you had to say simply and poignantly what a CMO does, it’s this: they help and organization make money, save money, do things better.

High-Level Responsibilities

A CMO should span the organization, have authority or influence on anything and everything related to things included but not limited to the following:

• Brand Management: planning, positioning, developing
• Customer Experience: improve upon key customer moments-of-truth, measure impact
• Digital Marketing: SEM/PPC, SEO, website/app/technical development
• Lead Generation: drive in-bound traffic via phone, web, e-mail, product placement
• Social Media and Marketing: strategy, execution, management and measurement
• Campaign Management: automated marketing, lead nurturing and sales support programs
• Corporate Communications: executive, employee, media, community and crisis communications

Time Allocation

The CMO’s time needs to be spent wisely. From my experience, the CMO performs the role of 4 different workers: an architect, a developer, a parent, and a short-order cook. Approximately 75% of their time needs to be spent acting, doing…being intimately involved with the daily tactics and demands of the role. The balance of time needs to be spent “visioning” and planning the future, much the way an architect dreams and designs future structure. Consider the roles and time allocations in more detail:

• Architect (25%): This is all about “Planning”. Planning for brand vision and direction, marketing, innovation, competitive and external scenarios. It’s about understanding trends, insights and devouring data and analytics to keep the brand heading due-north.
• Builder (50%): This is about the “Doing”. Taking strategic to tactical with marketing execution, project management, daily tactics. After all, you can’t spend all day just thinking and planning, right?
• Parent (20%): CMOs need to spend time parenting, “Guiding”. Time must be spent managing the team, overseeing the work and activities. They need to develop talent, advise sales, make tough love decisions on what’s best for the organization.
• Short-Order Cook (5%): CMOs need to spend time “Serving”, addressing typical unforeseen emergencies and opportunities, filling rush orders…but this should only be a minimal, minimal amount of their time.

This is just a guide, but an accurate guide to what’s needed and the approach I’ve taken over the course of my career. If my history serves as precedent, then the marketing team built and led by a CMO:

• Will be restless, curious, urgent winners.
• Will be a high-performing, results-driven force in the organization that plans, prescribes, acts and delivers. 
• Won’t be a “sit-around” group that waits for others to direct them.
• Will act far in-advance of sales and the organization.
• Will be doing things that build brand, generate leads, support sales, improves customer experience and generates revenue long before anyone has a chance to ask.

Tactically-Speaking

• The person in this role needs to be a teacher, mentor, marketer, business leader.
• They need to be visible, accessible, communicative and trusted throughout the company. 
• They need to develop an annual marketing plan and budget.
• They need to manage to their budget and really know and own their P&L.
• They need to know when and why to change course with budgets and plans as situations dictate and/or change throughout the course of the business year.
• They need to manage and develop their team to maximum output. 
• If staffing changes need to be made, this person needs to have the courage to make them.
• They need to forge strong, trusted working relationships with functional units across the business that represent critical dependencies for success.
• They need to assess the current marketing spend and revise/grow/reduce as-needed. 
• They need to manage third-party resources, ensuring good value for the money.
• They need to measure the impact of all tactics, measuring value-returned/ROI.
• They need to develop key strategic plan initiatives reflective of the overall corporate strategic plan.
• They need to spearhead strategic plan initiatives, communicating progress to stakeholders.
• They need to know industry issues and market trends to incorporate into marketing recommendations.
• They need to have guidelines for when to say “yes” to ideas so that they have a framework and reasons for saying “no” to ideas.

Granularly-Speaking

• Staffing Plans: A CMO needs to know who they have, what they do, what they do well and what can be improved upon. They need to define the most immediate critical roles needed for immediate success. Like a GM on a sports team, they have to have philosophy for building the team from the ground-up and know how to best use their “salary cap” by having a blend of fixed and variable cost solutions for talent. There are no-brainer staff needs of any CMO: a marketing technologist, a data/analytics storyteller, a content leader or social marketing demon who knows DVM (digital, visual, mobile) and an expert in PPC and SEO. Other roles are also strongly needed also: a process improvement guru, a traditional marcom expert.
• Brand Development and Management: A CMO needs to understand customer emotional and functional buying behaviors, understand competitors/competing influences, understand what makes the company relevant, different and better, measure the company’s RDB vs. competition. They need to uncover, define or refine how to position the company in the market and align the company’s RDB with internal and external processes. They develop a core messaging platform that aligns with RDB, distribute the brand through multi-media channels, measure customer awareness, understanding, preference and advocacy for the brand.
• Lead Generation: CMOs need to help the company make money. That means understanding current lead generation efforts and cost-per metrics (impressions, leads, quote/proposal/sale). They need to know what tactics/efforts drive opportunities, sales revenue and understand the conversion funnel and pinpoint opportunities for improvement. A CMO should always employ test-and-learn new tactics for lead generation, explore opportunities for third-party referral relationships, create leads through affiliated/brand-adjacent industries/companies. They need to go “DVM”, expanding into digital, visual, mobile areas for lead generation. They need to research and deploy universal e-mail serving tool; start small then grow to journeys.
• Sales Support: A CMO needs to understand current sales support efforts, learn what’s used, effective and ineffective. They need to understand how customers consume information in this space then develop suites of sales support tools that align with buyer behaviors. Ideally, they develop a seamless, turnkey hands-off system for trade show sales support, for promotional products, for personal marketing tools.
• Customer Experience: A CMO needs to understand and document the customer buying journey, review existing customer service metrics and trends, identify steps in the process that determine acquisition and retention. They need to develop and implement process improvements to strengthen the journey, measure the impact of customer experience on revenue gain and loss and implement rate-Us micro processes to pinpoint breakdowns in the customer journey.
• Social Media and Marketing: A CMO needs to understand current tools and tactics for social media. If not already in place, look to deploy SFDC social studio or Hootsuite. They need to claim and own all social channels to prevent brand-jumpers, aligning all social channels with brand messaging platform. They must develop and deploy hub-and-spoke plans for social media, develop weekly editorial calendar of custom content. They set goals for growth and revenue with social media, measuring the impact of efforts (impressions, transfers, cost avoidance, followers, leads and revenue).     
• Website Management: A CMO understands that their site is the first window to the world for customers. They need to benchmark the site vs. competition, trends, technology, user demands. They should always be mining data to inform website improvement for excellence in user experience, ensuring speed, certainty and simplicity in UX. They must deploy a user-friendly CMS that enables fast, low-cost management. Google Analytics and a variety of other site tracking/metrics must be deployed. They need to ensure enough content space is given to allow for excellence in SEO and embed social media (blog) to aid in SEO and social conversions.
• PPC and SEO: A CMO works with sales and customer service to understand most commonly used phrases by customers, assessing the global search volume of all commonly-used phrases. They develop target lists of keywords for SEO and PPC bidding, embedding keywords in page titles, tags and content. They know that “local” is vital for SEO success and optimize site locations for crawlability on site and register all site locations on Google My Business. They start small with PPC, owning brand terms and bidding on competitor phrases and grow from there, using PPC to further inform SEO plans. CMOs use social media as a weapon in the fight for SEO success, developing keyword-rich content.
• Digital Innovation: A CMO must also be a CIO, keeping abreast of emerging trends in customer engagement technology, understanding the digital use patterns of target audiences and customers. They ideate on ways to use technology to improve customer experience, considering best practices from other industries, adjacent industries and they think B2P (business-to-person), not B2B or B2C with their plans.
• Account-Based Marketing: A CMO works closely with sales leadership, sales op leadership. They identify accounts considered to be Premier, Target or Conquest Accounts. They develop a Premier Accounts programs to defend / retain and grow wallet share. They implement and track impact on spend with these accounts. They identify Target Accounts, those defined as having high upside for wallet share growth, working with sales to create marketing programs to move these Target Accounts to Premier status. ACMO goes on the offensive to “steal” accounts from competitors, “conquesting” them; they create a compelling reason for trial and/or switch.
• Employee Communications: A CMO knows the importance of building a strong internal brand. They develop a calendar of employee communications, key messaging and editorial content. They review and improve current internal media/channels for communications. They create an executive communications plan and calendar of communications. They develop a recurring series of employee engagement and events intended to build understanding, commitment and advocacy within the employees.
• Media Relations/Crisis Communications: A CMO plans for good things to happen but knows that sometimes bad things happen, and they’re prepared. They develop media relations policy to address the good and prepare for the bad. They identify employees who are able to engage media and train/coach them on media protocols and presentation. They identify those situations that require comment, develop standard responses, statements.

Skills and Competencies

Today’s CMO needs to have a strong force-of-will, be assertively-diplomatic or diplomatically-assertive, act quickly and decisively but not recklessly. They need to exude an air of humble confidence that says to the organization “follow me folks, I’m taking the hill.” Some other strengths, skills and abilities that must be present in a successful CMO include but aren’t limited to these:

• Clear executive leadership skills and abilities
• Unmatched communications skills
• Emotional intelligence
• Diplomacy and decisiveness
• Uncanny ability to be liked and respected simultaneously
• Demonstrated ability to make people and organizations better
• A desire to win every day
• Strong, infectious, contagious positive energy and attitude
• An urgent but not reckless pace
• A thinker and do-er who engages people to produce results
• Strong analytical skills, critical thinking skills
• Ability to easily move from strategic to practical to tactical
• Curious, inquisitive, challenging
• Ability to steepen the learning curve
• Willingness to engage healthy conflict to move the organization forward
• Fiscal discipline, wise decision-making
• Solid understanding of market research and data analysis methods
• Supreme marketing generalist
• Ability to fluidly multi-task and move easily to assignments throughout the day
• An expert problem-solver