Mandy Hornaday: Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday, and in our very first episode together we'll be diving into the CMO crisis and the four leadership characteristics I believe current and aspiring marketing leaders will absolutely need to master in order to be successful, now and in the future. Not only will I be sharing more about how to show up in these four key areas, but I'll also be offering some quick wins within each characteristic to enable you to take action as soon as today. Let's get started.
Mandy Hornaday: The CMO crisis is something very close to my heart, and a big part of why I felt so passionate about starting this podcast. So it only felt right to make this the inaugural episode.
Mandy Hornaday: When we talk about the CMO crisis, what are we referring to? One of the most staggering stats tied to it is that 80% of CEOs don't trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs, that's from the Harvard Business Review. We see this everywhere. The CMO role has the shortest tenure in the C-suite across many industries, including software, where average tenure is less than 18 months. Companies are constantly restructuring or eliminating the CMO position altogether. Marketing is rolling into the Chief Revenue Officer or a Chief Growth Officer role in many cases. And as a result, CMOs and marketing executives are experiencing major burnout, high turnover, limited CEO trust, and the exhaustion that comes with both.
Mandy Hornaday: Marketing feels harder than ever. We're expected to deliver far beyond what traditional marketing looked like 20 or 30 years ago. CEOs are expecting us to drive growth and higher ROI in a highly complex environment. Marketing is one of the widest functions that exists, when you think about our counterparts in sales or finance, we are expected to cover enormous ground, and as leaders we often don't have depth across every area of marketing. There's been an absolute explosion of MarTech, over 14,000 marketing technology tools, up 20% year over year. There's been an explosion of AI and automation. There's more data than ever on our customers and their journey with our brands, which is wonderful but also adds complexity. And we are firmly in a do-more-with-less era, where CEOs are expecting more from their CMOs than they have in years past.
Mandy Hornaday: As you're listening to this, if you're wondering whether you have this problem: does your CEO bring you and marketing in to solve big business problems? Do you have a seat at the table? If not, that's one of the biggest indicators that your CEO doesn't value you at the executive level. I also find that CEOs who don't trust their marketing leaders tend to view the marketing function as a supportive, reactive department whose primary goal is sales enablement. Or they can't articulate what direct value marketing brings to the company and how it's contributing to business goals. And they may not be engaged with or supportive of your marketing plans, through their time or your budget.
Mandy Hornaday: Given that 80% of CEOs don't trust their CMOs, if you're in that bucket, you're not alone. Today we're going to dive into the four key characteristics I believe every marketing leader needs to succeed.
Mandy Hornaday: Before we get into the four characteristics, I want to talk about why this matters to me personally. I was a B2B marketing executive for over a decade at a large company, running a large team. The company was amazing, the team was amazing, but I was experiencing all of the friction we've been talking about. Marketing stopped being fun. So I left, not just the company, but marketing entirely. I went to an early-stage B2B SaaS startup and ran growth operations: sales, biz dev, marketing, customer success, but predominantly the operational side. I loved it. But what I realized during that time was that it wasn't that I didn't enjoy marketing, it was that marketing as it exists today is broken. Being part of the entire growth function from start to finish helped me identify what's broken and how to fix it. When I came back into marketing as a fractional CMO and marketing strategist, I found common themes in what CEOs are looking for from their marketing leaders and what we can do to build trust and hold our seats in the C-suite.
Mandy Hornaday: Today I want to share those with you, not only so you can build trust with your CEO and advance your career, but so you can avoid burnout. No matter your marketing background, demand gen, brand, creative, PR, these four leadership characteristics will help you build trust with your C-suite and enjoy your role. Let's get started.
Mandy Hornaday: The first and most important leadership characteristic, and if you only take one thing from today, let it be this, is that CEOs are desperately looking for marketing leaders to be a business leader first. I always say when I walk into an organization: I'm a business leader first and a marketing leader second.
Mandy Hornaday: CEOs want us to be strategic, revenue-minded business leaders. But we are often so out of alignment with the business. One of the biggest ways this shows up is that we're focused on marketing metrics and KPIs instead of the business metrics and KPIs that actually matter. Many of us don't even know our business metrics. Do you know which numbers your CFO cares most about? Do you know how they're calculated? Do you know what's keeping your CEO up at night? If we aren't familiar with what our business goals are and the KPIs our CEOs and CFOs are taking to the board, the ones driving funding, growth, and investment decisions, we can't adequately align our marketing plans and tie them clearly to business results. And if we're not doing that, we're not in lockstep with our peers, and our marketing strategy isn't supporting growth in a way that works for sales, product, technology, and finance.
Mandy Hornaday: Being a strong business leader means you have a deep understanding of and high engagement with the company vision and goals, and you use it as your guiding north star across your entire marketing function, from your marketing goals to the strategies you select, to the campaigns you launch, to the programs you run, to the roadmaps you build. Can you point to everything in your department and clearly articulate how it maps to a business goal or which KPI it's driving?
Mandy Hornaday: Three quick wins. First, ask yourself: do you know the business goals and KPIs your C-suite is pushing toward? That includes your CEO, CFO, and CRO. Do you know how they define and measure that data? If not, start there. Second: does your team know these business goals and KPIs? If the CEO asked your director of demand gen what the business KPIs are, would they know the answer? Would everyone on your team from directors to coordinators? If not, get them up to speed. Third: does your team know how they personally impact the business goals through their work? Could each person point to a campaign they're running and say, this is the business goal I'm impacting? Start here, business-minded thinking shouldn't stop with you. It should reverberate throughout your entire department.
Mandy Hornaday: As Stephen Covey says: begin with the end in mind. Make sure you and your team know what you're aiming at and keep it front and center as your north star in everything that you do.
Mandy Hornaday: The second leadership characteristic is being customer-focused. It surprises me how many marketing leaders aren't truly customer-focused despite believing they are. What I'm seeing is that marketing leaders, and sales leaders too, have a basic understanding of their target audience and buyer personas, maybe some basic firmographics, but lack the depth and discipline around who they should be going after and when. Or they lack alignment between sales and marketing on how they even define the ICP, target audience, and buyer personas, let alone which specific accounts each function is pursuing.
Mandy Hornaday: This is more important than ever. The marketplace is more saturated than it has ever been. We're competing for buyer focus and attention against more companies, more messages, and more channels than at any point before. If we don't get crystal clear on talking to the right customers with the right message at the right time, we will lose. I still see companies where marketing leaders, sales leaders, even CEOs want to talk to everybody. We want to go far and wide. I understand the impulse, growth is everything, but we will never grow by trying to talk to everyone about everything, and therefore talking to no one about anything.
Mandy Hornaday: Being customer-focused means our customers, current and future, are at the center of our business and our marketing strategies. We're hyper-focused on talking to the right customers with the right message at the right time on the right channel.
Mandy Hornaday: Three quick wins. First: do an ICP assessment. Do you have one? Is it current? Are you using only basic firmographics, or are you pulling in more advanced data points, verticals, geographies, company size, buying signals? If you don't have a defined ICP, start there. Interview your sales team and get a basic ICP together. Second: do an ICP activation assessment. Are you actually leveraging the ICP definitions you have? Is your team using that documentation in their campaigns? Does your sales team know it exists? Third: do a messaging assessment. Now that you've looked at your ICPs and buyer personas, are you modifying your messaging to those different segments across your marketing? Start with these three assessments and see where you are. Do not launch anything without being crystal clear on your targeting and your customer.
Mandy Hornaday: The third leadership characteristic is operational excellence. This is one of my personal favorites, and a big part of why when I left marketing, I went into growth operations. If you don't have a handle on how to operationally run a high-performing function, regardless of your level of expertise, you are going to struggle.
Mandy Hornaday: When leaders lack operational excellence, I see it in a few ways: no clear marketing roadmaps, no handle on project management or resourcing, no operational systems, and tools and technologies that aren't being leveraged efficiently, or at all. The truth is most marketing departments are a mess. The number one thing I tell a CEO after building them a marketing plan is that even with a great plan, you have to have a clear infrastructure and plumbing within your existing function, otherwise you don't have the marketing machine needed to execute in a scalable, repeatable, efficient way.
Mandy Hornaday: Operational excellence means we don't do random acts of marketing. We're not an activity-based function. Everything we do, every person we have, has a purpose that ties to the business goals. And we have full visibility into what's working and what's not.
Mandy Hornaday: Three quick wins. First: familiarize yourself with a bottoms-up marketing plan. If you don't know what one is, do some quick research. A bottoms-up marketing plan is your forecast of exactly which campaigns and channels will drive the growth metrics you need over the next year. Having this in place is crucial to running an operationally excellent team. Second: identify your pipeline target. You likely know your business revenue goal. Back that into a pipeline target, how much pipeline does marketing need to generate to hit revenue goals? Use basic conversion rates or industry benchmarks to get there. You don't need the full bottoms-up plan yet, just get clarity on your pipeline number. Third: take stock of your total marketing spend. Are you aware of all spending across headcount, vendors, tools, technology, and campaigns? If not, start gathering that information. The goal right now is visibility, just understand where your budget currently sits.
Mandy Hornaday: We've all been tasked with doing more with less. Running a lean, efficient marketing machine is no longer optional, it's foundational to surviving in the C-suite.
Mandy Hornaday: The fourth and final leadership characteristic is the art of agility. While you could consider agility part of operational excellence, I wanted to call it out separately because one of the most common complaints I hear from CEOs, CROs, and cross-functional peers is that marketing is too slow. And I don't think it's because we don't want to help. I think it's because we've filled our plates so completely that we don't have the capacity to respond quickly.
Mandy Hornaday: Being an agile marketing leader means we don't let our marketing plans collect dust, we update and iterate them regularly to match evolving business needs. They should be living, breathing documents. And we need to build agility into our plans and budgets so we can test, iterate, and scale.
Mandy Hornaday: One of my favorite books on operational excellence is The Phoenix Project. Written for IT leaders, it covers principles that apply to every business leader. One of the concepts it addresses is the relationship between capacity and wait time. When someone's plate exceeds 90% capacity, wait time skyrockets. But when you can keep capacity around 85%, wait time drops significantly, and you have room for agility. I apply this to my marketing budgets: I leave 10 to 15% of budget unallocated for iteration. I leave similar room in my team's capacity and campaign calendar for testing and experimentation. That buffer is what allows you to actually respond when something changes or a new opportunity appears.
Mandy Hornaday: Three quick wins. First: do a resourcing assessment. Where do your projects consistently get stuck? Is the bottleneck a person or a process? Get clarity on what's preventing your team from moving faster. Second: assess how you evaluate new opportunities. Do you have an intake process for new ideas or market opportunities? A set of questions you ask? A way to stay aware of what's emerging? Third: evaluate your feedback loop. How frequently are you reviewing marketing performance? Do you have feedback loops with your stakeholders and customers? And when you collect that feedback, are you actually acting on it? The goal with all three is to get the right information in place so you can build agility in a way that makes sense for your team and your business.
Mandy Hornaday: I call it the art of agility because it genuinely is an art, balancing how often to change tactics without changing them too quickly. You need to give programs time to perform. That requires patience. But you also can't keep doing things that aren't working. Adopt a fail-fast mentality, give yourself room to test, and figure out the right balance for your business.
Mandy Hornaday: As we wrap up, I want to reiterate how important it will be for each of us to implement these four leadership characteristics. Show up as a business leader first. Be hyper-focused on your customers. Build operational excellence into how you run your team. And instill the art of agility. These characteristics have always been important for strong business leaders, not just in marketing. But marketing leaders aren't prioritizing them right now, and it's showing in our turnover rates and in the lack of CEO trust.
Mandy Hornaday: Here's what I want you to do next: take a personal assessment across all four characteristics. Where do you excel? Where do you struggle? If your C-suite were asked tomorrow whether you're a business-minded leader, a customer-focused leader, an operationally excellent leader, an agile leader, what would they say? Then implement some of these quick wins. Start with one characteristic, the one with the biggest gap, the one that feels most actionable, or start with the business mindset because it will win through and through. And finally, be accountable. Share these four leadership characteristics with your exec team and tell them what you're doing in each area to elevate yourself as a marketing leader.
Mandy Hornaday: I hope you'll keep coming back. We'll have weekly episodes continuing to cover these areas and many more. A big part of why I started this podcast is that while there's tremendous information out there on how to be an expert in different areas of marketing, I found very little on how to transform existing marketing leaders into the modern marketing executive, the kind CEOs are actually looking for. I've done thousands of hours of research, learning, and testing and have implemented these strategies across many B2B companies and teams. I'd love to share this with each of you so you can be more successful in your roles, continue to elevate into the marketing executive you have the ability to be, and build a career you love. Thank you. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you found this helpful. In the meantime, keep activating growth for you and your business.
