Personal Development
- Be the connector for your company – You’re already the chief marketer, chief communicator, chief people officer and likely also in charge of growth and product, so, you need to continue to be the connector of dots between various functions. For example, you should be helping finance and operations teams regularly work with your marketing and product teams to examine new ways of forecasting and managing logistics.
- Continuously push to drive long-term vision but back it up with data, research and test/learn plans – You need to influence your peers to see you on equal footing as CEOs in driving long-term vision. CMO tenure on average is 3.5 years whereas CEO tenure on average is 7 years. CEOs have the luxury of thinking long-term because they are in their positions longer. CMOs tend to opt for short-term solutions or splashy stunts due to the brevity of their tenure; however, providing a long-term vision with data, research and deliverable milestones will help you extend your tenure and breadth of influence.
- Surround yourself with diverse people, backgrounds, and thinking – Boards of companies have diverse backgrounds to help advise and think outside the box. You should have a diversity of thought around you as well. Think of it as your own personal board.
Organizational Development
- Training – Don’t just tell your organization to “learn” outside their own disciplines, actually set time aside for them to build diverse skillsets. Provide a curriculum for incoming team members to develop their skill in finance, product as well as marketing. For example, investment bankers get 5 weeks of grueling accounting, financial modeling, Excel and Powerpoint training, which allows them to work more effectively on the job. Give all new marketers to the company a 3-week crash course on finance, product and Excel/Powerpoint training. Then, throughout the year, give dedicated days for marketers to build their skills (e.g. training Fridays).
- Knowledge Share – Businesses often operate in silos, so metrics are separated and disconnected. Build regular knowledge shares between the finance and operations teams with the marketing, product, and customer teams. Encourage shared metrics and goals. Report on joint metrics. For example, have finance and marketing teams both report on a shared goal around return on ad spend and forecasts on LTV.
- Innovation hackathons – Create regular forums for teams to develop and practice the innovation muscle. Encourage formations of pods with different types of skillsets (e.g. a pod might include a finance person with a marketer with a product manager). You never know what kind of great ideas can come out of that grouping.
Have other ideas?
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