CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

Ep 15 - Fragmented Marketing Leadership Will Never Work

Welcome to another episode of CMO Field Notes. My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO, and I work with clients, both large and small, who are looking to have definitive marketing leadership in play in their business, so that there is a coordinated strategy around marketing. And it’s not just a constant battle in that Monday morning, 11am marketing meeting to go, “What are we going to try this week? What are we going to do there, here, and what are we going to do that,” and rely on ideas from the founder or the business owner themselves. So how does this change? How do we respond in this world? Let me just share a bit of a personal story, it’s something that has happened this week in the field. That’s why these short podcasts are called CMO Field Notes, because this is me in the field as a fractional CMO, working with businesses. So, something interesting happened. We’ve just had a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and over the bank holiday weekend, the CEO of a company that I’ve been working with emailed me because I wasn’t going to be able to make the Monday meeting. The Monday meeting that normally takes place at Monday at 12. It’s either with his marketing team or it’s with him. So, every other week, the meeting is different. This Monday would have been his day, and we had scheduled it for Tuesday at 12. But the email that came in over the weekend was basically him canceling our contract, as we were due to talk about the renewal of it, because we’ve been working together for a year. I had submitted the results based invoice, because I operate from a results based perspective with my fractional CMO work, and he has decided that he wants to take the work that I’ve been doing and the tools that we’ve integrated, the reporting system and the way in which I’ve been leading the marketing over the last 12 months for him (and yet I’m getting a results payout, because we have increased and grown the company over the last year together) and he’s redistributing the tasks amongst his other C-suite employees. I think this is a decision that a lot of businesses are making right now. I’ve recently read on Forbes that there is this trend to effectively take the CMO function out of the business and redistribute the different things that a CMO would do amongst the different C suite people. From a perspective of budget and finance, that’s going to the CFO. From a perspective of things such as like operations and AI, that’s going to the COO. If it’s anything to do with sales, then it’s going to the sales division. And, you know, there’s also newer roles that have been kind of created along the way. I’ve seen banded around a lot a Chief Brand Officer, and having worked with one for a few months last year, it was an interesting dynamic - because the Chief Brand Officer was more concerned about the message and the colour of things, rather than actually the results that were coming in. This is where I feel like the role of a modern day CMO has changed dramatically. The role of a modern day CMO is supposed to be about the campaigns and the numbers, looking at how is marketing activity directly correlated to the results that are being brought into the business. And it’s really difficult to measure for some companies because they have no idea. That’s why strategic leadership in their marketing is needed. But in this new age of distributing the marketing leadership away from the role of a single CMO, I feel like there’s going to be a bit of a technology mess, because nobody’s really looking at it all. You’re going to have the marketing team operating at one level, the COO operating at another level, trying to bring in AI across the whole company, dealing with maybe an IT manager or an outsourced IT support. Plus, you’ve also got all the finance side of things, and the financial reporting. There’s nobody really looking at it all. There’s no executive oversight around the entire martech structure and the budgets associated with it. I feel like if there’s nobody leading the marketing from a perspective of quarterly sprints, which is how I would operate, then who’s actually taking the way in which we should operate campaigns and build in the right way? Is it just going to be down to the different teams choosing to do what they want? It’s not just about colouring it and making things look pretty. It’s about seeing what works, what doesn’t work, doubling down on what does, and stripping back and simplifying by removing the stuff that doesn’t work. I think for me, my plea to any founder, any CEO, any entrepreneur who is operating at a level that does not have this integrated marketing leadership in place... the human judgment that comes from being able to see from experience what’s working, what’s not, how we test, how we measure, how team fits into all of that... that’s never going to ever be something that you can replace by taking the role of a CMO and splitting those tasks and putting additional pressure on other C suite members of staff. And it’s certainly not fair on them. I truly believe that there is a role for a CMO that should be present in every single business, no matter how big or how small. If you’re just an entrepreneur, you’re a solopreneur, having someone who is assisting and working with you from an accountability perspective about your marketing is the kind of thing that I offer, right through to working with my largest client who is running at around $110 million a year right now. It’s that strategic work around a marketing team. It’s that strategic work around the conversations in the boardroom and how that filters down and how projects are managed and how results are measured. I really feel like there is this generalist kind of view - that the CMO is a marketing generalist, not a specialist in certain areas, but a CMO taps into the specialisms of those who are focused on their task, and brings it all together. It’s about that cohesive marketing leadership. If you distribute marketing leadership across different functions, you end up with something that’s just completely dysfunctional. Commit to a genuine integration of a CMO in your company. You might celebrate the fact that you are without your CMO, because you’re saving a few $100,000 a year because you’re not employing somebody at that level, and then those short term wins mean that maybe people are excited that they’ve got a bit more autonomy around things. But what’s likely to happen is underperforming marketing over the next few years. Transformation in your marketing will come with definitive marketing leadership. If you’re asking the question of CMO or specialists right now, keep your marketing leadership in play, and then allow them to work with the specialists. It takes all of the weight off your shoulders as the CEO and as the founder of your company, so you haven’t got to be worrying about it. And that’s the whole point of having either a fractional CMO or a CMO employed. If it’s something that we can talk about, how I can really show you how that marketing leadership will work, the best thing for us to do is just jump on a call. Head over to www.anthodges.com [https://www.anthodges.com], book a call with me. Just click the “Work With Ant” button, and then you can just fill out the details and book a call. Let’s get on a call, and let’s see how we can transform things for you by keeping that marketing leadership in a centralized space, and you focus on growing the business with what you do as a founder and CEO. Go ahead and book that call over at www.anthodges.com [https://www.anthodges.com]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com [https://www.cmofieldnotes.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 14 - Who are you listening to about marketing?

Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for their business, they feel that because they got a detailed response... you know, a silicon chip gave you an answer that feels good because you’ve got a 12 page report on it all, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level. Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business. What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours. So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it? Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things. 1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well. 2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience. 3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money. I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy. Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually. Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business. The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution. That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team. If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com [https://www.anthodges.com/] and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?” Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com [https://www.anthodges.com/]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com [https://www.cmofieldnotes.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 13 - Marketing is not a cost center.

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification, and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked. When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue. I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets. In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount. There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge! In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue? The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs. If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in. The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it. When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will. So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question… “What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?” That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget. If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me cmo@anthodges.com [cmo@anthodges.com] or find me on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthodges/]. We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out. Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com [https://www.cmofieldnotes.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 12 - The CMO who couldn’t answer the CFOs question.

I was in a boardroom a few months ago, sat on a quarterly review meeting with a business I’d been advising. The CFO, quite a calm guy, no drama, asked the CMO one question “What’s the cost of acquiring a customer this quarter, and how does it compare to last quarter?” The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present impressions, reach, engagement, stats, follower, growth, email, open rates, website sessions, bounce rates, top performing posts, all of it, but she couldn’t answer the one question the CFO actually asked. Here’s what’s going on in so many businesses right now. The marketing team is producing beautiful reports. The CMO is presenting dashboards from six different platforms, and none of it rolls into one single number that CFO can drop into a spreadsheet and work with. When the board is making decisions about where to put the next dollar of investment, they’re not weighing up reach against pipeline. They’re weighing up marketing against sales, hires against product development, against R&D, and marketing loses the argument every single time when it can’t speak in a language of finance, the modern CMO has to learn to translate. That’s every campaign, every channel, every activity - it has to have a traceable revenue number that sits in the same system the CFO is using not a marketing attribution tool that produces its own version of the truth, the actual finance system. And if you can’t answer the CFOs question about the cost of acquisition, lifetime, value, payback period and contribution margin to your top campaigns, you’re not running marketing. You’re running a content operation, there’s a difference. If you’re a CEO or you’re watching your CMO present dashboards that don’t connect to the P&L it’s a warning sign. The fix isn’t more dashboards, the fix is rewiring the measurement so that marketing activity and revenue are in the same conversation. Email me cmo@anthodges.com [cmo@anthodges.com], or find me on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthodges/]. Let’s have a conversation about how to simplify the measurement and get marketing speaking the language of finance. Step away from vanity metrics and into the numbers CFO actually cares about. If you’re a CMO realise that we’ve got a different job to do today than we did yesterday. As a CMO in the modern marketing world, it’s about connecting revenue to the marketing activity that’s being produced. That’s what’s going to keep your job longer than the average one and a half year position. Side note… You know, a CFO, on average, is around 4.5 years in tenure. The average CMO is a 1.5. Start talking the language of finance, and you’ll keep your job. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com [https://www.cmofieldnotes.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 11 - The Trap of Employing a Full Time CMO

I’ve just come off a call with a client. And it’s kind of one of those calls that you kind of wish you’d had a few months before, because this client was somebody that I worked with. I acted as an interim CMO for a period of about 6 months while they were really looking at recruitment for a new full-time CMO in their business. It was as a direct result of somebody leaving the company. So, they needed somebody interim while they recruited and give like a 30 day handover and all of those kind of things. For the project itself, we started in the same way I do with all of my clients. We had a full one day meeting, it started with the CEO and his co-founder, and then it progressed to working with the marketing team, and then the sales team and then the sales team and marketing team together. That was the whole day in their office and it was an amazing time. We, I gathered so much information, we worked out so many different things, we looked at what we could subtract and simplify. As a direct result, the next week I delivered a full strategy for the next 6 months containing 2 different identified sprints and simplified KPIs that we would measure for the direct implementation of simplified campaigns - and we hit the ground running. There was really no kind of delay or anything like that. I got asked questions like, do you think we should simplify our brand? Do you think we should change our logo? What about this? And none of that came up because what I was focussed on were the numbers. It’s about, for me, a CMO is about connecting activity to revenue. What’s the return on investment for the activity that you’re producing? That was the first 6 months we had less than a 30 day handover because the person who was due to be starting as their new CMO was recruited, and they were delayed by starting by a week, and my contract was ending within 3 weeks - it was okay, the CEO was cool with this. In hand over. I focussed on what we were doing, the KPIs that we measured, the simplification that we brought into the business. I the call I just got off with was the CEO of the same company. It’s been 2.5 months of the new CMO in place and he called me up and he said, have you got capacity to take us on again? And I’m like, “Oh what’s happened?” And what’s happened is the typical thing that a CMO will do when they come in. They did a brand audit, which took the 1st month. And that brand audit was, is everybody compliant around messaging? Do we need to change it? They did a survey of customers. They did an internal survey and then month 2 was the start of a rebrand project. The CMO’s focus From the moment that they started was not necessarily around. The campaigns and the measurement of things, they basically just let the marketing team run with those things. But the focus was on brand, on colours, colouring in, and logos, and how pink and fluffy things looked. (Their brand is not pink and fluffy, but you get what I mean!) It’s the things that really don’t matter too much when a business is wanting a CMO to come on board to really focus on how the marketing is performing. In my mind, this role of a CMO, as I’ve said, is to connect marketing activity to revenue. That’s got to be the number one priority. But the number one priority in so many CMOs is, are we positioning the brand right? Do we change who our target audience is? Is our messaging right? Do our logos match? Is our stock photography? Is our video? All of this, all of the positioning elements, is that right? This is not a wrong thing to focus on, but when you’re getting into the new role of a CMO, you want to make a big difference. You want to improve the bottom line and actually, fundamentally, this is why I start with a simplified day. One day to get all of that kind of strategy nailed, to see what we can simplify so that we can hit the ground running where we jump into a retainer. When we jump into a retainer, we focus on those elements that need to be worked on, that will connect revenue to activity. Once those systems are working well, and you’ve got a well oiled machine, that’s where you can start to redefine what you’ve got and ask the question, do we need a rebrand? It’s not the 1st question you ask when you’re coming in because you need to understand and work from data. Do these campaigns work? Does this activity work? All of that kind of stuff. If you’re coming in new as a CMO to any kind of organisation or business, you need the data to be able to make those judgements. So, run the campaigns for at least the first month, 60 days, 90 days even, before you even get into making things look pretty, changing the colour of the logo, putting the pink and fluffy elements to everything. Step away from the crayons and step into the data. That’s my big thing. Connect revenue with marketing activity. If I can help, if there’s something that, you know, has resonated with this and you’re a founder or CEO, of a company, where you need strategic marketing leadership, where you find that you’re the de facto marketing officer for the business and you’re involved with all of the marketing decisions. Let’s have a conversation, just email me, cmo@anthodges.com [cmo@anthodges.com], or find me over on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthodges/] - let’s have a conversation. Let’s see how we can simplify, subtract, and start connecting the marketing activity to the revenue produced. I work on a performance basis with my retainer because I want to put skin in the game. And the focus is on growth, the focus is on not just making things look pretty. So let’s have a conversation. Email me cmo@anthodges.com. [cmo@anthodges.com] Oh, and just to finish the round up the conversation, I am engaged with that company again, and they’re letting the other CMO go. It’s not ideal. I don’t want people to lose their jobs over these things, but when the focus is in the wrong direction, and it’s affecting the results that the company want to see, you’ve got to be in line with what the results of the company want to see in the first place. So let’s focus on the right things. If you’re listening to this as a CMO, start focussing on where the results are coming from. Focus on data, focus on simplification, and step away from the crayons like I’ve said. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com [https://www.cmofieldnotes.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]