How CMOs can help first-time Founders/CEOs understand Marketing Better

How to challenge, compliment, push, and inspire a partnership that fosters growth.

I have worked for four (4) first time founders and first time CEOs and they were all very different. Many do not know what they are doing, just as you didn’t know what you were doing when you took your first marketing role. Just like in any other job, it takes experience to learn the ropes, mistakes to move forward, and a lot of patience on all sides. And it’s hard. Remember, most first time founder/ceos have no operating experience.

More than 80% of B2B CEOs have NO EXPERIENCE as marketing practitioners. (source CMO Huddle)

The reason first time founders/CEOs struggle with marketing (especially those without a marketing background) and why tenure is lower for CMOs than any other C-Suite is usually because of a lack of understanding or lack of visibility into what marketing is doing.

My initial first time founder CEO I worked for was a seed stage startup. They were more interested in being famous than running a company, so I left and in less than two years the company failed and eventually went out of business.

The other first time founders/CEOs I’ve worked for were in later stage startups ($1m-$150M ARR) and most of them needed help in being educated about marketing. One founder/CEO went as far as to send the GTM leadership team a book they had just read on how sales and marketing worked. 🤦‍♀️

But as you know, you can’t learn marketing from a book. Even if your founder/CEO has marketing experience, chances are they don’t have a ton of experience working at different stage companies or in all of the difference facets of marketing like you do. Take the opportunity to gently educate when and where you can. In fact, Raj Sheth shares his experience here and says, “I wanted to solve my problems, and assumed specialists that had done it before could do the same thing at my company.”

It’s not their job to know marketing inside and out, but they do need to understand and need visibility and you need to show accountability for your numbers.

Show and Tell

In my experience, it’s always better to show than tell. Because your voice is often overpowered by people who are not in the room. By that I mean, their colleagues or CEO/founder friends have told them something about marketing who they have respect for. But every company’s circumstances are different and there’s no one formula or strategy that works for everyone.

When you offer up your point of view on something, unless it’s backed up by your experience, data, or empirical evidence, chances are your recommendation will be viewed as just that — an opinion.

Years back I had a speech coach who told me to lead with phrases such as, “in my experience” or “recent research shows” — something more concrete than just your opinion. This way the opportunity to challenge your expertise is minimized.

To that regard, show how your funnel works with a visual to your first time founder/CEO, it will help them ask better questions later. Outline your strategy and approach in a deck, it will help them visualize where you’re taking the organization and also give them something to reflect back on. Experienced CEOs don’t care about this stuff, but first time ones usually do.

Remember, our job is to look at the market, create a plan, and translate that plan into actionable items and results they can see in the P&L.

1:1s

Make your 1:1 meetings count. Come prepared with an agenda, even if they have one. It’s your meeting too. You can have more than one per week if you need to, but generally, no more than 30 minutes should be needed for general check-ins. For larger innovation or strategy discussions, those should be longer. Schedule accordingly.

What should you talk about?

It’s table stakes to talk about any approvals, so don’t lead with these unless they are super urgent and time sensitive. These things can often be handled in a Slack or email.

What they want to hear about are:

• feedback from the market and from customers,

• stories you’re telling in the market and to the board,

• what your doing or your ideas to move the business forward (without all of the details),

• any new big broad marketing initiatives

They don’t want to hear about staffing issues or budget concerns but you’ll need to chat with them about those anyway. Utilize both their and your time efficiently.

Keep track of important decisions

It’s important to keep track of important decisions in a 1:1 document so that both of you can look back on it and reflect on any decisions that were made. The onus is on you to document.

Follow up

When you document your decisions, you can also document the things you didn’t get around to covering and add those to your next 1:1 document or set a reminder to follow up via email or Slack/Teams. Perhaps it can be covered async digitally rather than in-person.

Women CEOs are more than twice as likely (24.1%) to leave their roles within two years of appointment, and are four times more likely to last less than 12 months in the CEO role than men. (source: RussellReynolds)

Communicate

This sounds so rudimentary, but the more you communicate the more secure your first time founder/CEO will feel about decisions you make. Many of us think we need to have a handle on everything, but we don’t.

Great CMO/CEO partnerships are built on trust and it takes time to build that trust.

Bad habits die hard

Remember, it’s their first time in this role. They don’t know what the right thing is to do for marketing, that’s why they hired you! They only have an idea of what to do and they are learning from their previous bosses and mentors on how to be a good CEO. Cut them some slack, but also make them accountable and push back on things that sound ridiculous.

Avoid setting precedence on things that can become bad habits.

Summary

By in large, first time founder/ceos mean well. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few evil Lord Farquaad’s out there, but generally speaking they’re excited about their baby, they believe they understand the market, they’ve built for it, they want to succeed, and you as the CMO, are in the perfect seat to help them do it.

Now if you get in there and find they don’t think marketing is important at all, then you should run for the hills!