The CMO position is finding its way to the head table in many companies. As the hybrid skill set of the CMO become more important to business, the skills that should be prioritized are showing themselves. Although industries may vary, the competencies that are required for success tend to remain the same.
Product Marketing
As you know, most of your revenue will likely come from your existing customer base. Every CMO should understand how to market to a legacy customer as well as outreach to new ones. As aspects of product marketing, CX, UX and visual design are all important skills that your CMO should have available.
Scaling Content Creation
As the rest of your business scales naturally, your content will require a bit more effort. In order to get more quality content going for your brand, you either have to hire more people or outsource to a higher degree. Additionally, the different forms of content – how to videos, eBooks, email blasts, webinars – all require a different set of skills to make. A CMO must be able to determine the types of content that are most effective and work within the company budget to grab the most of it for the least.
MarTech
The best CMOs often come from a coding background. However, the CMO will usually not be employed as a front line coder. What is the balance here? The CMO should understand the language of the people who will be in the trenches handling business. Marketing is becoming more aligned with tech, and the successful marketing departments of the future will incorporate a great deal of overlap with the IT department. The CMO must understand what to prioritize within this overlap while understanding how difficult it is to translate marketing concepts into technical executables.
Agile Marketing
The main job of the CMO is to get rid of as much uncertainly as possible in the marketing process. As a data driven position, the CMO should naturally know how to manage shifting timelines and priorities. With a mastery of agile marketing, a CMO will basically be able to apply these shifts in real time. The result should be quicker deployment of marketing campaigns, a higher flexibility to make changes during a campaign, and a more effective cost for campaigns.
Account-Based Marketing
Even with digital automation and AI taking the reins in many aspects of the B2B sales funnel, there are more people than ever involved with each sale. Account based marketing keeps track of the money through this ever lengthening chain of command. One of the major priorities of any CMO should be to ramp up the sales velocity. The CMO should lead efforts to target many decision makers through multi-channel outreach at one time. This requires a close eye on each account from a perspective of personnel and finances.
Learning to Manage the Millennial Generation
Millennials are moving into managerial and executive positions, and the successful CMO will have to learn this new generation. Their motivations are different. There is no moving around them – they are the most qualified applications in most cases. Millennials have a natural ability to combine the soft skills of marketing with the hard skills of technology. As the older generation fades out and is replaced by this generation, a good CMO will learn a more sensitive, environmentally friendly and less hierarchal method of management.
There are certainly a bevy of skills outside of these top 6 that a CMO should learn. The market will change, and with it, the skills that should be prioritized. However, a mastery of these will certainly give a leg up.
