The Higher I Go, the Less My Job Looks Like Marketing

I spent some time, as so many do at mid-points of their careers, going, “do I even want to do marketing anymore?” A natural follow-up to that became, “do I even know what marketing is anymore?”

Traditional marketing, or what it was when I started, doesn’t look the same anymore. At the level I’m at in my career, too, so little of what I actually do is marketing at all. Now, marketing for me is allocating budgets and building operational models. It’s handoff to sales relationship-building and vetting the capabilities of the agency. It’s hiring to fit a new org design. It’s battling AI for the future of mankind.

There are campaigns in there somewhere. I promise. I think.

I don’t know that I have the answers, nor are they things to be had. But the journey down that mental rabbit hole took me back to where Tomorrow CMO as a concept even started: What actually changes as you move from being a great marketer to being responsible for leading Marketing?

We learn Marketing is a collection of disciplines

Most of us build our careers by getting good at pieces of Marketing…

·      Brand

·      Demand generation

·      Product marketing

·      Content

·      Communications

·      Digital

·      Events

·      Operations

You have to learn your craft, first. Then you have to learn how to manage people who start doing that craft, behind you. Then you have to manage… you know… more crafts. If things go well, eventually somebody hands you responsibility for the whole damn function.

And that’s when it gets weird.  That’s when the job starts looking considerably less like the thing that prepared you for it to begin with.

Suddenly, you’re talking with Finance about investment allocations. Sales is leading meetings to interrogate about pipeline quality and capacity planning. Along comes RevOps with qualification rules, routing changes, arguments for/against attribution, and data architecture that usually looks like it did three models ago.

Survive all of that, and you can advance to Product conversations that talk about the differentiation your customers in variant markets need. HR needs a succession plan and a capability gap assessment for headcount reqs.  The CEO wants to talk about growth and where it’s coming from.

And… increasingly… everyone wants to know about AI.

None of those things sit comfortably inside the traditional box labeled Marketing. But yet all of them increasingly determine whether Marketing works.

Maybe we’ve been defining Marketing too narrowly? We’ve always defined it by its outputs. How many campaigns and events did YOU deliver last quarter, for example? These are just things Marketing produces as a function. That’s not necessarily what Marketing is. Which explains why leading Marketing can feel so different from practicing it.

The executive's product is no longer the campaign

This may be the transition I've personally underestimated most in my own career.

As a marketer, I was trained to produce things. To ship them. I’ve got a long list of campaign strategies and frameworks that could choke a horse. Granted, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, and it’s a decidedly dark and weird turn of phrase anyway, not to mention logistically just unrealistic.

As a leader, the dopamine release from getting to point at a thing and say Marketing made that? Oh, sweet, delicious satisfaction.

It’s just… the higher you go… the thing you’re building and shipping changes. Marketing “product” increasingly becomes the organization itself. “Can the organization learn faster than the market changes?” isn’t a campaign question. Neither is “Can talented people make good decisions without waiting for you?”

My job isn’t even to make the campaign anymore, not exactly. It’s to make sure we pursue the right audience with meaningful things to say, activating channels effectively so that we can pick up on commercial intent, get all the important information to the right people… and then at the end of the day understand whether any of it all actually created value.

And more often these days, my role has become building the org capable of doing all of the above without me standing in the middle of it.

Which creates an uncomfortable career problem

Most aspiring CMOs are developed by becoming increasingly accomplished marketers, then they’re handed the role that asks them to be accomplished business leaders. I’m not suggesting those things to be contradictory. But – they aren’t identical, either.

You can be exceptional at demand generation and still have never allocated a nine-figure investment portfolio. You can be brilliant at brand and never have redesigned an organization. You can be an extraordinary product marketer and never have had to negotiate decision rights between Marketing, Sales and Product.

It’s why the jump into senior Marketing leadership can feel so surprisingly large. The functional skills that brought you to the dance aren’t catchy enough to keep the party going.

So what should tomorrow's CMO actually be good at?

Yes, understand Marketing deeply.

But also…

·      Learn how to allocate capital

·      Learn how revenue actually works

·      Learn organizational design

·      Learn how technology and data create (or destroy!) operating leverage

·      Learn how to make decisions under uncertainty

·      Learn how to influence peers you don't manage

·      Learn how to communicate with CEOs, CFOs and Boards

·      Learn how to build systems that allow other people to make good decisions.

·      And now, learn how to redesign those systems around AI rather than simply sprinkling AI tools across yesterday's workflows and declaring transformation accomplished.

The goal shouldn’t be: get progressively better at doing Marketing. Maybe it’s, be better at building the situation under which great Marketing >can< happen.

Which brings it back full circle…

Tomorrow CMO started because I was trying to understand what stood between the role I had, those I lost, and the role I wanted. Initially, I thought the answer was probably some missing collection of Marketing skills. Hell, eventually, Tomorrow CMO is set up to be a tool that builds those skills.

But I'm less convinced, now.

The biggest developmental jumps in my career haven't necessarily come from learning another Marketing discipline – they’ve come from learning how businesses work and how they make decisions as a collection of people come together to hopefully accomplish good things.

Maybe that’s the irony. The higher I've gone in Marketing, the less my job has looked like Marketing. It’s what leading Marketing actually is, though.