What’s it like to be a chief marketing officer in 2011? “There is no comfort zone anymore,” said Krishnan Chatterjee, CMO for $3.1 billion Indian IT service provider HCL Technologies. What’s hot can turn cold. What’s up may come down. And it all happens at warp speed.
There’s increased audience segmentation, a growing choice of marketing vehicles, the necessary integration of more third-party providers, and the seemingly endless touch points for any given brand that necessitates new relationships from HR and sales to IT and customer service. “The CMO today has really got to use the maximum amount of peripheral vision both internally and externally,” said Lynne Seid, partner in the global marketing officers practice of executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles.
The key is to build a corporate marketing team for tomorrow. “It’s very difficult to think you’re going to be able to construct the perfect message with the perfect execution anymore. If you linger too long or hesitate, someone will beat you to the punch,” said Gayle Meredith, CMO at commercial real estate firm Cassidy Turley, in an interview with CMO.com. “You have to construct a team that can help you quickly assemble different pieces that you need.”
Here are 10 tips from CMOs and industry watchers for assembling the winning marketing team of the future.
1. Build A Team Of Team Builders
Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and CMO of $6.5 billion semiconductor maker AMD, told CMO.com he is always searching for new talent. Yet even with the new demands of digital marketing, he rarely seeks a particular technical ability. “The biggest single skill necessary is collaboration,” said Dessau, who must compete with archrival Intel at one-eighth of its marketing budget. “And it’s the one thing you don’t learn in school.” He recruits entry-level employees who can learn on the job, MBAs who can quickly assimilate, and seasoned team builders.
“A lot of things that we are doing today are very new and have not been done before by a lot of people,” said HCL’s Chatterjee, who spent the first decade of his marketing career in consumer goods launching everything from a cigarette brand to a high-end apparel chain. He values intellectual curiosity, positivity, and experimentation.
2. Consider Creating A CDO
Digital media is just one aspect of marketing, but it’s the newest and most challenging for many corporate marketers. Some CMOs are appointing a chief digital officer (CDO) to guide them on the frontier. “This is a new kind of person sitting in the corporate environment that, a few years ago, may have been at a dotcom or a digital agency,” Heidrick & Struggles’ Seid told CMO.com. “This will be the strategic architect of company’s digital point of view.”
3. Enter The Matrix
Meeting new demands doesn’t begin and end with the coronation of a digital chief. “It can’t be done by one person sitting at a marketing dashboard doing their own thing,” Seid said. “It has to be interwoven into every aspect of what CMO does.”
“You don’t want to create a ghetto,” AMD’s Dessau agreed. “You have to add a bit of that to everyone’s job.”
Think interdepartmental teams, cross-training, and reporting matrices. When Maria Davlantes became the first CMO at $962 million modular rug company Interface, she sought to create a physical and cultural environment conducive to small-group discussions and “cross-pollination.” “We want staff who are experts in their respective disciplines, but who can also step outside of their comfort zone and value different ideas,” she told CMO.com.
But take care to create common goals, Dessau warned. You can’t have the director of regional working toward contributing margin dollars and the corporate manager chasing gross margin percentage and expect teamwork. Unite digital and analog efforts with common metrics as well, said Megan Findley, marketing director at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in an interview with CMO.com. Incorporate new marketing vehicles into your ROMI model. And “look at a broader range of objectives and ways of defining success,” Findley advised. “Declare victory because you learned something, not just because you sold something.”
4. Look Beyond The Usual Suspects
Meredith has spent the majority of her career in real estate, but the 20-year marketing veteran is looking for talent in new places today—graphics folks with an affinity for new tools and IT professionals who love communications. Sometimes she finds the best people hiding in plain sight. “You have to be inquisitive of the people around you and really try to figure out what their interests are,” Meredith said. “Some people are just really good soldiers doing what you ask. If you don’t ask the question, you’ll never know what they really want to do.”
Consider recruiting from niche agencies or technology suppliers. “Then combine that talent with digital boot camp training and education for the rest of the marketing team,” said BCG partner and managing director Dominic Field.
5. Assess Your Analytics Capacity
Seid calls it “the ever-growing and previously unsolvable problem of analytics.” CMOs are blessed with an abundance of data, but turning those bits and bytes into information is an evolving science. “It’s always been an important weapon,” BCG’s Field told CMO.com. “And it’s going to become even more important.”
Conduct an audit of your organization’s analytics prowess and fill in gaps. “It goes beyond the market research function; they haven’t been in a world where customer feedback is in real time,” Seid said. CMOs must tap other data silos in the company to create a full analytics picture. Some are creating an analytics director to lead the effort. “They may have come from academics or cultural anthropology or a data company. There’s a complete lack of continuity in the background of these folks,” Seid said. “But what’s very clear is their understanding of the difference between data, information, and insight.”
6. Diversify Your Talent Portfolio
The corporate marketing team must reflect the communities and markets in which you do business. “You have to hire the right skills and people locally and nationally and even take it in to account when building your agency model,” AMD’s Dessau said. He has created a two-tier model to incorporate region- and country-specific third parties into his mix. The only danger is in letting every country or region do its own thing, of course, but a balance can be struck. “I can’t manage a China market from Austin, Texas,” Dessau said. “What matters there is not visible from this office.”
Managing a geographically diverse team isn’t easy, said Davlantes, whose 100 marketers are scattered around the globe. “Building upon relationships is not always as easy as we’d like it to be,” she said. “[But] along with regular communication, we have multiple in-person meetings throughout different world regions within each year.”
7. Don’t Just Employ--Empower
The average age of an employee at HCL Technologies is 25, and that holds true within Chatterjee’s team. Since he manages groups on three continents and tackles everything in-house, he can’t wait for years before entrusting them with important pieces of the marketing portfolio.
Once Chatterjee has gone through the due diligence of hiring the right people, cross-training them, and putting the right processes in place, he must let go. “You have to believe in your people, challenge your people, and then let youth brigade take charge as much as you can,” he told CMO.com.
HCL holds an annual global meeting of current and future customers in Orlando—a corporate version of a tent revival to energize the business. Last year, with corporate budgets shaky, Chatterjee anticipated 600 attendees at best. One thousand came. “That was pulled off by 20 of my people, none of whom is above 26 years of age,” he said. “They have brilliant ideas if you can enable and empower them to deliver to their potential.”
8. Integrate Third Parties
Cassidy Turley’s Meredith does a lot of outsourcing, but the work is increasingly going to a larger number of specialized providers, from media placement agencies to technology vendors. “The number of providers and the niche aspect of what they’re providing have become very complex,” Seid said. “The client wish is that the providers would just talk to one another and self-integrate.” But the onus is on the internal marketing group to coordinate and align suppliers.
AMD’s Dessau has changed the nature of his third-party relationships. “We’ve moved away from a relationship that’s transactional—one task at a time—toward one where you may pay some level of retainer to make sure you’re putting together a team that’s able to collaborate,” he said.
Meredith currently has a project that requires her external creative agency to join forces with an IT vendor. “We’re developing project teams with multiple third-parties and for us to be successful they have to work together,” Meredith said. “It’s an additional management challenge to make sure they play nice.”
BCG’s Field suggested changing the incentive structures for outside suppliers. “Some CMOs are making up to 20 percent of compensation contingent on collaboration,” he said.
9. Incent Innovation
You get what you pay for outside and inside the organization. If you want to increase the importance of new media or mindsets, then put your money where your mouth is. Set minimums for digital investment and put incentives in place for experimentation, BCG’s Field said.
Employees must feel free to fail, Interface’s Davlantes said. “CMOs also need to be reflective—as well as strategic—listeners for their teams,” she said. “The best ideas can come from the most unexpected places.”
You know the old phrase, “No one ever got fired for buying too much television”? Start firing people for buying too much television. Or at least require new kinds of investments from your team. “The CMO should be saying I’m not going to reward more of same,” Field said. “They must actively push people to get in the game.”
10. Walk The Walk
Forward-thinking CMOs aren’t sitting on the sidelines. “The most important thing for the CMO is to show leadership stating that [digital media] is important—that it’s a source of competitive advantage if you get it right,” Field said. “There has to be a top-down mandate to say, ‘We need to be present in figuring out how to embrace the opportunities of the array of new options.’”
“Some traditional marketers will say, ‘I’m not on Twitter; I have a team that does that.’ But there’s not a switch called ‘advertising’ or ‘social media’ that you turn on to engage in various new outreach methods,” said HCL’s Chatterjee, who is on Twitter, writes a marketing blog, and has a Facebook page promoting the rock band he formed within his marketing team. “You have to engage yourself to understand how the channels and media work.”
“For a CMO to be effective today, it’s very difficult to sit in your ivory tower and prognosticate,” said Dessau, who also tweets and blogs “You have to be much more willing to engage than ever before.”
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