Six signs your CMO is a problem
The most expensive line item a founder ever misjudges, and the three questions that catch it in an interview.
I’ve worked with a lot of marketing leaders. CMOs, heads of growth, VPs, GTM leads. Most of them are good at the job. Most...
A few of them were the reason nothing shipped and why marketing gets a bad rap.
Which should be a contradiction, because the person hired to make marketing go faster is not supposed to be the thing slowing it down. But it happens, and it looks the same every time. They don’t underperform in a way anybody can point at. They sit in the middle of the org, absorb decisions, and hand the blame downstream to whoever is holding the deliverable.
After enough of them I started keeping a list.
The cast
Names changed cuz I'm not a complete douche
Derek - CMO of a fitness brand
Jenna - GTM leader for a dev tool
Gerald - Head of Growth for a software consultancy
Diane - CMO of a tech-enabled service provider
Here are the six signals they gave that made the list:
1. They iterate in the garage and never take the car on the road
Derek took us eight variants deep on homepage copy, approving a direction, backtracking on his own feedback, then asking for another pass at a headline nobody outside the building had ever read.
Our rule is v1, v2, v3, and if we have to, v4.
Everything past v4 is creative masturbation, because what you’re polishing has no data attached to it. You’re not making it better, you’re making it different, and playing around because you "just want to see how it feels."
And you end up paying for it with a later launch date that your CEO is pissed about.
Nothing you don’t ship can help you.
2. They approve it, then they unapprove it
Jenna, in writing, on the positioning doc: “I love the work on this. This is great. Approved.”
Four weeks later it was "lackluster."
Indecision is an honest reply. It is completely reasonable to be unsure of a marketing effort that can only be assuaged by testing. This isn’t that. This is wanting the comfort of having decided without the discomfort of living with it and putting it into action for validation.
An approval that expires in four weeks was never an approval, it was a mood swing.
3. They can’t hold a trade-off
Gerald’s site was a ghost town, that had little traffic going anywhere past their homepage so we gave him two options as we built out the new site:
Option A: launch now with a new home page and port the blog over.
Option B: wait and get every page at once.
Speed or completeness, pick one.
He picked speed, we launched, and he was pissed the new site didn’t have everything the old one had.
He didn’t choose wrong. He chose fine. He just wanted to unspend the cost of his own decision the second it showed up, and the only tool he had was pointing at us.
You don’t get to pick the trade-off and then... get mad at the trade-off.
4. They can’t connect a deliverable to the goal
We were hired to bring Gerald traffic and sales qualified leads. Mid-project he had us build an onboarding deck that goes out to customers after they sign up for their service.
After. They. Sign.
This deck would only go to people who already talked to sales and already paid. Nothing to do with impacting traffic and leads.
We told him, but he insisted, then sat on it for weeks polishing the copy and layout. His CEO was frustrated that the beautiful deck didn’t produce any leads.
No shit. It was never going to!
If they can’t draw a straight line from a deliverable to the number they were hired to move, their efforts are going to fall short.
5. They’re running a playbook from a different sport
Diane spent over six figures and more than a year on a rebrand. What came out was photography that doesn’t hang together and a typeface change that still isn’t live on their site. A hundred grand went to brand guidelines she doesn’t follow herself.
Then she pointed out, as an observation, that their LinkedIn and Facebook campaigns weren’t connected to the website.
"What do you mean it's not connected to your website? That's where those ads are going to be sending buyers."
The issue: she was pulling in a playbook from large brands (like Procter and Gamble huge), where the goal is awareness, not conversions. Most sites for D2C brands with large distributor networks don't even have a checkout function.
But this was a tech-enabled service where every prospect had an intake call with a sales rep.
Awareness is a good goal when you sell soap or pet food. When you sell a service the goal is a qualified conversation, and the website is the last touchpoint before somebody becomes one.
GTM without a website? It's so ludicrous that even writing it out makes my head spin.
6. They can’t delegate, so they become the bottleneck
This one showed up the most often.
Jenna went radio silent for a week at a time, then came back to complain about speed.
Diane took three hours and two other people to review one home page. A seasoned CMO does that in 45 minutes, and I’m being generous.
Gerald routed our work to a committee of employees with no marketing background, then took it back to the CEO who hired him to get the decisions off his plate.
Here’s what the role actually is: you are not in the trenches executing.
You know where the company is headed, you keep everything pointed that direction, and you do not slow down the people doing the pedaling.
So when you hire a CMO, ask three things.
What's a marketing trade-off you chose and had to live with?
What matters more, getting it shipped or getting it perfect?
How do your proposed solutions tie back to {insert goal here}?
If they answer with specifics, keep talking. If they answer with acronyms and case studies where they "increased awareness," that's your signal to move on.
— Zach
