[This is an adaptation of a session I delivered at the March 2023 Product Marketing Alliance Summit in New York]
No one starts out as a CMO. And I didn’t even start out in marketing.
My undergrad degree was in economics, and my first job out of college was with the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
That's actually me in the front row with Janet Reno and the team that focused on the Microsoft anti-trust case which made for an interesting resume walk a few years later when I interviewed at - you guessed it - Microsoft. I ended up spending 14 and a half years there, so I guess it ended up ok.
After the DOJ I went to work at Deloitte & Touche as a risk analysis consultant. My main client was a mortgage back securities provider. I was going to make a joke about the financial crisis that took place 8 years later, but in light of recent events with Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic….let’s just move on….
It was at that time around 2000/2001 I realized I really wanted to be on the business side of things, and I was pretty sure marketing, but I honestly didn’t know what that meant entirely. I decided to go back to school and get my MBA at the University of North Carolina.
It was during my MBA program that I took a class called Preparation for Executive Management. And the first day they asked "Who wants to be a CEO or other C-level position?"
And I’ll admit….I didn’t raise my hand initially. After some elbowing by my friend Ted, I finally raised my hand. But I really didn’t know if I did or not. And you know what? That’s ok!
Too often we pick career goals arbitrarily. Oh, I want to be a manager, or I want to be a C-level this or that… whatever the next rung in the ladder is...without really knowing what that means. It’s important to have a framework for how to think about your career path – to figure out what you REALLY want to do, what will make you happy and fulfilled, and how you might get there.
I'm going to walk through some of the frameworks I used to enable my lightbulb moment, when I realized I did, in fact, want to be a CMO.
First, an amazing coach that I worked (Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan with Infinite Impact) asked me a very powerful question: What projects have been most energizing for me and which ones have been most draining?
This exercise really help me shine a light on the TYPE of work I liked to do. When you like the work you do, it usually means you are at your best – you are bringing all your strengths. If work is draining, it usually means you are having to over-flex certain skills and it’s hard and tiring to bring your best. Now, we can’t do energizing work 100% of the time, but you can look for roles where you get to do it the majority of the time.
Second, I worked through my personal brand statement. A value prop for…myself. This is great for us product marketers, right? We excel at building value propositions! When you are clear on your unique strengths and how you show up as your best self, you can more easily understand what roles and working environments are best for you. This exercise also gives you grounding and confidence to navigate times of turmoil and make big decisions. I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to leave Microsoft after 14 years as a divorced mom of 2 young kids and go to Qualtrics, a company I really didn’t know at the time, without this work. The book One Piece of Paper by Mike Figiuolo is a great resource for this work.
Finally, when I was at Microsoft, I got to work with Michael Gervais , the sports psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks at the time, and he had developed some great research and tooling around building a high-performance mindset.
A critical part of this was developing my own personal philosophy. This was an important exercise as it made me really focus on what’s important, in life in general. No artificial distinction between work and personal life - how did I want to live my integrated life? And yes that meant thinking about my job and how I spend those many hours each day…but ultimately it came down to what did I want to be able to say on my deathbed, as a human being, a mom, a daughter, a friend, a partner.
As I went through these steps, I was enabled and empowered to have my lightbulb moment. I can still remember the day, the room, and everything about it. I was attending a leadership talk with the CMO of Nordstrom at the time. That was the day I realized…I wanted to be a CMO. Now, he didn’t have the same career path as me, and he was a B2C CMO and I was pretty firmly grounded in B2B. But as he spoke about the challenges and opportunities he dealt with and the impact he and his team had, I could clearly line up those experiences to what energized me and how I wanted to show up each and every day.
Now I had locked in on my goal, the next step was building a skills map. This is a great exercise no matter what your career goal happens to be. As you take on new roles, document the skills you have gained that support your goal in the center. And then in the empty slices, you can start writing down skills you still need to gain. This provides a map for not just future roles, but career development conversations you might have with your manager – what can you do in your current role to help you develop those skills.
An important note about skills: I think of them as either “direct experience” or “conversant. ” Some skills are important for you to have direct experience, and some you can get by just by being “conversant.” I don't think there is an algorithm to determine this, but I would recommend leveraging your energizing vs. draining exercise to help inform this.
A great example of how this helped me: I had been at Microsoft for about 10 years, always in a headquarters / global role. I knew I needed more scorecard management and business ownership experience. So I took a role in the US subsidiary, which ended up being an incredibly pivotal experience. I learned skills that I needed later at Qualtrics and now at BlueOcean around pipeline management, building get-to-green plans, and overall business accountability.
Now that we have some frameworks to help with career goals and development, let’s talk more specifically about Product Marketing skill sets.
A few years ago when I was building the product marketing team at Qualtrics, I drafted this definition:
“Great product marketing is the mastery of combining product truths, market truths, and customer truths into an end-to-end GTM strategy and execution plan that breaks through with customers and drives meaningful outcomes for the business.”
It’s not to say every PMM at every stage of their career is doing this, but I do think it does a good job of representing the north star and a broader framing for your work, even if it's a piece of the story. I also think this description communicates what makes Product Marketing an amazing job.
If we double-click into this statement, there are three main skill buckets that emerge.
First of course is being the Storyteller (that's Dave Grohl - his book The Storyteller is amazing, even more so on Audible with him narrating).
Whether it’s crafting a product demo video, informing a product vision with customer requirements, or internally communicating a go-to-market strategy, storytelling is a critical skill for any product marketer.
Next is being the frameworks person (this is probably my favorite one, personally). The most successful PMMs are really adept at pulling together all the disparate pieces of a go-to-market or a customer's needs and wants into an approach that makes sense and can activate the various teams towards a common goal.
Being the frameworks person is also super helpful when you are operating in a chaotic environment or there is a lot of internal churn (which I think we've all been experiencing lately!). Being the great clarifier and helping to frame up some order out of the chaos is a top leadership skill.
And finally…business acumen (I struggled with the gif for this point - please don't be like anyone on Succession because they are all terrible people). The most successful PMMs understand the different levers that can drive business impact and connect their work to that impact, even if it takes a number of clicks.
As you take on more senior roles, there is more opportunity to be directly accountable for business impact and develop strategies and plays that are aligned with corporate objectives. For instance, my product marketing team at Qualtrics was highly accountable for business outcomes such as pipeline across all sources, conversion rate, and overall revenue attainment.
These skills are of course grounded in, or made more powerful by your mastery of those product, market, and especially customer truths.
Now, let's talk about becoming a CMO. The CMO position is an incredible role. But you may not be sure you want to be one. It has been tough lately, with the lowest average tenure in a decade (Spencer Stuart) and a lack of confidence and trust from their CEOs (Boathouse Thinking, 2021 CMO Study).
I believe this is largely due to the fact that the role of the CMO has been dramatically changing over the last few years, and it’s taking some time for people and organizations to catch up in terms of skilling. But the good news is -- these changes, these new requirements for CMOs… it’s why I think PMMs make great future CMOs.
There is a lot that goes into being a successful CMO, but there are three top themes or traits:
First, more and more CMOs are becoming the Chief Customer Officers in their organizations. In fact, you’ll often see the CX leader (my former world of experience management) roll up to marketing. This modern CMO has deep customer empathy and understanding and realizes that brand strength is only as good as the entirety of the customer experience
Second, the modern CMO is accountable for business outcomes and is focused on building predictable, scalable growth for the organization. This growth must be fueled by agile growth strategies, so it also requires a strong handle on data and the latest technology. CMOs are well served to become best friends with not just their CFOs but also their CTOs.
And finally, the modern CMO is the Great Communicator. As today’s CMO has more purview across the customer journey and is more accountable to business metrics, it is critical to communicate effectively both to internal teams and to stakeholders across the company
When you look at these skills, I think it’s quite clear why PMMs can make great CMOs. Storytelling, frameworks and driving alignment, business acumen – these top PMM skills align directly with these modern CMO traits.
Here are some additional data points to support this story:
At BlueOcean, we analyzed the 6,000+ brands in our intelligence platform and identified the top three brand metrics most correlated with revenue growth.
2 of the top three are right in the PMM’s wheelhouse:
- Non-branded search: If you are bringing in more website visitors via non-branded search than your competitors, it means you not only gaining in Share of Voice but you are dialed into what your customers care about and what they are searching for. And you are serving up relevant content that resonates. This is a key PMM skill t– bringing customer insights together with great content and messaging.
- Audience reviews: We found that both average rating AND the volume of reviews are important to revenue growth. PMMs can drive impact here with deep customer understanding, knowing how the product is currently addressing pain points and what gaps exist, and what’s required to ultimately drive retention and this very valuable advocacy.
In another research study we did, we took a look at the impact of audience connection on brand and business health.
We found that when brands align their messaging and content with the themes their audiences care about most, and they generate higher sentiment, there were three important outcomes:
- An improvement in brand health, specifically in support of driving consideration: When brands that talk with audiences on their level, rather than at them, are more likely to be perceived as important and relevant leaders in their field.
- Accelerated share of voice: Brands can impact their share of voice more efficiently when they have strong content alignment and sentiment. Intuitively, this makes sense: when social media audiences see a brand discussing the themes they're interested in and acknowledge their sentiments, they are more compelled to engage with and amplify that content.
- Higher "Estimated future revenue growth" vs. competitors: BlueOcean calculates an estimated future growth metric as part of its brand framework. Brands that aligned more closely with audiences and focused on improving resonance can expect to grow revenue at a faster rate than their competitors. This relationship is so powerful that it nearly drew a 1:1 correlation - even more than overall advertising spend.
In both these studies, you can see that these outcomes - brand strength and revenue growth -- are what CMOs are ultimately accountable for. And PMMs are uniquely positioned to support these goals and drive impact today in their current roles, and in the future as a CMO, you’ll have the skills and experiences to help your teams do the same.
To wrap this up, here are some things you can do today to improve your impact as a PMM and prepare for being a CMO one day if that happens to be your goal.
- First – using the frameworks I shared here, or other tools that work for you – identify your goals and set your course. If you don’t know where you are going, how will you get there?
- Next – I recommend exploring the development and ownership of GTM or Revenue Plays – these are end to end, targeted plays that connect multiple parts of the organization to drive a specific outcome. This type of approach can help you build that business accountability muscle and build more cross-company alignment skills
- Of course storytelling and communication is important – this is the PMM’s bread and butter. In addition to your regular work to build messaging and content, find mini moments to practice such as an MBR or a team meeting.
- And finally, keep investing in that mastery of product, market and especially customer truths…it is this mastery that really sets PMMs apart, and prepares them to the CMOs of tomorrow.
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