Category Archives: CMO

>BOOST O2 >> Building A Team Of Team Builders

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10 Tips For Building Your Next-Gen Marketing Team

by Stephanie Overby , Contributing Writer , CMO.com 

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.”

Read more: http://www.cmo.com/management/10-tips-building-your-next-gen-marketing-team#ixzz1KwTzcYQY

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>BOOST O2 >> Walk In the chief marketer and finance chief’s Shoes

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5 Tips To Get Your CFO‘s Ear

by Mercedes M. Cardona , Contributing Writer , CMO.com

Conventional wisdom holds that the chief marketer and finance chief are the right and left sides of a company’s brain–the creative versus the practical. But a CMO doesn’t need to be a brain surgeon to communicate with the numbers people, marketing insiders said.
“They have to agree that there is a joint goalpost for both of them,” said Ron Hill, professor of marketing and business law at Villanova School of Business, in an interview with CMO.com. “If somebody is trying to hit a home run [and] somebody wants to score a touchdown, they’re not even on the same game.”


Conversations have become easier in the past few years, even as the recession tightened the scrutiny on marketing budgets, experts said. Both sides are more focused on showing an ROI since the start of the recession, and the rise of new digital efforts, such as social media and mobile, have brought on more real-time metrics to express that ultimate goal.
“It’s not that will we ever get to the Holy Grail. I think it’s very difficult. But I think the digital age is getting us a step closer,” said Carl Anderson, CEO and former CFO of Doremus, the corporate advertising specialist.
There is no silver-bullet metric that will unlock the money chest, either. Depending on each company’s goals and industry, the metrics relevant to the CFO will vary. In a new-product introduction, for example, metrics showing trial, such as awareness and consideration, can be traced back to activities such as sampling and point of sale, which can clarify the ROI, noted Ted Woehrle, CMO of Newell Rubbermaid, in an interview with CMO.com. In the auto industry, lead generation is the goal, added Julie Roehm, founder of marketing consultant Backslash Meta and a former Chrysler marketer.
Marginal ROI–the extra return for every dollar spent beyond the projected budget for an effort–can be an effective number to show finance staff the results of marketing, said Douglas Brooks, executive VP of marketing at Management Analytics, a unit of Synovate. But like a financial adviser talking up an investment, the marketer has to put that model in the context of the larger effort, he said. “That’s what marketers get paid to do,” he told CMO.com. “The day a model replaces a marketer, we’re all in trouble because there is no growth and no innovation.”
Other metrics–such as reach and frequency, number of hits on the Web site, and leads generated–are “lovely and measurable, but they don’t translate to what the CFO wants to show,” Roehm told CMO.com. Those numbers need to be related to the company’s bottom line, she said.
Brooks said he often doesn’t report straight ROI to clients. Instead, he prepares a quadrant chart relating the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing investments, showing which ones are driving sales, which could be more successful with more spending, and which could be cut. “You need to be a data-driven storyteller,” Brooks said. “Analytics don’t tell the whole story. When analytics are successful is when you have a good translator.”
So how can a marketer learn to translate ad-speak into terms familiar to the CFO? Here are five simple tips to help you get on the same page as your brethren in the finance department.

1. Walk In The CFO’s Shoes
“It’s like any relationship. I would begin by cultivating mutual respect,” said Hill, recalling one of his first consulting projects, which involved mediating between a company’s senior vice presidents of finance and marketing. “They were at loggerheads, absolute loggerheads.”
The marketers didn’t care about profits because they were being judged solely on increasing sales. Meantime, the finance staff was concerned about losing profits by overspending to boost sales. By getting them to role-play each other’s position, Hill got the executives to begin searching for common ground.
This is easier in companies where the two departments work closely, marketers said. Brooks said one CMO he works with takes the finance staff out to lunch and invites them to meetings and marketing event. That way they can get a sense for what his department does.
Of course, the reverse also works, Roehm said. “Learn the financial operations of the company. . .Become a sponge,” said the former Chrysler and Wal-Mart marketer. Earlier in her career, she held positions in sales and finance, which gave her a sense of how other departments operated.
“If you’re a CMO, you’re in the C-suite–you’re friends,” Roehm said. “That’s just teamwork 101. But a lot of CMOs avoid the CFO because they’re always taking things away.”

Read more: http://www.cmo.com/budgeting/5-tips-get-your-cfos-ear#ixzz1KwSOV0yq

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