What you need to know:

• In the first episode in a new CMO Awards podcast series, three ex-CMOs and business leaders now in the thick of either holding non-executive director roles or recruiting for them, have shared what they think it’s really going to take for marketing leaders to win over boards and CEO as economic and demographic shifts, geopolitical realignment and AI create a new world order.
• The trio – John Batistich, Nikki Warburton and Michele Phillips – all point to a relentless pursuit of efficiency, bottomline improvement and extracting more value out of marketing as key CEO and board imperatives as significant inputs into how CMOs need to operate today.
• As well as better aligning strategy to business imperatives first and foremost, the three podcast speakers are urging marketing leaders to get a better handle on building capability around AI fluency, data literacy, measurement and better using technology and tools to generate higher levels of impact for their organisations.
• There’s also a clear desire to see marketers stop saying yes and choosing more wisely where to place their bets. Per Batistich: “Marketers are programmed to say yes to everything, but it gets us into a lot of trouble. Marketing choices need to be made around critical principles: Does it matter to the customer? Will it be incremental? Will we create value? Do we have the capability and the resources to execute this plan? Saying no can be an act of real leadership for your team… some resources are overloaded… you have to stop doing these things that suck up resources and don’t create value.”
• Listen to the podcast here.

Seeing around corners, ruthlessly prioritising to realise more value, recognising and responding to heightened regulatory risk, building AI and data fluency, maintaining cross-functional influence and impact, exhibiting the maturity of candor, speaking the CFO’s language – while still acquiring new customers profitably – are all part of what CEOs and boards now expect marketing leaders to be able to do.

With one of the most diverse yet least understood remits in the c-suite today, marketing has its work cut out demonstrating value and results against business outcomes at the best of times. Throw in navigating and adapting to the volatile technology, political and economic environment organisations are operating in, and the marketer’s tendency to cheerlead, or simply say yes to everything, is simply not going to work.  

In the first of a new limited podcast series for the inaugural CMO Awards, powered by Mi3, we’ve brought together three of our highly credentialled judges – John Batistich, former Westfield, PepsiCo and Lion CMO and now non-exec director for Foodco Group and Versa CX; Nikki Warburton, former Audi chief marketing and customer officer and now non-exec board director at MA Financial Group (ASX), CarExpert, GWS Giants, CloudWerx and Automotive Superstore; and Michele Phillips, current partner at executive recruitment firm 100 Percent Partners and former VP and marketing chief of Electrolux, Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble – to take a deep dive into what it’s going to take for marketing leaders to win the hearts and minds of their boards, CEOs and executive peers.

Extracting more value

Making wise choices and choosing where to play dominated the conversation.

Yes, boards and CEOs always expected the CMO to be the voice of the customer and to address more profitable customers. But ‘how’ they do that has become much more exaggerated in the face of ruthless prioritisation and efficiency imperatives, says Phillips. Instead of simply spending a marketing budget, they’re increasingly wanting marketers to get maximum value out of that budget, she says, by developing high performance, accountable marketing teams that use technology, data and AI to provide a customer and cost advantage.

Marketing leaders are also expected to do this while avoiding heightened risks around privacy, data and cyber security. Per Phillips: “Extreme governance visibility” is making everyone more nervous about organisational reputation and risk and that’s again biting into what marketers can and can’t do.

“Look at the world the CEO and board is facing into: Markets today are incredibly relentless on a need for increase in profit and therefore an increase in share price,” says Phillips. “If you're not delivering an increase in profit and share price, your tenure can be very short. So what the CEO is facing into is how to make an impact, and to make it quick, or you're out of here and you don't have a job. At any one moment in time, one out of five CEOs in Australia are changing jobs. They know they have a short window.

“Therefore, what boards and CEOs are asking CMOs to do is to partner with them on that profit journey. Marketers often think, you know what, I have to do more and more to deliver that. Actually, I think the board and the CEO are saying, no, we don't want you to do more and more. We want you to make wise choices as to where you invest. Increasingly, boards and CEOs are asking CMOs to rethink their marketing business models and how they will extract maximum value from them.”

This means adapting the marketing strategy to the business imperatives CMOs find themselves operating within, our trio agrees.

“Work in the best interests of your company, not your team,” says Batistich. Cross-functional alliances are crucial here. “Demonstrate an ability to engage across the organisation, that you can understand your impact… thirdly, align your plan to the total business plan so there’s really clear alignment. Show it cascades down to your plan and to every individual in your group.”

Volatile market conditions

Cue today’s volatile macro-economic conditions. Batistich posits a number of “short and long burns” confronting how marketers are both perceived and where they need to act. The long burns are arguably demographic shifts in ageing, home ownership and ethnicity. However, economic uncertainty, geopolitical realignment and generative AI are having more immediate, stinging impact.

“For CMOs, they need to see around corners; they need to understand future scenarios,” Batistich says. “They need to build capacity, particularly around data fluency and generative AI literacy. They need to start applying those as productivity tools, and they need to be using these tools to generate higher levels of measurement and impact across the organisation.  

“When we talk to CEOs and CMOs, their biggest concern is the capability gap they see amongst their teams to navigate and adapt to this volatile technology and political environment we’re moving forward to.”

For Warburton, relentless focus on efficiency is also driving short-term focus versus long-term focus. While that’s always been a challenge for marketers, she sees financial scrutiny as an even greater challenge over the next 12 months.

“Throw on top of that the speed of technology and technological advancement… and what’s coming down the pipe from an AI point of view, and there’s the question of whether CMOs and their marketing teams are equipped to be able to look forward and understand the macro changes and what those mean for their customers and their businesses,” she says. “All this, while upskilling and working out how to take on all these new technological opportunities and actually turn those into something that can drive efficiency and growth for the business in the short and long terms. It’s definitely not easy.”

Phillips is blunter. “If you’re a CMO, think about your marketing function: Are you going to disrupt it first, or are you going to wait for a management consultant from one of the big four to come in and disrupt it?” she asks.

Boards know all this tech should be driving more value, adds Warburton. “I think the KPIs have changed dramatically in terms of what is met, what can be measured now and also what boards expect to be measured,” she says.

The good news for Batistich is while marketing hasn’t arrived yet, it’s certainly on its way to having broader strategic impact because “marketers are the only people in the organisation that are actually acquiring new customers, often,” he says. “That’s critical to driving revenue.”

Don’t be a cheerleader, learn new steps

Nevertheless, Batistich warns marketers to avoid falling into the trap of thinking the story you need to tell is what everything’s working. Tell a story – yes. But be honest.

“You can smell cheerleaders – those who say everything is great, everything worked, everything was successful and the team was outstanding,” Batistich says. “That’s not real in our personal lives or in business. Having the maturity of candour to say this is what we learned, this didn’t meet our objectives, this is what we’re changing and having an iterative, learning mindset is critical. Rather than launch and then either review success or otherwise, it’s about constantly, always learning, iterating, testing and experimenting and being honest around when we’ve not delivered value. Sometimes we will fail but we need to make sure we fail fast, first, cheaply – we don’t want it to be fatal.”

Phillips brings it back to having curiosity and a growth mindset, while Warburton points to taking the business on a journey with you so they understand why you’re making the choices you’re making – and you’re saying no. She channels her own experience while chief marketing and customer officer at Audi Australia here.

“You’d go to offsites, and say what we want to do is get to three pages [on the to-do list]. People start going through and saying yes, we want to do all that. Then to you get to asking: What can we stop doing? And there's nothing on that list,” Warburton explains. “That's actually not realistic. Even in our day-to-day lives, there's things we should stop doing immediately.

“Sometimes we get caught up in a silo of what we think is important. We've then got the customer hat on to say, well, we’re the experts on customers, so we know what the customer wants. But it's very important to also understand what the business wants in that timeframe as well. For me, that's always been a bit of a measurement overlay over what we keep doing and what we could stop doing. It might just help some people with being able to say ‘no’ more confidently.

“People in marketing roles generally want to say yes to everything. They're excited about all these wonderful, innovative opportunities. But not everything is going to drive the results, and you can't do everything all the time. Also, don't underestimate marketing's impact on culture. So I think sometimes saying no and driving the right decisions has more significant impact across the business and the culture of the business than we believe is the impact we can have.”

Batistich agrees marketers are programmed to say yes to everything, "but it gets us into a lot of trouble. Marketing choices need to be made around critical principles: Does it matter to the customer? Will it be incremental? Will we create value? Do we have the capability and the resources to execute this plan? Saying no can be an act of real leadership for your team… some resources are overloaded… you have to stop doing these things that suck up resources and don’t create value.”

Tune into the full first CMO Awards Podcast episode, powered by Mi3, here or via your preferred podcast app.