Software Companies Should Eliminate the CMO Role
And a great way to present case studies
Hello Gobbledeers,
First, I wanted to thank the good folks at marketing automation firm Iterable for having me speak at their Activate event last week in San Francisco. It would appear that live events are fully back. It would also appear from the eclectic assortment of humanity wandering the streets that nobody is going to work in-person in San Francisco.
It was striking from the questions after my presentation that the gobbledy problem is not confined to the software world; people from retailers also had questions about how to push back on this type of copy in their own marketing.
During Q&A someone asked me what they could do in their company to get other teams to be more comfortable with clear, concise copy rather than reverting to nonsense. I gave a half-assed answer because I was caught off guard (though I’m the one who asked for questions, so I’m not sure what caught me off guard - it’s not like the guy cornered me in a hallway...) But now that I’ve had a little time to think about it, I’d like to present an answer, fully-assed:
But let’s start at the beginning…
The root of the problem at companies is two-fold:
A lack of clarity around ownership of marketing messaging
A lack of understanding about marketing strategy, specifically that any marketing tactic that is not direct response is a waste (and perhaps worse, that it suggests the marketing exec is too focused on “brand” and not enough on driving leads (as if those things are completely unrelated)).
Let’s start with the first bullet (since I wrote it first).
In my old age (but also in my old amount of experience), I’ve come to believe that the person who runs marketing should have the final say on both the messaging (what are we trying to tell people about our product) and the copy (what are the words we’re using to convey that message).
Perhaps that sounds obvious, but I have not found that that is how it works in practice. Product marketing often leads positioning and messaging (especially product-specific messaging), which can be OK.
But I frequently see product marketing reporting into Product (rather than marketing), and the Product team is great at making products, but generally not great at messaging why those products matter. (See this Gobbledy classic about selling the brownie rather than selling the recipe). The product team is typically amazing at selling the recipe. So even when product marketing creates a concise way of messaging product benefits, I’ve often seen the Product team push back, saying that that clear messaging doesn’t convey the complexity and sophistication of the product (it’s so much more awesome! you’re missing the awesomeness of it!). Then the gobbledy creeps in.
More broadly - and I’m not just saying this because I’m traumatized from nearly every software website project I’ve ever worked on - the copy that marketing writes is more scrutinized (and criticized) than anything else a company does.
To that end, let me ask you a question.
(Yes, I’m talking to you.)
Have you worked ever worked on a project to re-write your homepage copy?
Follow up question - was it suggested/asked/demanded that you “run the copy” by “the product team” or “the engineers” or “partners” or “Gartner” or “one of our investors” or “this person I know who works at Retail Dive” or whatever?
Do you think this happens to other parts of the organization? Are the engineers ever asked to “run their code by my friend who works at Starbucks?”
It does not. And that is because marketing does not actually have ownership here.
Why does marketing exist (aka, Why Male Models?)
The second bullet point is about a lack of understanding about what marketing does for a living. And this is where I think there is opportunity.
Software marketing is 98% focused on direct response marketing. That is, marketing designed to elicit an action - a whitepaper download or a form-fill or similar. Direct response marketing has a place in the marketing toolkit, of course. But it is a marketing strategy; it is not the entirety of marketing.
As funding has dried up for software startups over the past 9 months, I’ve heard repeatedly from people that they were told to cut “branding campaigns” either because they’re a “nice-to-have” or because they “don’t generate leads.”
That mentality shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how marketing works and what the marketing team does for a living.
What you learned in your Marketing 101 course back in college still holds true: Marketing generates awareness, consideration and intent to purchase. They do this by segmenting the market, deciding which segments to target, and how to position themselves to that target. They will then decide which Product gets sold in which Place, through which Promotional means, and at what Price (the 4 P’s). Branding sets the guidelines for how the company will represent itself, through the colors/fonts/iconography/language and also through the means by which representatives of the company interact with prospects and customers.
That’s marketing. (I know you knew that. That was for the other people.)
You may notice that “branding” is not “wasting money on advertising.” Branding is not “pretty pictures.” It’s not “what we do when we have a few extra dollars sitting around.” It’s not what “people used to do in marketing before they were data-driven.”
For those of us who’ve spent more time on the direct response side of things, it’s not “those annoying people who tell me everything I do is ‘off-brand.’” **
**(Except when that happens to me.)
(Ed. note: I have no idea why this week’s column has 13,000 quotation marks in it.)
Companies need to consider ALL of those parts of marketing - they need to build awareness, they need to get people to consider why they should buy your product, and they need to get people to buy. And that is made easier when the brand is clear.
I believe that most software organizations do not understand any of the last few paragraphs. They have a fundamental lack of understanding of marketing.
And that’s where there’s opportunity to change things.
Marketing leaders need - NEED - to educate their companies about their role.
We really have no other choice.
A Suggestion You’re Not Going to Like
It occurred to me after seeing yet another head of marketing dismissed after 2 years or so in the role that maybe - just maybe! - there’s something fundamentally broken about marketing’s relationship with exec teams.
Isn’t that the most likely explanation for why the average CMO tenure is about 2 years?
Why every conversation I have with CMOs ends up being a conversation about how much nobody in their organization understands the value they bring?
Why marketing dollars are often the first to be slashed from the budget when the environment is challenging.
It can’t be that everyone sucks.
(I mean, it CAN be, but that seems unlikely).
I can think of two ways forward:
Software companies - except in really rare cases - should eliminate the CMO role. The CMO (theoretically?) should be leading the marketing strategy and working with their teams to implement it. If the strategy is “do demand gen and get as many downloads and form fills as possible” (and also do events), then I’m not sure you need a very senior person for that. Hire a head of demand gen and a head of marketing ops, have them report into the CRO and have a nice day. Since what they’re doing is primarily bottom of funnel lead generation, that’s pretty close to sales. So change the reporting, eliminate the senior role, and everybody wins. (“wins” = CMOs are no longer constantly fired but also have nowhere to go and you’ll have an influx of people writing Substack newsletters about marketing that sometimes seem like it’s just them complaining about their situation. Obviously, this newsletter is the exception to that.).
ORMarketers need to run the top of funnel awareness playbook inside their companies. They need to hold brown bag lunches (is that a thing anymore?) where they talk about marketing. They need to evangelize awareness and consideration campaigns they’re running and talk about their success, and not just leads generated (however you define “leads.”). I know some marketers are trying this. I also know that many are trying this unsuccessfully, either because they’re doing a poor job of it (not you - other people) or because they have a CEO who simply doesn’t want to listen.
CMOs need to be far, far more picky during the interview process, and they need to push the CEO when they’re interviewing to talk about what they think marketing does in the company. What they want it to do. What other companies they think do marketing well. What happened with the previous marketing person? Why did that person leave? What would the CEO suggest the new marketing person do differently?
Who am I to tell you to turn down a job if you need a job? But I would suggest that most of us can smell a bad marketing situation from the first minute of the interview with the CEO. Sure, you can still take the job and do what you can to educate. And that might work. But - we should be honest with ourselves - it probably won’t.
I promise I’m trying not to be so negative here. But I’m really, really struck by how other CMOs talk about their jobs, and how frustrated they are all the time. And how frustrated CEOs are with marketing leaders. It goes both ways! Nobody thinks this is working. Something’s gotta give.
On a More Optimistic Note…
Writer is some sort of AI-based writing platform (they should use “some sort of AI-based writing platform” in their marketing…I won’t charge them!).
I saw a case study they did recently, and the way they presented it was as good as I’ve seen anywhere.
I love (as you see below) that they filmed a conversation, then turned it into a video, a podcast and a story. They give the reader all 3 options of how they want to engage with the case study, and how long each would take.
The rest of the page is well-designed, broken up into readable pieces, with callouts on the copy with time-stamps from the audio and video if you preferred to listen/watch a given part.
It’s a well-executed strategy of creating one thing (a video) and repurposing it a bunch of different ways, but with the twist of giving the reader the option of the medium they want to engage with. Nicely done, Writer team.
Someone recently said to me that they assumed I just wrote the newsletter and was otherwise taking a break from working. Au contraire, mon frere! This whole enterprise is just a barely-veiled excuse to sell my services to you. What services? I’m glad you asked. You know how I keep going on and on and on and on about terrible messaging? As a former president - I can’t remember which one, but I’m sure we’re definitely not still talking about him all the time - once said: “I, alone, can fix it.” It = messaging. I work with software companies to reduce sales cycles by creating messaging that makes it obvious why your prospects should purchase your product.
I’ll also happily speak at your event about all of this gobbledy stuff. Happy to share references who will say nice things about me.
(Uncomfortable self-promotion now complete.)
Well, as the wise 20th century philosopher Cosmo Kramer observed, "Jerry, you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle." I mean, that's the takeaway, right?