Career development is a personal journey and if you were to ask a group of people what it means to advance their career, you’d receive numerous different answers. Because climbing the career ladder means something different to everyone.
It doesn’t just mean chasing that promotion or pay rise, but can be about developing your personal skill set, changing teams, being awarded more responsibility, taking on new challenges and attending training courses. But whilst the execution of it varies, career development aims to show proactivity within the company and demonstrate valuable characteristics, such as your ability to adapt to changes in workload or cope with more responsibility.
Regardless of what industry you’re in when you’re building and developing your career, having access to the right advice and direction can change the trajectory of how your career evolves. Which is why we asked the world’s leading marketers for the #1 piece of advice they would give to an aspiring CMO. Here’s what they had to say…
Katrine Rasmussen
CMO, Pixelz
Always hire people who are smarter than you. This is not necessarily new advice, but it is very good advice. As the CMO, hiring the right people is going to be the most important part of your job. You simply won’t have time to go into details with all the different campaigns, channels, and activities your marketing team is working on, so you need to have a great team in place that you trust 100%. If you don’t have a competent team, your job is going to be much harder and you’ll always struggle to keep up as you find yourself attempting to do the job of the team and constantly checking their work. If you make sure to hire people who are excellent at what they do, you’ll be free to focus on the things you’re supposed to: working closely with the executive team to define the overall business strategy, making sure your team is executing accordingly, and hiring, managing and developing a team of excellent marketers.
Ryan Bonnici
CMO, GymPass
In my opinion the best CMOs and executives understand that everything is about your customers. Why? Your customers are your revenue stream. So the closer you can get as a marketer to sourcing revenue for your company, and retaining that revenue, the better you will be at your job. Demand generation and growth marketing certainly helps build revenue in the short term, but brand marketing helps build revenue in the long term. You need both of these ingredients to set up your marketing team for revenue-attribution success.
Ruth Zive
CMO, LivePerson
Early in your career, figure out your superpower. What is the one thing you do better than most other people? And use that skill to get noticed and promoted. Mine was writing. But once you’ve risen through the ranks in your specific area of expertise, rather than mastering all other aspects of marketing, focus on the soft skills. Wielding horizontal influence, using data to influence decision-making, managing people, etc. Those are the things you’ll need to master on the path to CMO. You have to be credible in all areas of marketing – but you don’t have to be an expert. You’ll hire the experts. And as CMO – you’ll need to hold them accountable, keep them engaged and focused and inspire them to do better.
Antonio Lucio
Principal & Founder | 5S Diversity. Former Global CMO Facebook, Visa, HP
“Develop a balanced brain. Lead with the brain with very strong analytics and transcend with the heart with creative solutions that connect emotionally. You earn a seat at the business table by your ability to prove the business case for marketing. You drive the business by connecting emotionally with your customer and then showing impact. Finally, remember, success in life and work will be driven by your resilience, your ability to pick yourself up after each fall, learn and move forward.”
Tom Wentworth
CMO, Recorded Future
“The biggest mistake I’ve made as a CMO is not realising that brand creates demand. CMOs feel immense pressure to hit their quarterly goals and keep sales happy. This drives short-term thinking, causing CMOs to put all their time and budget into classic lead-generation activities to keep sales happy this quarter. But eventually, all the existing market demand dries up, the company misses its numbers, and the CMO is let go and wished well in their future endeavours. The path to sustainable growth over a long period of time is realising that brand creates demand and that CMOs must have the courage to make big bets that can’t be measured in quarters but have an outsized impact when measured over years.”
Mark Kilens
CMO, Airmeet
My number one piece of advice, simply put, is you need to understand the entire business, not just marketing. As CMO you need to be really great at understanding how to take the growth goals of the business, both in revenue and efficiency, understand its long-term growth milestones, and unite the C-suite around a joint go-to-market.
A great CMO shapes the market with the help of their Sales team, their Customer Success team, and their Marketing team. And together, they will grow the company’s market opportunity through both internal and external strategic initiatives. As an example, one of the things I was tasked to do as CMO, was to actually own the pricing and packaging of our product suite, the Event Experience Cloud. I had to unite our Sales Leader, Product Leader, our CEO, Head of Finance, and our VP of Customer Success around the idea of “this is the new pricing and packaging, here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s how it is going to help the business grow”. One specific skill set all CMOs should be developing are their negotiation skills. Because you’re typically negotiating a lot between executives, but also negotiating priorities and decisions within your team.
Andy Lambert
Founder ContentCal, Now Product Marketing, Adobe
“Make sure you have a seat at the leadership table, otherwise marketing will always be viewed as discretional spend, as opposed to a necessity for growth.”