A CMO's primary job is not just external promotion but also internal marketing. This involves consistently communicating marketing's vision, progress, and wins to other departments to secure buy-in, resources, and cross-functional collaboration.
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When pitching new marketing initiatives, supplement ROI projections with research demonstrating a clear audience need for the content. Framing the project as a valuable service to the customer, rather than just another marketing tactic, is a more powerful way to gain internal support.
The leap from a hands-on marketing leader to a C-level executive is less about tactical skills and more about personal growth. It demands a shift from execution ('doing the work') to leadership ('inspiring people'), which requires self-awareness, authenticity, and dropping 'professional walls' to build genuine connections.
To modernize her team, Ally's CMO designed a new structure based on core capabilities (Insights, Execution, Creative, Measurement) rather than traditional functional silos. This model, benchmarked against other high-performing organizations, creates clearer ownership and a more effective workflow.
The most effective CMOs see themselves as 'architects of growth.' Their core function is to bridge consumer/human growth opportunities with commercial goals, blending the science of data and the art of creativity to design a holistic, company-wide vision for expansion.
To achieve true alignment with sales, product, and finance, marketing leaders should avoid marketing jargon and subjective opinions. Instead, they should ground conversations in objective data about performance, customer experience gaps, or internal capabilities to create a shared, fact-based understanding of challenges.
Generalists' broad skillsets allow them to communicate effectively with sales, product, and rev-ops. This 'multi-lingual' ability is critical for gaining the buy-in necessary for complex strategies like ABM, giving them an edge over siloed specialists by getting them into more strategic conversations.
The Chief Marketing Officer role at a large organization like Unilever is less about marketing execution and more about aligning the entire business—from R&D to finance and sales—around brand-centric change to navigate a dynamic market.
The CMO role has shifted from a top-down "ivory tower" approver to a servant leader. The primary goal is to create an environment of psychological safety where even the most junior person can say, "I think you got it wrong," which ultimately leads to bolder and better ideas.
Marketers can feel frustrated by the constant need to educate the company on their work. However, effective leaders reframe this perspective, understanding that internal communication and building trust are not distractions from the 'real work'. Instead, they are a core, essential part of the leadership role itself.
The primary benefit of internal marketing isn't just self-promotion; it's making the marketing team a visible and approachable destination for ideas from across the company. The best campaign concepts often originate from unexpected sources like SDRs or engineers who, because of internal hype, know who to share their insights with.
