Jess Cook, with a background in content, identifies her two biggest growth areas as a new VP of Marketing are metrics/reporting and team management. While creative skills get you the job, operational and leadership skills are required to succeed.
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With engineer CEOs leading 9 of the top 10 global companies, the C-suite increasingly values analytical rigor. Marketers must evolve beyond gut-feel by embracing a hypothesis-driven, systems-thinking approach. This not only improves decision-making but also enhances communication and credibility with analytically-minded leadership.
A leader's value isn't being the expert in every marketing function. It's identifying a critical problem, even one they don't fully understand, and taking ownership to push it forward. This often means acting as a project manager: booking the meeting, getting the right people in the room, and driving action items.
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.
Vector's CEO specifically sought a marketing leader with a content and brand background, not a traditional demand gen expert. This reflects a shift where storytelling and brand building are seen as critical drivers for early-stage growth.
At the VP or C-level, a leader's primary role shifts from managing their function to driving overall business success. Their focus becomes more external—customers, market, revenue—and their success is measured by their end-to-end impact on the company, not just their team's performance.
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.
Growth isn't just a marketing function. It is a broad discipline combining user acquisition, product-led growth (onboarding, monetization), data, and CRM. True growth leaders must be both analytical to find insights and 'salesy' to guide users through complex conversion funnels.
A CMO's role extends beyond lead generation. By analyzing operational data, they can identify bottlenecks and opportunities, creating strategic alignment across marketing, sales, and operations to improve the entire customer experience and drive efficiency.
A core, often overlooked, part of a marketing leader's job is managing the team's composition like a sports GM. This involves making difficult decisions, such as letting go of a high-performing employee whose role is wrong for the company's current stage, in order to reallocate budget and headcount to functions that will drive immediate growth.
Instead of defending every marketing program, leaders gain credibility by having the humility to use data to surface what's broken. Admitting a channel is a resource drain builds trust, leads to smarter strategic decisions, and ultimately accelerates a senior marketer's career.
