A new study has found the majority of B2B CMOs have a long way to go before they’re ready for board consideration. Vanessa Cheal, Head of Brand and Creative Planning at Transmission identifies the must-have skills senior B2B marketers need to become boardroom-ready.
As a senior marketing leader, earning a place in the boardroom can feel like an insurmountable hurdle. That’s why we at Transmission created the ‘Building the Board-Ready CMO in B2B’ report to highlight the must-have skills and behavioural traits board directors look for in their new members.
Today, less than 3% of public or private companies have a CMO serving on their board, despite McKinsey research finding that CMO-inclusive boardrooms deliver a greater percentage of annual revenue growth, profitability, and market share than those that exclude them.
According to Doug Bewsher, Board Director and ex-CMO, Salesforce, the reason for this is tellingly simple: “I would say that there’s nothing that I had learned from my marketing experience that was useful to me on the board.”
CMOs’ lack of control over their organisations’ go-to-market (GTM) strategy has led to struggles in demonstrating the commercial impact of marketing activity. Not only has this diminished the perceived value of marketing within the business, it’s also weakened CMOs’ control over the growth agenda, leading to often fractured relationships with their CFO and the board.
So, how can we elevate the role of marketing to the board and get more senior marketing leaders a seat at the table? We worked with leading B2B marketing research company, NewtonX to find out in our ‘Building the Board-Ready CMO in B2B’ research report.
The Board Readiness Framework
62% of the B2B CMOs we surveyed aspire to serve on a corporate board in the next three to five years however, only 8% are confident in doing so based on their current skills and capabilities. To remedy this, we at Transmission have developed an eight-part Board Readiness Framework using real-life qualitative insights from current and former B2B CMOs who have served on B2B boards – supplementing our findings with guidance from executive and non-executive board directors responsible for new director appointments.
(Source: ‘Building the Board-Ready CMO in B2B’ report, Transmission)
In doing so, we created a first-of-its-kind CMO maturity benchmark through which 311 B2B CMOs gauged their board-readiness, filtering our results by maturity levels to reveal where they performed well and most importantly, what skills they have to develop to improve their chances of earning a boardroom seat.
Why aren’t more CMOs in the boardroom today?
As David Tiltman, Chief Content and Customer Officer at WARC states in our report foreword, “no amount of knowledge of effectiveness principles is going to help if the CFO simply doesn’t trust the marketing team.”
The lack of trust David mentions stems from Marketing’s difficulties in demonstrating how it impacts the business’ bottom line. Senior marketing leaders can reference all best practice research they like. The reality is, strategic insights aren’t what the board is looking for from their CMO. They’re looking for:
T-shaped skills
Per Sonita Lontoh, Public Company Board Director and Former Fortune 100 Technology Executive in our report, “Boards generally don’t look for one-trick ponies. We talk about the desire for someone with a ‘T-Shaped’ perspective for our board.” To win a hard-earned seat on the board, senior marketing leaders need cross-disciplinary traits that make them well-rounded business leaders.
Unfortunately, we found that only 33% of B2B CMOs have the T-shaped skills necessary for board consideration. Focusing on sharpening their T-shaped skills across areas like international relations, corporate governance, auditing, or business law will set them on the right path. And that, unfortunately, means being not just the best marketer in their organisation, but the best marketer in other business areas too.
GTM connectivity
While the ‘M’ in GTM may stand for ‘market’, B2B CMOs today have worryingly low ownership of the 4Ps beyond promotion. Many B2B organisations today are recognising the advantages of a unified approach to GTM strategy. However, only 42% have full responsibility for product strategy while that figure lowers to 32% for pricing strategy.
If current and aspiring CMOs are to make a strong case to become a board member, they need to be comfortable with product and pricing discussions. This doesn’t necessarily mean controlling GTM in its entirety. There does, however, need to be an element of influence in GTM strategy to demonstrate the marketing function’s impact on growth, as supported by Patricia Hadden, Board of Directors, Global Marketing Lead, Google in our report.
By focusing on indicators of marketing effectiveness like cost of customer acquisition and customer lifetime value, senior marketing leaders can take a long-term view of their activity – showcasing a dedication to sustained growth and a bigger-picture view of how marketing fits into the growth engine.
Market specialism
While one of the building blocks B2B CMOs performed best in, it’s important to emphasise that boards aren’t interested in how or why marketing activity works a certain way. They want to know whether the business can design, build, or lead a category.
Thankfully, 59% of B2B CMOs consider themselves a ‘market expert’ in their organisation and a further 37% believe themselves highly competent in matters relating to the latest market trends, dynamics, challenges, and opportunities.
The key here is to be able to tie in these market insights into conversations around the long-term profitability and sustainability of the business without getting bogged down in the details – a stance reflected by Jennifer Griffin-Smith, Board Member and CMO, Acquia: “I would consider not having Chief Marketing Officer in your title. The ‘ING’ puts people off. Become the ‘Chief Market Officer’ instead. It adds a lot more value.”
Building the board-ready CMO in B2B
At Transmission, we’re on a relentless mission to ensure marketing’s value is recognised by the board, and our report is simply another milestone in that journey. However, the majority of B2B CMOs have a long way to go before they’re ready for board consideration.
We hope that in creating this one-of-a-kind research piece, we’ll aid senior marketing leaders with board-level aspirations in identifying where they may lack the traits necessary to join the boardroom – allowing them to review their career development goals and build themselves into the board-ready B2B CMO.
Dive deeper into our findings by downloading the ‘Building the Board-Ready CMO in B2B’ report here.
