What Roles Should a B2B Chief Marketing Officer Fulfill?

There’s an ongoing discussion about the evolving role of the chief marketing officer. Once upon a time, a CMO was expected to focus on brand awareness and lead generation, prioritizing top-of-funnel activities such as advertising, trade shows and sales support.

Today, however, a CMO does ... well, all of that, actually. And a lot more.

Increasingly, CMOs are expected to be drivers of business growth and customer experience. Gartner describes a “head-spinning transformation” of the CMO to more of a chief customer experience officer role. The Digital Marketing Institute says a CMO must “take charge of aligning an organization’s goals with those of its audience.” And McKinsey has long urged CMOs to “spread their wings” beyond mere brand management.

Particularly in B2B, where the purpose of marketing tends to be less well understood, the CMO function is evolving rapidly. A well-equipped B2B CMO has the title, visibility and mandate to fill a variety of critical roles.

If you’re a CMO, you’re already wearing many hats: e.g., connecting your business with customers, connecting strategy and execution, connecting various competing interests inside your organization. Of course, there are many more hats, and exactly which ones you decide to wear will depend on the specifics of your business. So rather than prescribe a single model of what a B2B CMO should be, let me describe some of the roles played by CMOs my agency has engaged with recently.

The Innovation Architect: Innovation rarely succeeds in a silo; to successfully bring an exciting new product to market requires cross-departmental collaboration among technology, finance, sales, product and others. With your organization racing to innovate and remain competitive, as CMO you are best positioned to connect disparate parts of the business around an innovative offering and bring it to market. After all, you know your customers and competitors, understand experience design and can communicate how the new idea supports the growth strategy. Speaking of which ...

The Growth Driver: You are one of a small group of top executives responsible for growth (and likely to be the best at articulating where growth will come from). You play a key role in shaping the growth strategy and aligning your colleagues around it. Knowing the growth strategy and structuring your group to drive it also gives you a short, straight path to prove your impact and influence others in the organization to get in line.

The Conveyor of Urgency: Maybe more than any other leader you understand the need to be responsive to a dynamic marketplace. With shifting customer demand and surprise competitor moves, it is critical to get to market and roll out initiatives rapidly. To do this, you need the data, executional skills and operational independence, and to do that you need to be deeply informed on your MarTech and have the resources to execute on it. Tech is usually the long pole in getting to market; you can be the answer to shortening it.

The Customer Advocate: Listening to customers is already part of the CMO job description. Customers today rightly demand modern user experiences driven by their needs, and you are the executive with purview over customer journeys, shaping and optimizing how customers interact with the brand. As the gatekeepers of customer insights, you and your fellow CMOs naturally step into this role.

The Aligner: You are painfully aware of the need for internal alignment. And because marketing touches every part of a business, you are the best-positioned executive to align cross-functional efforts around a critical goal or initiative, using both your actions and your communications skills. As CMO, you can ensure your organization’s theory of growth is clearly articulated and communicated, and that marketing activities and investment tightly align with growth strategies.

The Data-driven Leader: You have access to vast amounts of data on your customers, markets and performance, allowing you to see what others may not, enabling better decision-making and bridging the gap between strategy and execution. As a data-driven CMO, you can also strengthen your relationship with the CFO and other strategy leaders, helping secure the resources you need for success.

The Collaborator: Because your role as CMO touches so many other parts of the organization – and you are, by your nature, collaborative – you are well positioned to work across disciplines with your C-suite colleagues and ensure the whole enterprise is working together towards common objectives and executing coordinated strategies and tactics.

Strategist, innovator, growth enabler and more: Your unique combination of CMO skills is invaluable for driving business growth. So how do you prioritize what hats to wear?

• Look at the most significant challenges your business faces. Which one of these can you, in your many roles, help solve?

• Choose an approach that will show meaningful progress in three months and move the needle in six.

• Make sure you have the resources you need in place and rope in your colleagues around the organization to work with you – yes, you can be a giver of hats as well as a wearer.

As they say in infomercials, act fast. The average tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs was 4.2 years in 2023 – lower than the average for all C-suite leaders. By creating the optimal portfolio of roles, you’ll be the B2B CMO your business needs you to be today to prepare the organization for the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow.