How to lead like a modern CMO

Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Before Terminus, Vajre led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, ABM is B2B and is the host of FlipMyFunnel podcast.

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1 Time-Stamped Show Notes:

1.1 In-Short:

Sangram was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on Mar 04, 2020. It was an insightful session and here are the key takeaways from the webinar.

Watch the complete webinar:

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[02:00] What does it take to become a modern CMO?

[11:11] Should marketers also own parts of the customer’s success?

[13:55] How does a CMO overcome the skill gap in marketing?

[26:32] Does marketing get more budget when the revenue goes up?

In-Short:

Question: What does it take to become a modern CMO?

Sangram: A modern CMO, I think, is someone who is really empathetic to the customer and just says that they actually do it right. So it doesn’t matter what you do. So to be up more than seeing it more, you have to talk to your customers every day. And only then you’ll be able to empathize with them. And that’s not necessarily mean you’re on call every single day. That just means that you are engaged.

Question: Should marketers also own parts of the customer’s success?

Sangram: I don’t think you need to, but what you do need and what I’m seeing through the whole account-based marketing lens is one of the greatest areas.

Question: How does a CMO overcome the skill gap in marketing?

Sangram: Early-stage startup is going to be really, really hard for you to be a CMO. If you’re someone who likes team building and likes making sure that a bunch of people do other things, events at a massive scale, and stuff, then maybe it’s a bigger organization that you should go for. So the skill set Sinjin up really depends on the type of the size of the company and also the type of personality most people have got to totally understand.

Question: Does marketing get more budget when the revenue goes up?

Sangram: t’s tied to marketing and sales is tied to the hip. So you like it or not. This is not an honest philosophical conversation. No. Nada. It is a hundred percent a conversation of truth. The truth is marketing and sales are tighter to her. If you’re in B2B and it’s one line item in most financial statements. So if you’re tied to the hip, your job as a marketer, everyone who’s listening to your job as a marketer is to do that incrementally or exponentially grow sales, period.

Sanjana Murali

Sanjana Murali is a Marketing Specialist at Hippo Video. She is an award-winning blogger, one of her articles on “Customer Success” was selected from worldwide participants and won her MVP 2019 award. She has learned the knack of ranking her blogs and website pages in the 1st result of Google Search from her 6+ years of writing and marketing experience. She is also the host of #Limitless webinar and podcast series at Hippo Video. She loves to talk about branding and marketing with videos. An eternal writer, words are her lifeline.