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Foreign. You're listening to gtm live, a podcast by passetto. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. It's Carolyn here. You know, one of the biggest privileges I have is really getting to work and speak with a lot of CMOs every single day. And I don't always take the time to reflect on the trends that I get to see and, you know, translate back to this audience. And from doing this work, I have really pinpointed the unique traits that some of the best CMOs embody. And it's really quite interesting and exciting, and I really want to share that with all of you today. Now, there's a lot of amazing communities that will talk about the tactics that are working, and in my opinion, those are great and valuable, but it's also a really saturated space. And that's why I think, you know, when it comes to getting marketing right in today's market, it can feel really difficult because there's just a lot of content and advice swirling around us. But one thing I'm really deeply invested in are the behavioral leadership traits that top marketing leaders embody, because, for one, I think there's a lot of white space here because the industry tends to over index on, like, the tactical advice and like the content. And two, because I see and communicate with so many marketing leaders every day, and there really are very visible and distinct differences of the leaders that really stand out and separate themselves from everybody else. And that's what I really want to get into today. So I'm going to go through a few things. So starting with number one, one of the biggest differentiators I see in the market right now with the top CMOs is that they have just let go of team credit. They have let go of the world where they cling on to marketing credit on pipeline and revenue. So it's really about throwing out everything you've ever been taught about it. Because to truly transform and accelerate how marketing drives impact is to get out of defense mode. Like, this notion of credit obviously is very narrow. It's not customer centric, and we talk all the time about how problematic last touch or even first touch attribution really is. And this is not about going down this path, specifically about all of the ways, you know, that type of measurement is unproductive. You know, it doesn't reflect how buyers buy, et cetera. It's really about releasing this need to. To get the credit where you think credit is due. In fact, I would say one of the best traits that I see CMOs have is to actually focus not on Credit, but on doing what's responsible for the business. And instead of needing to build a narrative around, well, you know, marketing did this and they did this, and, you know, look at all this pipeline we created. It's about showing the board, their peers, the various ways that marketing is maybe doing the wrong things. It means being honest about the issues that you're seeing that wouldn't otherwise be surfaced when you're just in that place of fighting to be understood or pushing to have marketing's function be valued. It's a really tough spot and it requires a lot of resiliency to approach the problem from that lens. And we're going to get more into that later. But when we talk about credit, that's essentially putting your team and your ego in, like, this mode of needing to defend and protect what you've built and what you're doing and what it's not doing. When you do that is making decisions centered around the buyer with whom your service or your product is trying to create value for. And often when we release this need to defend, like a pipeline number, which we can actually see that marketing's value could really be showing up in a different place than the thing that you're measured against. Now, I'm not suggesting, like, throwing out the notion of credit entirely because that pressure, actually it comes from the top and in some ways our role and our sort of like, safety in that role, it hinges upon it. But I mean, stop making decisions around it entirely. And it's really, really easy to want to revert back to wanting to do things that are easy to count because of politics or because of how well they're understood, or because doing otherwise might jeopardize hitting that number or might jeopardize your role. But when you look at the bigger picture, you often see that what's best for the business overall starts to ignite a very different narrative. And I want to give you a really good example of that. So one CMO that I work with runs marketing for a risk management software company. So really competitive category, but they have huge contracts, they have extremely long sales cycles, and they often have a number of different members on the buying committee. And so this company, when we started working with them, their reporting for marketing was mostly like marketing source pipeline. Marketing sourced revenue from the lead source field on the opportunity record. And so that's a manually populated field, like it is for a lot of companies, where somebody can select a value and it can also be overwritten at any point. And this is a company that also doesn't Add those buying committee members to opportunities, right? And so immediately that puts marketing at a disadvantage because it becomes really difficult to tie anything back to marketing when the people are invisible on the opportunity. And two, when you have one field to try and characterize why that opportunity was even created. And the greater sort of like buyer journey visibility that we gave them showed them that many of their deals have a two year, if not more period of like top of funnel marketing engagement or brand awareness building before those deals ever become deals. So one example, they had a deal that closed this quarter that took just shy of four years from first touch to close one. And in that early engagement period, there were over eight active buying committee members that engage with marketing and over 50 trackable high intent signals. Like, we're not just talking about like ad impressions or anything like that, like things that those people did. And all of that was invisible, obviously in their lead source model. And so when it came time for the quarterly marketing board report, there was a lot of pressure on the CMO to justify event spend. Right? They're at all the big trade shows, they're doing a bunch of roundtables and things like that. And so the perception from leadership and board was, hey, these events are low ROI because they're invisible. We can't see those creating opportunities. Right? But nearly 100% of the buying journeys that we looked at actually had events showing up as a core marketing touchpoint throughout the journey. But it's taken time for this CMO to craft this narrative and have this narrative understood by their leadership. Right. It's a different way of sort of looking at marketing impact, but it's required her to understand that the nuance that she cares about, well, it doesn't come from focusing on deal credit. It comes from focusing on the buyer and focusing on different data that might not come through on, you know, last touch attribution. Okay, so moving on to number two, and that is a relentless commitment to data integrity. It kind of sounds boring, but. But we know the market is changing rapidly. We know that channels are really hard to get right. Strategies are changing by the week, and none of what you go and implement matters if you cannot reliably see or measure it. You're just doing yourself and your team and your credibility a disservice by investing in channels when you can't measure the through line. And so the CMOs that excel really hinge everything upon the ability to make decisions that are actually rooted in evidence. And they make the decisions, they do not outsource those decisions. And they know that their data, their marketing data is the DNA of their company and what they're doing in marketing, and everything comes back to the ability to measure that. And so if they can't, it's a problem. And they recognize that. And then they remain tirelessly focused on getting that right, because without that data, they know that they cannot act or make decisions responsibly. And one thing that I'm really proud of, and proud to be a part of, is that the number of CMOs who are preparing to actually walk into a new role and reach out to me in advance of starting, and they turn to me saying, hey, I really need you to help me get a plan in place so that when I go into that new role, SETO is one of the first investments I'm going to make because one, I have limited time to make an impact and, and to have a plan to grow revenue. And two, I know that the data that I'm going into, I'm not going to be able to build a plan around that because it's. I know it's not the same lens that you have when it comes to data. And so what they don't want to do is wait. And they understand philosophically that the sort of the standard, very narrow legacy data model is not going to give them the answers that they need to make smart decisions going into that role. And so what's different for these types of folks too is that they already also deeply understand the questions that they need the data to answer, and they already have a pretty solid understanding of the ways the legacy model can't answer that. So they've done their research, they're highly educated around what they need to go track, but they're saying, hey, I'm going to call in support, that I can get at that quickly and not waste time trying to figure it out. And so sort of like a part two to that is number three, which is they don't wait on RevOps. So one of the biggest blockers to the above, which is prioritizing data integrity, is making decisions rooted in data and having a proven KPI framework that they can do that. But what they don't do is wait on RevOps. And I don't mean this as an insult to RevOps at all. I mean that they recognize that the likelihood of, of getting what they need and what they want from RevOps is very unlikely, especially at the speed that they need it in. So I would say on the opposite end of the spectrum, where CMOs really get stuck, and what I've observed is when they either think that the KPIs that they need are relatively easy to get from RevOps once they sort of like know what they are. And two is that their RevOps team wants to own sort of like the keys to the reporting or the keys to the metrics, and then tells them, okay, we've got this, we'll handle it. So in either situation, both of these things become extremely difficult for a CMO for two reasons. One, RevOps is a role that is all about system systems and operational maintenance for the most part. Meaning they've got to keep the lights on and maintain a lot of the reporting currently in place. We hear all of the time that RevOps are understaffed, that they just have so much on the go and their team depends on them for that maintenance. So the nice to have KPIs or the reports that marketing needs that aren't integral to the system as it is today, depends on their ability to come up for error and be able to make time for it. And the pressures of building in AI agents and AI workflows and things like that are the things that are taking precedence right now. So that is going to be the top priority. And secondly, probably the more important of the two is that the KPIs that marketing needs don't really depend on just piping in data from their different platforms and getting the data visualized. It really requires a super complex model and process of data transformation that sort of like happens underneath the surface. So that's not easy to get if it's never been done before by the person or team that has to go do it. And so in today's day and age, I actually believe it's highly irresponsible for marketing leaders to operate and make decisions without that essential data. But let's talk about sort of like more under the surface and getting that pre pipeline marketing visibility. It's operationally hard to get at because it lives outside of the CRM and in a marketing automation platform environment. So what happens is the CRM, you know, that owns lead creation or contact creation and everything that sort of happens after that. So things that matter to marketing like early sort of like top of funnel content engagement or page views or event engagement and so forth, that lives in a different place, which unless you're sort of operating CRM and HubSpot in the same ecosystem in HubSpot, sorry, typically what we see is marketing engagement platform lives over here in one place, opportunity management lives in another place and you know, sales activity lives in another place which means everything is fragmented. And so a common sort of mistake or misconception from CMOS is that it's as simple for RevOps to go pull together some reports when really what needs to happen is that a new data layer needs to be constructed first. And I'll give you a really quick example of how this actually plays out in the real world. So with one customer I worked with, we spent actually just recently two full weeks diving into sort of the underlying mapping of where all the data was coming from. And what we had found was that they have five different lead entry points, each with conflicting shimas. They have three different salesforce fields that are all claimed to define what's a new business deal. And sometimes the values on those fields contradict each other. And of course there's also layering in like data migration issues from old systems that didn't migrate properly and then having like really inconsistent processes for how activities or marketing programs have been tracked over the years. You can really quickly see how complicated this would be for a RevOps team to go manage that when they're not solely focused on this. So it's really a data model project and many companies don't design for this type of work, therefore it goes unresolved. And that's why CMOs are often sitting sort of waiting for months on months on months to have something resolved when really the complexity underneath it all is really widely misunderstood. And so the real cost of delay here is not just on marketing or on the cmo, it's on the business's inability to know what decisions they should be making. All right, so trait number four is playing offense and defense at the same time. So I think one of the most profound shifts this industry has had even in just the last year is a newfound appreciation and understanding in the flaws of creating demand. Right. So most of the really brilliant forward thinking CMOs are actually realizing the detriments of not having prioritized like brand development and awareness building earlier. Of course, you know, this is something that Passetto and you know, Chris and all of us have been talking about for like six or seven years now. But finally, as we predicted back in 2019, the market is now catching up. And so they're shifting their strategies to focusing on a huge chunk of the market that isn't in market yet and building preference in that market. Like it takes time. I look at this specific data for companies that we work with every day and the evidence shows us that when you actually look upstream to how long buyers engage with brands before they actually go and raise their hand, that's typically months, sometimes years, depending on the company. So in a world where boards and investors are really uneducated about human decision making and how buyers buy and how buyers want to buy on their own conditions, and the fact that revenue generation isn't as straightforward as converting a lead immediately into an opportunity, it's about needing to be really good at two roles at the same time. And I'll explain what I mean. And so what I would say is irresponsible to do is to assume as a CMO that you can survive the shift into that new world of marketing where you just throw out the old metrics because you think they're stupid and you think they're not effective anymore. And side note, this is also why I'm growing super fatigued of like, the MQL is dead era. And I know I've banged that drum myself, but it's really. Because everybody's saying that. But it's not that straightforward. Right? We hear people complain about the mql, but it's really a lot more strategic than just saying, okay, the MQL is dead. I'm not going to use it anymore. Because these types of metrics are metrics that boards and leadership teams have been conditioned to report on for decades. It's all that they know. So to just say that's a dumb metric, we're not going to report on it anymore, is not realistic and it's not going to work. And so how you do this in practice, and I'll give you a real world example of this with one of our really brilliant CMO clients that we work with, Christine, is how she's been navigating this. She has been playing defense and it's about giving the board something real right now. And it's not everything either. So she needs to show by playing defense that the machine is running. And she needs to narrow the scope to what she can show in the moment right now while she's making longer term strategic changes, many of which are going to be experiments. So for her, she's really closely tracking hand raisers from inbound web form submits because it's clean, it's defensible, and it's easy for the board to understand. That is only one slice of the pie for what marketing is doing. But she needs to anchor to something that the board can get behind and that she can track cleanly. And that's very cleanly tied to pipeline and revenue creation. For the offensive role, what she's constantly and also like simultaneously reframing is what data means for her board and in their mind. So walking them through not just outputs, AKA leads generated to more of like how we can use data to answer the question did this work? And what the data in other places is telling them about where to push. So for this it's about layering in some new metrics about for them specifically, we're looking at pipeline created from outbound and revenue created from outbound as the source and how marketing is helping to create conditions to make that cohort of pipeline perform better. So it's not deflecting, it's not saying the MQL is dead or this metric is dead. It's helping to upgrade the questions that the board asks of marketing and helping enable the board to see more forward looking sort of metrics versus just backwards looking. Like did marketing create this? Yes or no. And it's a process. And I think she'd be the first person to tell you that that transition and that approach requires a ton of resiliency and a huge commitment to looking at the world differently. And it's not always straightforward or easy. And most importantly that the most strategically powerful things you can do, like this example with Christine, take time. Right? We already know that marketing KPIs and measurement is like anything but straightforward. It's complicated. It oftentimes feels overwhelming because you're just trying to piece together a lot of different data from a lot of different places, trying to make sense of it. And it's about having the discretion to have your board narrative centered around business metrics and having that be really clean and defensible and then having the operational metrics that are used within the team and knowing what's useful to whom. Okay, so moving along to trait number five, and that is experimenting relentlessly. And so I will say a lot of what we just talked about leading up till now has been around, you know, making decisions from data and understanding a different data model and using evidence to make your decisions and helping transition your board throughout that process. But this is really like one of the biggest shifts and one of the biggest differentiators because when it comes to making decisions, especially those rooted in data, there's really this bridge between understanding and interpreting what you're seeing and then what you go do next, how you go take action. And so the best CMOs, from what I've observed, they don't expect that they're going to get lucky with just a few tweaks to the strategy or a few new investments. It's usually just way more complicated than that. And Thinking very creatively and very much outside of the box and not outsourcing that playbook to somebody outside of your organization to go figure out for you. So from what I've observed, there's some sort of sentiment in the market that somebody outside of your own business is going to have the answers that you need to fix your problems. And that can feel really seductive. It can feel really seductive to believe that somebody else is going to come in and tell you what to do. And also all of the possibilities for what you could do in the market with your marketing strategy and channels and this, that and SEO and AI, you know, GEO and all this other stuff. It can feel extremely overwhelming when you think about all of the possible levers that you have right in front of you to pull. And I really believe and see that the future success from marketing is the ability to expand what's possible by testing ruthlessly. And it's actually really stepping outside of what you know and picking a few things to run with and testing and monitoring that just like obsessively. So I think that what I'm trying to say here is there's no magic shortcut to getting some wins. The ones that don't embody this trait and that tend to get stuck. Right? Because I do see a lot of people get stuck and I see a lot of the people that don't, but the ones that get stuck are the ones who sort of like get to this point and overthink what to do. And it's almost like they're looking for, you know, a hyper structured playbook or like just like this recommendation of tell me what I should do and are scared on almost to do something wrong because they've never done it or they don't know if it will work right. And so the companies that truly hit breakout success, well, honestly I think a lot of cases they're anomalies and they've programmed us to believe that there's something specific that we all need to do to achieve that level of success or that there's some sort of like unlock or strategy or thing that we gotta do. But the reality is that they've probably hit a really lucky streak with something that they've tested that has landed and resonated well. And so in a world where there is just so much sameness and so much curated content through AI, experimenting and getting really creative is just one of those things that is just very hard and where teams need to push the limit and push their thinking. And I think the classic or default approach that so many people take is to actually have a really binary way of thinking around marketing. And so oftentimes they approach this with this, like, we just need to do more of X and stop doing Y. But usually the answer is somewhere actually in the middle. And that's really challenging. And reflecting on, you know, taking time to ask hard questions and to really deeply reflect on how you've been doing things and putting yourself in the shoes of the buyer and asking, is there something we can be doing on this one thing to make it better, to make it more inviting or compelling, to approach this just differently than we've been approaching it. And usually it's not just a stop, do this and do more of this. The answer is usually somewhere in the middle and really getting creative about how you're approaching this one thing. And so one example here is, I'm just going to preface this by saying, like, this is hard and this is where having a really solid team is so important, because a CMO is. Cannot shoulder this responsibility alone. And no external agency is going to give you a strategy that also guarantees a result. But if you can try and identify the root cause of what might be happening, and then you can identify from there a potential agency or third party that can help you perfect that one thing, that is where I think bringing in an objective, sort of like third party can help you. But let's talk about one example. So is with a vertical SaaS company we work with. And so what we're observing with them is that they are consistently generating more inbound leads. Their volume is going up quarter over quarter, and also their conversion to pipeline is going up. Right? So that looks like a success for marketing. But at the same time, when we look downstream, we're also seeing that within that cohort of inbound leads, the win rate is starting to decline. Therefore, they're not coming in, meeting revenue targets, right? So it's sort of like this disconnect of what is happening. Our leads are going up, but the revenue is going down. And so we can also see that marketing engagement is going up, meaning all of the things that those leads are doing, right? They're doing more, they're engaging more with the events and so on and so forth with the content. But where the bottleneck we've identified is happening is with the demo set, right? Basically these people are coming in, they're filling out forms, they're booking a demo, but then they're not showing up. And so sort of like the initial thought was, well, we need to go get more leads, right? But really the lever here is to fix what's actually happening in the funnel. Identifying where the friction is between demo booked and demo sat. And the best thing that this team can do is to really critically think about and put themselves inside of the buyer's mind at the moment and reflect on why are they booking a demo but then not showing. There may not be one clear thing or one clear answer, but the best thing this team can do is to test new creative approaches and go all in on figuring this out and identifying either the cause of the problem, which is, hey, maybe we're not qualifying these leads enough before they raise their hand and, you know, book a meeting or, or a solution that's going to help lift the win rate, which is more strategic and responsible than obviously going to optimize for more lead volume. And again, that's hard. It requires really deep experimental thinking and the risk that maybe those first two to three things that you might try may not work, but it's just taking action versus speculating on all of the possibilities or waiting for, you know, the one thing that you think, okay, this is going to be the thing that fixes it. It's just moving fast and failing fast and having the data to optimize quickly when you try things that maybe do or don't work. All right, so moving on, number six is not outsourcing business context. So really similar to the above and what I've really observed about this market is a lack of critical thinking and understanding of their own business. So like I said, having some sort of external expert swoop in and tell you what to do, that can feel really easy and of course, seductive, especially in a world where there are a lot of agencies or fractionals that claim to be really good at one thing. But nothing, and I mean nothing, replaces the knowledge that you and your team hold about your customer and your business. And that's why when it comes to testing or experimenting with new tactics, yeah, you can hire an expert in a specific area like paid search or, you know, SEO or whatever, optimize. But the best strategies or ideas are going to come from the person who knows your buyer the most intimately. And also, it sounds cliche, but I do believe that we tend to optimize for what the market is telling us to do versus looking at the experience of our buyers instead. Right, that's where we hear a lot about, like, zero party data that Forrester talks about. You own that your company owns that you have the perspective of your own customers in your own call, you know, your own call logs and Your emails and what they tell you, nothing is more valuable than that zero party data that you own. And no external agency is going to have that knowledge like you do. So it really just requires a lot of reflection and introspection to really just like think hard about the challenges and not just look to an external sort of like playbook that you think is gonna solve that for you. And yes, that is hard. Okay, number seven, and this is the last one. This is having a high frustration tolerance and the mental toughness and a high amount of fortitude. So I've said this so much, I think I just said it. But truly like being in a marketing leadership role can feel impossible at times. It is exhausting. Buying is extremely chaotic, it is very nonlinear, it can be very abstract at times. There is so much we cannot see or track. And as we know traditionally there really is no like broadly accepted good measurement in place or good reporting unless you work with Passetto. Just kidding. But marketing is really misunderstood by leadership who aren't in marketing as well. So staying in the game even when shit isn't working is very difficult. Mentally. It really pushes the limit of what you think you're capable of enduring. And it's an infinite game of testing when you don't have infinite time to demonstrate your success with those tests, which is really counterintuitive. Those two things are sort of an oxymoron. But testing is the only way to keep playing the game, especially in a world where the way we market is changing so, so fast. So how do we do that? It's building and creating a culture of making decisions from evidence. That means having better inputs to the decisions that CMOs own. And I'll leave you with this recurring businesses rarely survive on doing more of the same new things, new approaches, they keep emerging and they're going to continue to keep emerging. So what matters most is knowing what to monitor for one, what to go track, knowing what success looks like and adopting the process, this three part process. So number one, understanding what is happening with data, number two, prioritizing within that world of all kinds of data, what are like the two to three, maybe four most important things that you've identified. And three, continuously and religiously tracking the success of those tests and continuously optimizing for better results. So it's no surprise that the CMOs that succeed adopt this process. And it's also the thing that Passetto runs its business against because we believe wholeheartedly that you really need evidence to help you make high confidence decisions. And that's not easy and it's also even harder when you don't have that evidence. Right. So adopting this approach helps you move away from being constantly in that defense mode. Right. To have the right data to equip the decisions that need to be made and then using that to own what to do next with evidence instead of just assumptions. So that's it. But before I go, I just want to say, well, thank you for being here and, you know, I hope you found this helpful, but I really hold a lot of respect for CMOs who are really trying to stop optimizing for the legacy way of, you know, making decisions and tracking marketing success. And I think we're really at a tipping point in this industry right now. And I'm so happy and privileged and humbled to be part of that alongside so many other really talented and committed CMOs. And when it comes to data, specifically. Right. We talk a lot about data. I know it can be hard because there's a really high level of fluency around the answers that we're all looking for and the directives that we're all looking for and not as much of a deep understanding to know what KPIs to go measure and how to get at that data. Right. That is not what a CMO has been trained or maybe has the experience doing. And so we've created something really great to help CMOs understand their blind spots and what KPIs can be most impactful for elevating their role, their credibility, their story to the board. And this is something we actually bake into our work for our customers. But if you want to grab a KPI score of where you're at today and where you don't have visibility to comprehensively see marketing's full impact across the buyer journey, click the link in the show notes to grab a free assessment. It's a quick sort of like 20 minute exercise. It's directly aligned to our framework that we use. And what you'll walk away with is a really good understanding and sort of like a score and a rationale for why you got that score of where you lack the visibility you need and like the three things that would help you unlock that visibility next. It's very comprehensive. A lot of folks tell us it's extremely helpful in sort of building alignment internally with where to focus. And so that's free for you guys. It's in the link in the show description. So go grab that. And I hope you found this episode helpful and I'm really looking forward to seeing you all next time. But for now. Thank you. And take care. Of sam.