5 Great CMO Challenges, 5 Greater Solutions

It’s no secret that “The Great Resignation” has profoundly changed the way that B2B organizations are thinking about employees. To start, orgs need to offer competitive salaries and level-set current staff when new hires arrive at significantly increased rates. To really win, though, the investment needs to go further than the dollar sign.

Here are a few things you can do to create a stronger sense of belonging and build stickier cultures:

• Bring your team together on a quarterly basis for in-person gatherings that are informative, fun, and inspiring;
• Develop career maps with every member of your team;
• Survey employees across the organization to see where you can improve;
• Be as transparent as possible about the future of the company;
• Keep the door open for employees who leave and welcome any boomerangs back with open arms;
• And when in doubt, distribute more swag!

Recruiting challenges come right at the heels of retention. Whether your employees have been swept away in The Great Resignation or your company has seen a rapid rate of growth in the last few years, roles need to be filled and the competition for top talent is fierce. Success lies in the surround sound approach and a rejigging of the recruiting process.

Action steps include:

• Hire for talent, not for skill. Yes, it’ll take more time to get them up to speed, but they just might end up being your MVP because you saw their potential and gave them a chance;
• Broaden your candidate pool by exploring partnerships with organizations like the Black Marketers Association;
• Build your personal appeal as a CMO by sharing your motivations and values on channels like LinkedIn;
• Expand your network as a CMO through community involvement;
• Add a link to your careers page in every PR announcement.

It’s time to reclaim at least 5-10 hours a week to strategize and think big—the time suck that is too many meetings and too many emails needs to go. Be ruthless about it. I’ve covered how to beat meeting mania previously, but here are a few reminders:

• Audit recurring meetings and audit next week’s calendar every Friday, cutting what’s unnecessary and shortening the rest;
• Set no-meeting days for your entire team;
• Build breaks into your calendar and say no more.

More time in your calendar does NOT mean you can use those extra hours to get through an always-full inbox. A few steps:

• Make it standard for employees to add actions to headlines like “Need your input,” “Just FYI,” or “NRN: No reply necessary.”
• Set rules in your email client to siphon everything but the urgent into different folders;
• Throw out your to-do list and just turn emails that may need more urgent attention into calendar events instead;
• And if you’re a CMO and you don’t have a VA or EA, get one, even if you have to pay for one yourself. As they say, if you don’t have an assistant, you’re the assistant.

“Brand” has become a dirty word. It’s mostly seen as fluff and colors and logos and design, getting easily swallowed up by the pressure on CMOs to drive revenue. But your revenue-generating efforts can only go so far without brand—when your brand awareness goes up, so do your market share opportunities. You’re that much more likely to make it on a buying committee’s shortlist. Your cost-per-click for that quick-win SEO program that stagnated will drop.

Many CMOs have resorted to renaming Brand, using euphemisms like Corporate Marketing, Revenue Marketing, Growth Marketing. Others have established baselines for awareness, measuring market share against branding initiatives to prove the power of brand to non-believers. Regardless of what you call it, ignoring the things that build brand will come back to bite you sooner than you think.

Given that most B2B marketers shifted the majority of their spending to digital in the last 2 years, it shouldn’t be a surprise that digital fatigue is on the rise. There’s simply too much noise in the digital world, so it’s time to, first, raise the bar, and second, expand your horizons. If you’re putting content out there, it better be exceptional. A great litmus test for whether a piece of content is valuable is to ask: Would our best customer get value out of this? If the answer is no, then you know it’s not up to scratch.

And rather than relying on digital alone, more and more brands are returning to in-person events. The pent-up demand for human interaction is palpable, so don’t be the last brand to venture out. Go visit your customers if you haven’t already. Drop in on a trade show. And while you’re out and about, perhaps it is time to reevaluate your media mix. The CMOs of CMO Huddles are doing just that, buying outdoor, radio, podcasts, and sports sponsorships.