The 6 Steps to Your Next CMO Role 

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present this episode, I’m thrilled to announce the first-ever in-person CMO Super Huddle that we’re hosting in Palo Alto on November 8, 2024. The theme is “Daring Greatness in 2025” and we’re rocking a full slate of inspiring speakers with ample time for networking. Early Bird tickets are on sale now, so grab yours at cmohuddles.com. It’s gonna be flocking amazing! Now, Episode 410 is for the CMOs in transition out there, both now and in the future. And as with every 10th episode at Renegade Marketers Unite, I was the interviewee this time. I was delighted to speak with the DIY Influencer Crew, a community of aspiring thought leaders founded by Julie Michelle Morris, my formidable interviewer. On the show today, we talk about the state of the CMO job market, five steps for CMOs in transition, why you need to take a strategic approach to job search, and how to do it. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Julie: The way I met Drew is the way that actually I met a lot of you. Someone cool introduced me to someone else, and that someone cool was originally someone I met on LinkedIn. So the someone cool in this case was Katrina Klier, who was interacting on LinkedIn with someone named Drew Neisser. And I said, “Ooh, he looks like he’s got all of that cool brain power that we want to have, too.” And so I started following Drew, then reached out to Drew and said, “Hey, question, question.” And then it led to a meeting, which led to an opportunity where I got to go and meet with his awesome crew at CMO Huddles in the transitions team. And now he’s coming here to bring us some brain power. So here’s to LinkedIn, here’s to the power of connection, and now we get to learn from Drew. So we know that here in DIY Influence, we really value being candid, and so this will be a candid discussion about something that is not an easy walk in the park for any of us: the job transitions, the career transitions, the “I was in corporate, and now I’m going to be a consultant, I think,” or “I was in corporate, I would like to stay in corporate, and then maybe one day transition,” but we’re going to kind of get real. So thank you in advance for letting Drew be him, and me be me, and we’re going to ask all our candid questions and just have a real discussion. So Drew, we’re thrilled to welcome you today. Thank you for the chance to sit down.

Drew: It’s great to be with you.

Julie: Absolutely. We are really cool people. So let’s start, if we could, with a little bit of a level set. So Drew, when I heard your approach on the transitions that we’re facing right now, and the way that the market’s changing, and the way that it takes so long to get into that new role, and there’s just so many ways that we can kind of mess it up, I knew that I wanted to have you come and share that with us. And just so could we just level set around like, what is the job market like for experienced career folks?

Drew: It’s really icky right now, and it’s icky on multiple fronts, for multiple reasons. Statistically, there are just a lot fewer jobs. If you look on LinkedIn, for my area, which is CMO, and mainly B2B CMO, it’s about a third of the number of jobs that were being listed on LinkedIn than there were two years ago. So there are fewer jobs. There’s a lot of people chasing those jobs. And you have employers on top of this asking for crazy stuff, like people are taking the equivalent of IQ tests to get jobs. People are, you know, not just 30-60-90s, it’s two sets of personality tests or things like that. So, yeah, it’s really, really challenging. I have tremendous empathy for the folks. And just in case you were wondering why this supply-demand thing is so out of whack, there were a lot of company startups in particular that probably shouldn’t have had CMOs, but got a lot of money, hired one anyway, all those folks are now looking for opportunities, and they have the CMO title. Any number of companies have just said, and these are smaller companies, we don’t need a CMO. We’ll just use VP of Demand, because in their mind, that’s all marketing is good for anyway, so let’s just have a VP of Demand. So anyway, the bottom line is, it’s really tough.

Julie: It’s really tough. Yeah, and Drew, you kind of exclusively work with CMOs. So your main core experience is CMOs. And I kind of love that for us, because even though not all of us are CMOs, it feels like the CMO is one of the most scrutinized, heavily subjective fields to be in, where anyone can have an opinion, and you’re supposed to now be responsive to all of this input and everyone telling you how to do your job. So that’s interesting, but also how to go and then position yourself. Sometimes CMOs can be the worst at that. And so this, having the CMOs or model for a transition can be helpful, but any more to say about you and your work and background, if you would.

Drew: Well, I mean, I think you were really getting onto a key point here, which is the thing that I keep seeing happen over and over again, is the first thing a CMO in a new role would do was focus on the strategy, right? They focus on, what’s the go-to-market strategy, where are the holes, where are the weaknesses, what do we need to talk about? And yet, when they get into a job search, first thing they do is, you know, update their LinkedIn profile without having really thought about their personal brand. They start calling all their friends and so forth. They start following up on jobs. And they don’t have a position, they don’t have a strategy. And I keep seeing this over and over again, and that’s something that we can talk about fixing.

Julie: We’re gonna fix it absolutely. So Drew, if you would tell us about you, what do you do? Give us the Drew.

Drew: Well, I really like penguins, and that’s important in the scheme of things, because I discovered that—we started CMO Huddles four years ago, right after a good friend of mine sold the CMO Club to Salesforce, and that created an opportunity for us. I had been part of the club for 12 plus years as the guy who interviewed CMOs and helped build their personal brands. So when the club got sold, I saw an opportunity. Katrina was with us from the beginning, we started CMO Huddles, initially just as a concept, and six months later, 55 meetings later, we had a business, and I have the privilege now of sitting in the middle of CMO conversations every single week, whether it’s in a Peer Huddle or interviewing people like you’re doing to me. I get to interview experts for CMOs, whether they’re bestselling authors or subject matter experts. We have a live streaming show called CMO Huddle Studio, where we have three Huddlers on each of those shows and those become podcasts. So we’re excited. We just had episode 400 of Renegade Marketers Unite come out, and it happened to be with the founder of the Global Penguin Society. Why the penguins? A group of penguins is a huddle. Alright, there it is, tied it up. Nice little bow. That’s me.

Julie: Exquisite. Part of CMO Huddles is this group of folks that you said, is a quickly growing cohort of CMOs that are in transition. Is that right?

Drew: Yes, well, it was growing in that we used to have a sort of a free program and a paid program, and we just doubled down on the paid program, and we actually eliminated the free program. So it had gone from 30 to 180, now we’re back to about 30 in two years. And the reason for that was really important, which is a small group of people that we could focus on and help walk them through a really defined process where they help each other, and that takes a commitment. And we don’t, you know it’s, there’s lots of ways to do this. This is the way that we think works. We know it works, and so you either commit to that or you go somewhere else. And that’s fine, because there are a lot of other good places to go to help find, you know, help you through this. You know, and I know that this is not something that… this is not a solo sport, this is not singles tennis. It’s not even doubles. This is team.

Julie: Yeah, without a team. Here we are. Here we sit in this—the only mission, I tell you, of this group sometimes just feels like we’re here to be supportive. Like that’s our core, that is our culture and that.

So let’s go back to then, this process. When I first got to hear about this process from you, so much became clear to me. Number one, because your process is simplistic. It is simple, it is targeted, it’s very focused, and it’s designed to help you not do the stuff that will just be a time waste. If you’re in transition, you’re going to just sit there and apply, apply, apply, apply to jobs, jobs, jobs where there’s thousands of people, literally, who can apply in one day. Like we know that doesn’t work. Your process kind of flipped that over its head. It stepped away from the time-wasters. So would you walk us through, what does it look like to effectively get through a transition?

Drew: So let me give you an overview of the steps. The first part is reconnecting with your strengths and really getting to the ability to understand what your personal brand could be. The second part is committing to a peer group. Third part is defining your personal brand, which you’ve helped weigh in on and help with our documentation. This is really important. Then the thing that’s really different about this for CMOs is step number four: identify your top 25. I’ll talk about that in a second. Step number five is executing your outbound, and there’s a very specific program. And then finally, honing your skills. So we can go through those one at a time.

Reconnecting with your strengths—there’s a psychological aspect to this, just a reminder that you didn’t become stupid when you lost your job, that you didn’t become bad at your job when you lost your job, you just are in transition. So reconnecting with your strengths and reminding yourself and going back and talking to everybody that you’ve worked with above, aside, below, is really important, because now what companies are doing is they want to talk to the people you worked with at your first job. You know? I mean, it’s crazy. It’s like, wait, that was 20 years ago. “Yeah, well, we want to talk to them.” Well, I haven’t talked to them in 25 years. So you might as well go do that work yourself, or find out what they’re going to say, refresh them. And by the way, that’s another way of networking early on.

But the main point is, what was I good at? What did you like about working with me? Remind me of my wonderfulness. You’re going to write all that down. You’re going to gather that information for the ones that really feel good, if you haven’t gotten recommendations from them, you get recommendations from them on LinkedIn. You know, you’re filling out your profile.

We’re going to skip being present in your group, in the peer group, because we’ve already talked about that. You folks are here. You’re in a peer group. You get it.

Defining your personal brand is such an interesting one because when you read most LinkedIn profiles, particularly CMOs, it says data-driven, growth-oriented CMO leader. And, you know, it’s very hard for companies to distinguish between data-driven, growth-minded CMO leaders, so you’ve got to have something more. I mean, I get there’s a game going on with SEO, and there are lots of ways of playing that. And I’m not the expert on LinkedIn search. But I do know what a personal brand looks like, and it becomes really important because then the next step we’re going to talk about is identifying your top 25. Why do we do this? So LinkedIn is a black hole of job opportunities. I know of all the folks I’ve probably talked to, 250 CMOs in transition in the last four years. One of those individuals has gotten a job on LinkedIn—one. So she keeps pursuing that. But for most, it’s just this rabbit hole. It’s like social media, where you’re just flicking and flicking and flicking and you can’t get out of it, and it sucks up time, and it sucks up energy, and it’s frustrating because you never hear back from them.

So rather than wasting your time there, we’re going to say, alright, there’s going to be, you know, recruiters are going to be one in four of the job opportunities. So 75% you’re going to have to make. The likelihood is you’re going to make that through your network, and that your network is going to be sort of your inbound. Your outbound is going to be based on a six-by-six match. And this is, again, the crazy thing—it used to be you could have amazing experience in one industry and take that experience to say, I can help you in this industry. Right now, yeah, because people who are hiring are trying to minimize their risk, they’re saying, “We want you to have experience in the same category, at the same growth stage, with the same kind of ownership structure.” Is it PE? Is it private? Is it public? Is it VC? They want to know that you’ve targeted, is it enterprise or small business? And they want to—oh, and by the way, the tie goes to the local person.

So you have this crazy grid where you go, wait a second, I got to match five-by-five or six-by-six. Then turn that around and say, okay, well, that’s the way I’m going to find 25 companies that I’m a five-by-five match for. So I’m going to take a 50-mile radius around where I live. I’m going to look at my last job and say, well, I worked at a company that was 50 million to 100 million, and that was that growth phase. So I’m going to look for companies in that phase. And then you’re going to make your list of 25 and then your stalking plan begins. I mean, your content plan begins. And I’m facetious about the stalking, but only partially.

I was talking to a guy who had done a lot of work on his personal brand. He had it nailed down. He decided he was going to do a podcast, and it would talk about that. What he didn’t have was his top 25, and without the top 25, he wouldn’t know what stories he needed to have in order to get to each of the CEOs, because your goal is to be able to write an email or a LinkedIn connection request or a direct mail piece, or all three of those things, or maybe more, where you can say three things to a CEO at any company that is on your top 25 and say, you know, you probably want to know this. Something I call love letters, but you’re creating content with one target in mind, which means, you know, you might be creating 25 things, or you might be creating five, and then you’re working it.

So once we have that content for that top—you have your top 25—we’re going to execute our outbound, and there are a lot of ways to do that. Should I go into those details?

Julie: Okay, yes, in a second. But first, can I have a couple of quick follow-up questions?

Drew: Sure.

Julie: Alright, so here’s my first comment: the recruiters aren’t coming to save us anymore, guys. The recruiters aren’t coming to save us. Gone are the—and I don’t have to tell anyone here that, right—gone are the days where you used to field phone call after phone call. Oh, the recruiters keep calling. It’s just—it may never be that way again, like, or maybe it’s like, three, five years down the road, but like, it’s not now, and they’re not calling with the right opportunities for you. We noticed that, right? They’ll call, and then they’ll get you excited, and then you’re just like, “Oh, great.” And then it just falls apart. Or you get to the last round, or, or, or—so we’ll cover, I would love to chat about interviews and where we kind of can fumble there at some point. But Drew, does that opinion connect with you?

Drew: Yeah. I mean, we’ve had a couple of recruiters join us, one from Spencer Stuart, and he said, “Look, I’m, you know, my volume is down about 66%,” and he was totally on the match-match. Now, we also had another recruiter who had placed two CMOs at companies who was not about the five-by-five match, but it was this recruiter’s strength, and she had the relationships with the CMOs that she placed. And she got one to come back from an early leave, she got another one to sort of talk to this company. So that was a strength of—well, we all sell, but most recruiters are taking the “you want a five-by-five match, I’ll find them for you.”

The challenge, of course, is that the recruiter relationships you should have been building when you had your last job—it’s really hard to do it when you don’t have a job, because, you know, it’s just that’s not the moment. So when you get your next job, just remember to help them as much as you can, because the minute you have a job, they’re going to be all over you.

Julie: Yeah, without a doubt. Okay, thank you for that. And when we’re talking about the 25, does there have to be an opening? Do we have to have any clue about that? Are we just looking for the right fit?

Drew: No, no. There doesn’t have to be. Again, sadly, think about the average tenure of a CMO. And you know that CMO may willingly leave. They’ve been there three years, they’re kind of done everything they think they could do. They may be ready to go and looking for their replacement. So you just don’t know. And it’s not like you’re trying to displace someone. You’re trying to have a conversation with a CEO on an important subject and give them some information that they say, “Oh, I want to talk to them”—some insights, something, because you’ve been in the category, you have insights.

Julie: Well, I love where this is going already, and I think like, if this is validating for you all, you know, you can feel free to chime in in the comments, or if you have any questions as they come up, please do. This is exactly where I hoped this conversation would go. It’s just a very clear state of things.

Drew: So let’s talk about that. So now you’ve created content, and if you go to my profile, you’ll see the posts that I’ve been doing every Saturday on LinkedIn. These are very, very specific thought leadership pieces, but I do have CMOs in mind when I write them. It doesn’t have to be written. It could be a video. You just need to make it easy for someone in three minutes to get some insights and say, “Wow, okay, I’m interested in talking to this because they’re talking to me.” So now, how do you get that in front of the individual that you’re targeting? Well, the best case scenario is someone in your network knows that person, obviously.

Now you could say, “Hey Julie, would you mind introducing me to Katrina?” and I say, “Oh, sure, I could do that.” But they may be uncomfortable and it may not be. It may be too much work, so you’ve got to make everything easy. If you were going to ask for someone to introduce you to someone else, write the message for them and tell them everything you want them to say. “Hey Julie. Really good friend of mine and we’ve been talking a lot about this, and I think she has some insights that you will really find valuable. Here are a couple that she shared with me. They seem smart. What do you think?” That’s when you have a connection, you’ve got to make it easy for them.

Okay, if you don’t have a connection, then you go to plan B, which is the stalking part. You’re going to hope that that individual is active on LinkedIn. Let’s assume they are. If they are active on LinkedIn and posting things or cheerleading, you’re going to comment and cheerlead them back. You’re going to, if they’re posting about the company or just liking it, you’re going to do it too, and you’re going to do it enough until someone says, “Oh my god, this person’s kind of everywhere.” At which point in time you’ve got it three times, four times, five times, whatever you’re comfortable with. You send them a connection request and say, “Yeah, I kind of been stalking you. I’m excited to talk to you about some insights that I have found on the category, having spent three years in the category at the last job.” And you know, you try to deliver value in these things. You don’t ask for the order. You don’t have to in the first thing, if they accept the connection request, then you can send them a message saying, “Here’s a couple of the insights that I learned. Would you like to learn more?” So you again, you’re providing value, because the worst thing you can do in any kind of connection request, once they say yes, is to go, “Okay, let’s have a meeting.”

Julie: Right? Be cool, man. Be breezy. Breezy. Cool.

Drew: You have a plan. Stick to the plan you got it. Now the CEO may not bite, so then you look to see who is active. Could be the COO, could be the CFO, could be the CRO. It kind of doesn’t matter, because the insights are still going to be valid. And, you know, not, let’s face it, not every CEO is active on LinkedIn, and if they’re not, then you’ve got to find a plan B.

Julie: Yep, and staying power like this may take six months. These job searches right now are taking longer than they’ve ever taken before, and that’s not changing anytime soon. So if it took six months for this to happen, okay, but you are still showing up, and you’re not waiting for permission or invitation or even acknowledgment, because they are still watching. Most of us who have been reached out to by companies like this, they will never indicate until they are ready to meet with you, that they are even seeing your stuff, because they are being pounded right by how many people. So you need to stand out for your staying power, but also because you feel like they read your stuff and it feels like you are in their head, t’s like, is she at the table? Is there a wiretap in here? How does she know? How do they know that this is our struggle? Like that is how well you have to write.

Drew: You’re going after nerves, and it’s all expressed in your personal brand, your strengths, your thinking. Each piece of content is reinforcing the story that you’re going to be able to tell. 

Julie: A lot of work.

Drew: It is a lot of work. And that’s why you know, if it’s top 25 and you have to create 25 pieces of content you might only do two a week. And so part of this is time management. And one thing I encourage, this is really hard, because I know you want to get a job and it’s painful, but make it a nine-to-six job. Don’t make it a 24/7 job. And so you divide your calendar up between, okay, networking and content creation and so forth.

And then when you get to the interview stage, and this is the last thing, and I’m sure your group is really good at that, is honing your skills, this is the part that I’m always shocked that not enough folks are practicing their interviewing skills. They’re not practicing the questions that they’re going to ask. They’re just not rehearsing. And it’s kind of impossible to imagine any kind of athletic endeavor where you didn’t practice, but they’re not doing it. So that’s what we’re doing, and I know you’re doing so every interview you have, it’s easy to anticipate what the questions are. You can go on ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I’m a CEO about to interview a CMO, what are the 10 questions I should ask them?” No, no. And then you say, “Okay, get serious. Give me the hard questions.” Okay, what are the hardest questions that they could ask? And you could get to the point where you can anticipate what the questions are, then you’ve got to figure out, how am I going to answer this question in a way that expresses my personal brand, reinforces my experience, makes them think like I’m the person that understands and listens and can solve their problems? And that’s practice, and that’s really that’s the fun part of it. That’s the fun part of having a group.

Julie: So watching our game tapes. If I could get anyone to do almost anything in thought leadership, except to watch their own videos or except listen to their own podcast or watch their own speech again. It freaks us out, and we have to just move away from that because that is the fastest way that we can accelerate. We need to just wrap our arms around that person who we see on video and go, look at her go, she’s amazing, and now we’re going to improve and we’re going to say it again until it feels comfortable. It doesn’t sound jilted or stiff if you’ve had practice saying that thing over and over, those are the reps that you need to get the muscle right. So we’ve got to practice, and Drew, we don’t do anything around this. We’re focused on thought leadership. But I think I could totally see space for like, interview rehearsal practice groups where we just get really damn good at this because this is where we drop the ball. Often it’s not, in this group, personal brand. It’s not maybe the content side. It’s not the who can I serve well and what are they thinking inside their head? It’s the interview. And that when we are up against people 20 years our junior and cheaper, we can’t blow it there, and we know that. And all of this, again, holds perfectly true for business development, too. None of us want to go do business development, but we totally can get better at it in this spot.

Drew: Yeah, I’m so glad you reminded me of it, because one of the things that we prescribe in the hone your skills stage is every interview you have after the interview, write down every question and every answer. You’ll remember your answers because we always remember what we say. We don’t always remember what someone else says, but write it down and look at it critically and then go over that with someone else. And the reason we’re spending so much time on this, interviews and questions and answers is you don’t get as many as they say swings at the plate right now, so you’ve got to increase the odds of scoring because you have fewer opportunities to score.

Julie: True, we have a great question from my buddy, Carol, what’s your advice if you’re trying to move away from what you’ve done, or maybe like into an adjacent area or into even a different industry, this is a tough one, but great question.

Drew: Yeah, it’s doable, and a lot of folks would encourage you to do that. I’m just trying. If you want to ask me, what’s the shortest distance to a job, it’s going to be something that looks like the job that you just had in the last five years. Okay, so now let’s just take the content strategy that I described and say, okay, we’re going to go after 25 companies that aren’t in our industry. We’re still going to look at growth phase, target audience, so forth. We’re going to try to find some common experiences that you’ve had, and then you’re going to create content that bridges the gap. So you worked in cybersecurity, and now you want to work in retail. Six things every retail CEO can learn from cybersecurity. You’re going to have to connect the dots, and that becomes the content that you work on, and you find different ways of doing it, but over and over again, you’re going to have this library of content. And by the way, by writing it, this is the part that I have gotten when I started writing these Saturday posts. And I’m on the 10th one. By writing a 700-word post, you understand. It forces you to understand. It forces you to have a point of view. And again, you can sort of use these tools out there. You can write your point of view. I’m not doing that, by the way, but you could, because I kind of like having little flaws in mine. I’m in a different place than you are. But you could write your post about seven things that cybersecurity execs could learn from retail or vice versa. Then you could put it into Claude and say, “Hey, how’s my argument holding up? You know, what are the weaknesses in this thing?” So you can, again, you can. You can use these tools that help your work be smarter. Don’t think you can use these tools to really help yourself be a better writer other than Grammarly.

Julie: Yes, absolutely.

Drew (AD Break): This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness, and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a Huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you’re a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMOhuddles.com? Hope to see you in a Huddle soon.

Julie: Carol, I think to your point too, and just echoing this idea of bridging, anytime there is a thing that we feel insecure about or feel like could be a barrier, we gotta confront it, and we gotta do it almost more headlong and clear and calling it out because the last thing we want is them constructing a narrative. “Oh, she’s leaving cybersecurity because obviously there was a problem, and that’s why she’s going into retail.” No, I mean, you define it. I would even do a post on it. I would say cybersecurity is evolving, and when you know what your passion is over here in retail, that’s when you want to bring what you know into where the market is now. Obviously, the market is going towards cybersecurity, and not away, so that’d be a tougher sell, but try to figure out what those barriers are to why they would even want to talk to you and speak to them as if you were interviewing 24 hours a day, seven days a week in your content. That is how I built my business, and like from the ground up, it’s how I’ve been a breadwinner for as long as I have been. It works, like we all know it works. I don’t have to tell anyone here but for someone listening to the recording later.

Drew: And I wanted to sort of address this other part of it. I sort of went, if you’re going to go from one category to another. But I thought maybe behind that question, it was, say, going from marketing to HR, for example. If that’s what you’re trying to do, most likely you’re going to need some kind of certification somewhere that gives you something to say, “Yeah, I know the basics enough.” Or “I’ve done a crash course on this.” It’s the same written strategy in terms of content development. What HR can learn from marketing, right? It would be the same approach. And the interesting thing about being a marketer is that you are in touch with all aspects of the business. For example, you understand internal communications and why that’s so important. You understand customer experience because that shows up in customer satisfaction, and if that’s not good. So you really understand the business. You just have to sort of make the case. You’re going to really have to connect the dots or bridging, as you said, Julie, it’s a great word.

Julie: Yeah, actually your word, but also mine, too. I love that word, bridging. Everything about our thought leadership and personal brand should be a bridge. It doesn’t look at us first like it does, but really, like start with where you want to go, because there’s so much bias. We want to hire what we look like. We want to hire the same gender. We don’t want to hire for difference of opinion. We don’t want to hire for difference of anything. We want someone who is going to be me and tell me everything I want to hear. So like in my thought leadership, if I am trying to manage the bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy, food, water, shelter, I am really looking to build a bridge. I will hold back stuff that I know they should not be trusted with yet later, when we’re like in the lunchroom, that’s a different story. There’s safety there. They have committed to me. They can know that I volunteer at the cat shelter, and I’m not just a crazy cat lady talking about cats all the time, right? So what are some of the ways that we really do mess up?

Drew: Well, mess up number one is having a long explanation about what happened at your last job. Just you want a one sentence. I learned a lot. It was a great experience. It was time to move on, or something equivalent. You don’t want to say anything bad about the company. And what’s hard is any kind of, well, they were running into financial problems. That may be the truth, but even that may be a losing sell, because, well, what did you do about it? How come you didn’t fix it? Why didn’t marketing save the day? So the less you say about this, I learned a lot. I’m very proud of my experience and what I was able to accomplish. Excited about my next opportunity, by the way, at that job I learned this, which will be helpful here. Bridge it just go get from that question into how you can help them. So that’s mistake number one, sometimes two and three.

Julie: We hang ourselves sadly with the words that we give. We give them more than they even ask for because we don’t know when to stop speaking often because we’re uncomfortable with the idea of letting the silence hang in the air, letting them just think while we sit there confidently. It’s like you say the thing, you drop the mic, and then you just kind of gently wait and give them just that moment where you can look confident under pressure. Dunk on it. Okay. How else can we de-risk by knowing the ways we screw up?

Drew: Well, I’m just saying, as you were talking, I was thinking of Matt Abrahams’ book, “Think Faster, Talk Smarter,” and it’s a great book. I did a podcast with him, but he really talked about how some of it is improv training, a combination of things, but there are structures for answers. This came as news to me, by the way. It’s like, wait, how old am I? If I knew there’s always been a structure in marketing, it’s, you know, problem, solution, benefit, kind of a structure. But he offers a wonderful structure of “what, so what, what now?” And by having a structure, you can get yourself to an answer in two sentences or three sentences, and then you can do full pause. You can look at the reaction. But if you don’t have a structure for your responses, you’re just going to talk until you run out of air. The book is called “Think Faster, Talk Smarter,” by Matt Abrahams.

Julie: So how else do we do poorly in any of this process? Where do we blow it? Fumble?

Drew: I think going at it alone, that’s one, obviously no one here is having that issue. Not rehearsing, but also going back and reviewing and doing a post mortem on every single interview, and keeping a log book of these things, of your interviews. I don’t know when you get the opportunity, it’s so difficult because you can’t seem desperate, but you want to seem interested. It’s just such a fine line. I think that if you’ve already identified, and this is why this content plan is so helpful, you already know five problems of the industry and five solutions that you can bring to the table. You already know those. So you have a lot of value to bring, and just have to remind yourself that you have value to bring, and be prepared with that value and be prepared with your really good questions.

Julie: Not desperate, but interested. So where I see kind of some fumbles occasionally is when we’ve been in job search mode for a long time, and wherever we are that becomes what we think about and what we’re surrounded with and the people that we care most about. And so I will look at someone’s activity feed on their LinkedIn profile, and I’ll see three posts that talk about job seeking, and that is never going to work, it just can’t work anymore.

Drew: No. I mean, it will be great for the sympathy, you know, if you share that honesty and that journey, but it won’t be great for your personal brand. You are not defined by being in transition. You are defined by what you are, what you want to be, what you put out there. If you want to define yourself as being in transition, write about it all the time, but otherwise, you know, to me right now, there’s, you know, ageism is real. There’s an assumption, if you’re 25 you know how to use these tools. I can’t tell you how many kids I shock, because I know more about how to use an iPhone than they do. It’s like, what? And there’s just an assumption. It’s real, it’s out there. So write about that. Write about, you know, how you are using cutting-edge tools to develop your content and your strategy. Write about the area—Let’s say you’re at the intersection of brand and demand. That’s where you are. You meet right there. Find great examples of that. Write about it, but write about it with real insight. So you have to take some time to do that.

Julie: Absolutely. I’m going back to your point about the writing that you do. It’s like we’ll push you to write posts. We’ll push you to write because writing is the most transformative act that you can get. I had a massive fear of public speaking until just a couple years ago. I could never have talked in a group. I could never have been able to sit here with you and have a conversation. Writing helped transform what I know and it helped give me the courage even to speak and to do this. It also helps come up with the messaging that you’re going to do in the moment, in the hard moment, because you’ve had to crystallize now it’s distilled from like what would have been like pages or a blog or meandering to like this crisp, beautiful, powerful, standout kind of insights that they will remember. If they’re not going to like, want to write it down what you’re saying in that interview. Let’s push harder. We want them to hear it and go, “Whoa, I think that was like a framework for success. I think whoa, that was an unlock,” and we can push and get there, and it’s worth doing it. And very often it will happen because of conversations that you’re having too. So just as much as when you’re writing, sit down with someone and find where you are just on fire for the topic and just talk it out, you’ll hear yourself saying something. You’ll see when your friend, like lights up and goes, “Whoa. I get it now I didn’t get it before.” So like, those conversations will give you the messaging too, with what they say in response.

Drew: Yeah, it’s true. Writers tend to be good listeners, or listen and hear what’s going on and just hear ideas through it. One thing I would say is another book to read is “Smart Brevity.” If you’re struggling with your writing, it’s just great. It’s really, really great. And again, as someone who’s written a lot for the last 30 years, it was a wonderful reminder to be terse, to just narrow it down. And I think it’s wonderful thing to think about as you’re preparing for an interview, too. It’s like, okay, what’s my experience? Can I get it down to five sentences? Can I get it down to three words? Penguins, you know, force yourself to be as brief as possible, and then you can expand.

Julie: Clarity, brevity. I love it, absolutely. Okay. So folks, we have 18 more minutes with probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met about this stuff and about how to get you seen, noticed, heard, and in the place you want to be. Feel free to come off of mute or do the little hand raise thing. Okay, Melissa, thank you for your question. So video introductions, answers. Like, I like the idea of doing video. I don’t know if I like it in the DMs for this purpose, but can you say any more about what you might do there?

Drew: So there are a couple of thoughts. It may be if you notice that company that you’re targeting does a lot of video, and they do a lot of personal video, then, one, that may be really smart to do it. Two, it’s a lot easier to do video than it ever has been, because there are all these wonderful editing tools, Gen AI editing tools to help you out. I’m a fan of video as a form of communication, whether you’re doing the Loom videos, which is another good thing you could do and have fun with. What I like about it is it’s a chance to demonstrate, to show and not tell, right? So if you understand Gen AI and how to use the tool and how, so it’s “here’s my quick message I want you to know I’m using Discus for a generative AI tool to edit this video. Here are the three things I want you to know.” And you know, you do some magical thing with the video. I think it’s great. I think you need to set a certain standard for yourself. You need good lighting, you need good audio, and you gotta keep it short.

Julie: Witty, biting, fun, which means, like, we’re almost putting on a personality we may not feel at all because, like when we’re in transition, it is a low point often, and you’re tired and you’ve been having to worry so long, and your cortisols are out of control, and all the things.

Drew: Another thought for a video, please. So I do this silly thing, maybe every 20th episode, where I interview myself, and I actually put up two microphones, and I just started asking myself questions, and then I switched to another mic, and then I asked myself questions. All of us are pretty good at thinking on our feet and asking questions. So if you’re thinking about doing a video, get someone off camera to ask you a question, and you might be amazed, and you give yourself some time. But if you say, you know, and again, you’re going to sort of read Matt Abrahams’ book or Smart Brevity, and you’re going to think about, “What, so what, now what,” or some structure. They give you the question, “Really interesting question. Here’s what I heard you say. Here’s where we need to go with that. This is why it matters.”

Julie: So cool.

Drew: Get someone you know, and the other I’m looking at the other side of my monitor imagining someone throwing me a question. It happens that Julie’s doing that for me now.

Julie: We have a weekly video creators group where we are all having to now force ourselves into video. We are the last generation at this frontier. Everyone else was born with a phone in their hands and video in their brain, and it’s just lucky them, but not us. So we will struggle through together until we get so good at it that we stand out and shine.

So Drew, curious, I know this works really well for people in job transition, I am a huge fan of thinking about this idea of like, if corporate doesn’t, maybe have space, have room. We don’t want to go back there, try to shove ourselves back into the shoebox. Or we just want to have some more options. Your thoughts on, like starting a consultancy on the side, trying to pull off a little bit of work here and there, or just go and start our own dang thing because, hey, we’ve all run the P&L by now. We know how to manage teams. We know how to manage budgets. We know how to solve every problem there is and wait, there’s more to come on that. But what do you think?

Drew: A number of CMOs that I know that I’ve gotten jobs recently. Got jobs by being a partial CMO, fractional, or whatever they want to call it, or just a consultant, first at this company, and then ended up going full time. So there’s no doubt in my mind that that is a path to getting a full-time job. That’s part one. But I think you have to be very clear in your mind, am I going to get a full-time job? Is that my goal, or am I really going to set up my own shingle? Because they’re very different approaches to the thing. Because if you set up your shingle then you know you need a website. You need to plan your schedule such that you know 80% of your time you’re servicing clients, and 20% of the time you’re marketing your business, and you’ve done a different kind of personal branding work, the kind that sort of positions you with a really tight and what book I recommend for that is “The Business of Expertise,” by David C. Baker, if you’re thinking about it, he’ll help you decide what’s expertise really look like? And he talks about a horizontal and a vertical and it’s like, you want to be the best of the world at this one thing and just hope that there’s enough demand for that, and then go after it. Again, It’s liberating once you define that narrow space, because then all the content that you create, all the outreach that you do, if you have this problem, I can help you solve it. I don’t think, and I haven’t heard from a recruiter that’s setting up your, you know that setting up a consulting practice while I haven’t heard a recruiter say, oh, that’s bad. You can do them in parallel paths. What I wonder is, can you do that well? Can you do both? Like, let’s say you’re 60% of your time is servicing a client. Now you can spend 40% of your time finding a job. That’s the part I don’t have a good answer for you.

Julie: It is, to some degree demoralizing to sit on the sidelines for long periods of time and just to keep doing the search. Now that we have a more focused approach to a search from today, I feel like that would be different, but busy is sexy. That’ll be our next t-shirt that we put out. No, I’m kidding. It won’t be. But if we are moving, we are thinking, we are networking, we’re active. We’re much more active now. I I was still actually job searching, but open to clients, I would do the back channel kind of marketing to find those clients. I would not be putting that out maybe front ways, like, do one thing front ways and the rest is back channel. Like, it’s your network, it’s quieter, but it’s intentional. It’s still very intentional.

Drew: I mean, the question that I have is, if you’ve been out for six months, what do you say? What have you been doing the last six months? And I think you need a really good answer. One good answer is garden leave. I’m on garden leave. I took six months off. That’s it, and you better put that on your LinkedIn profile. The other answer is, if you set up your own shingle, even if it’s not real, you need to be able to show the clients, or at least talk about the experience and things that you’ve had in a constructive way that reinforces your brand. So it’s no good saying you’re a consultant, then not necessarily having any clients, right? That doesn’t solve the problem, because they’re going to say, “So, what have you been doing?”

Julie: And as you get specific, it’s like, just imagine you put your CEO hat on. You don’t want to give them too much. You don’t want to get that crisp, “What, so what, now what? It applies just for that too. And would I actually say go do free work or heavily discounted work to get those clients? Yes, I would. Yes, I would. Yes.

Drew: First client, absolutely.

Julie: Okay, any other thoughts, questions?

Audience Question: So you’re hearing all over the place about the demise of the CMO, right? And perhaps rise of Chief Brand Officer or Chief Growth Officer. What are you seeing in light of your conversations about the evolution of the role into other things?

Drew: So every five years, this conversation comes up, and the same people write about it on both sides of the thing. It is not a thing. You can change the title. You can call it Chief Market Officer, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Whatever Officer, that’s not the problem. The problem is managing the expectations of the CEO and the board in terms of what marketing can and cannot do with the resources that you are given. And that problem doesn’t go away if you change the title. So what happens is they hire someone they call the Chief Growth Officer, who doesn’t have brand, who doesn’t understand customer experience, and what they really have is a demand gen person. And everybody knows that there’s about a six-month window where you can refine your demand gen engine, and then suddenly the sales guys call, “Wait, there’s no air cover. They haven’t heard of us. They don’t know who we are. We need some cover, air cover,” and then suddenly, “Oh well, maybe we really do need a CMO.” So it’s not a good use of your energy to be thinking about that. What is a good use of your energy is thinking about how marketing drives businesses forward, and how you as a leader help CEOs drive their business and meet their growth agendas. You hit a nerve for me because I think the title changes, and the notion of the demise of the job, it’s not. The companies that fire their CMOs that have a demand gen are not going to grow, and they’re going to see that, and then suddenly people are going to say, “Oh man, we don’t have a brand, we don’t have any awareness,” and they’re going to come back and they’re going to hire CMOs. But that will be when interest rates are down and money is starting to flow again, and people are acting rational. Right now, it’s an irrational marketplace.

Julie: It’s an irrational marketplace. So what I would do, if that still didn’t feel super clear to me, because I would need to think about that for a while, I would grab a friend, I would sit down at coffee, or sit down over Zoom and go, “What the hell does it mean if the market is irrational, what do we need to say? How do we stand out in a sea of this?” And if I just say that, like all of this is a workshop, it just is. So Drew are you accepting people into your transitions program right now? And do they have to be CMOs? Tell us about the program and the structure, if you would.

Drew: Thank you. So the answer is they need to be a Head of Marketing. They don’t necessarily have to have the title CMO, and part of it is just because you’re going to be interviewing for the same jobs, and we want you aligned with people who are interviewing for the same types of roles so that they can help you. It’s a paid program. We charge like $350 a quarter. It’s not expensive, but it’s a high-value program. And you know, our goal is to get you the shortest distance to your next opportunity and again, we’re focused on B2B. So it’s like B2B heads of marketing.

Julie: Yeah. So if you’re not that, follow Drew obsessively. He’s got some of the best thought leadership out there. And y’all know that’s saying something from me, it’s extraordinary how he can articulate and crystallize what everybody is thinking and feeling and then turn that into something that attracts people to him. So y’all, we’re so grateful to be in community with you. This is not easy, but you will absolutely get through this, and we will suffer together till then and make you laugh along the way. Drew, thank you so much for teaching us today. This has been intensely helpful. Thank you.

Drew: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you and all that you’re doing. Ihope and wish you all the best of luck. And I’m going to tell you a startling statistic that I heard from Roger Federer. So he won 82% of his matches, but he only won 54% of his points. Don’t worry about the points. You have an interview that doesn’t go well, don’t worry about that. It’s the next point, the next interview, the next interview, and just keep working on it and getting better, because eventually, you’ll win. So there it is.

Julie: We’ll win. Thank you all so much for being here today. Have an awesome day. We’ll see you all soon. 

Drew: For more interviews with innovative marketers, visit renegademarketing.com/podcast and hit the subscribe button.

Show Credits
Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!