What CMOs Get Wrong About Career Transitions

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketer! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today’s episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we’re doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We’re also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they’re gone. I promise you we will sell out and it’s going to be flocking awesomer!

Welcome to Huddles Quick Takes, our Tuesday Spotlight series where we share key insights from CMO Huddles’ Bonus Huddles. Today, we’re featuring a conversation with Catherine Altman Morgan about career management. She’s seen it all in just 20 minutes. Catherine reveals the career mistakes that haunt CMOs most, especially when they wait until they’re laid off to build their personal brands. Let’s get started.

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.

Drew: I’m excited. Joining us today is Catherine Morgan, a career coach specializing in transitions. In her book, which I read over the weekend, “This Isn’t Working” – nice little pun going on there – she describes her personal brand as “appropriately irreverent, inspiring action.” We’ll be testing that today, but it should make for an amazing and fun conversation. Now, speaking of her book, it’s a breath of fresh air as it goes through all of the toxins many found in many work environments and offers strategies for overcoming them.

In our conversation today, we’re going to talk about two areas that I know are of interest to some of you more than others. So first is career management, which I know is of interest to all of you, both here and in the audience later. And then the other one is how CMOs can set themselves up for long-term success. That’s part one, and the second part is just career transitions: when to consider one and how to make the leap. So you’re a CMO now, and tomorrow you want to be something else. How does that happen? So two topics, one podcast, one interview: career management and career transition. Lot to cover with that. Hello, Catherine, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Catherine: Hi, Drew. I’m doing great, and I am here in Sweet Home, Chicago.

Drew: All right. And are you feeling appropriately irreverent?

Catherine: Every day.

Drew: All right, well, just in case, we have a nice audience here with us. And then, of course, later in the podcast, if they want to leave early, let’s convince them to stay. Can you provide three things CMOs typically get wrong when thinking about career management? Give me the topic, and then we’ll go through them one by one.

Catherine: I don’t know if they typically get them wrong. But I want to make sure that they don’t do these things. Okay, these seem like very smart, successful people, so maybe they’re not doing them wrong, but maybe some other people who aren’t on the podcast are doing this:

1. Not keeping your resume and LinkedIn profile current. I don’t care how busy you are, I don’t care what’s going on. I don’t care if you feel really safe in your job, you need to keep your resume and LinkedIn profile current. If you are a white-collar professional, full stop, okay.
2. Not positioning yourself as an expert on LinkedIn. You have expertise. You have a point of view of marketing. You have success stories. You have things that could be done better, keeping your thought leadership and demonstrating how you think on LinkedIn – it’s a non-negotiable for the level of professional who’s on this live stream.
3. Not staying in touch with former managers and colleagues. Because guess what? Everything old is new again, and the best way to find a job is still getting recommended into it or getting hired by a past manager who loved you.

Drew: I love these three, and it’s a great place to start. I’ve heard all the excuses about not keeping the resume. I’m just too busy. Why is it so important to just keep that LinkedIn profile up to date?

Catherine: First of all, if a recruiter calls you for a dream job and wants to back up the money truck, you might want to be ready to send them your resume and not say, “Oh, you know, I haven’t updated it recently,” or “It’s still a work in progress,” or blah blah blah. That’s not coming from a position of power. You want to be able to send that baby and be very confident that it’s going to present you in the way you want. Ditto for LinkedIn. I actually believe that LinkedIn is as important, or more important than your resume, because there isn’t a human who’s going to have a conversation with you at this level and not look you up on LinkedIn first. Your LinkedIn profile has to be buttoned up.

Drew: And so just with sort of every three months, every six months, at least annually, what’s the approach? Again, it’s all about time management.

Catherine: When something changes. But how hard is it to add something? This is a living document. It’s not static. If you just got an award, or if you just launched a new product, or if you just had a big success with your agency – just add another bullet into your current thing. Like, it’s not hard. How much time will that take? Three minutes to massage the words. It’s not a big time commitment.

Drew: Okay, all right, so we’re going to keep our resumes and LinkedIn profiles up to date at some interval. That makes sense based on the news that you’re bringing. Okay, number two, not positioning your expertise on LinkedIn. This is something that I’ve noticed when I talk to folks that are in transition – the two biggest regrets they have are one, that they didn’t spend any time building their personal brands and their content around, and number two is that they didn’t keep up with their network, right? Which are your number two and three of your points. But let’s talk about this. I mean, all of the folks on this call are smart, strategic, data-driven leaders who drive organizational change. Okay? And yet, that doesn’t sound very distinctive, right?

Catherine: It’s generic words, but there’s some point of view that you have, some way that you approach your work, some depth of industry expertise that you bring. When LinkedIn added the Features section at the top of profiles where you can embed media, to my mind, that’s what made LinkedIn more important than a personal website for people at this point. Nobody’s going to do that extra click to go to your website. But when you can embed media – a recent media mention, a recent PowerPoint deck, a recent video, a recent podcast you were on – like executives are often front-facing people. If you have something in that featured section, then you’re saying, “Well, nobody’s going to look at that.” And I’m going to tell you, you are wrong. A VP of sales that I worked with recently got her job because the CEO listened to a podcast she was on, and it was a random thing that I made her do. She’d never done one before, and she crushed it, and she got a job because of that.

Drew: Amazing. Wait, that’s kind of like marketing. You know, you’re out there, you’re getting exposure. Marketing works, but you have to apply it yourself. I want to go back to this notion of no personal website, because I get that question a lot. So LinkedIn, essentially, is the surrogate personal website. And your advice to the CMOs here is?

Catherine: You know, if you want to do it and you enjoy it, and you have the money and the time, have at it. But as you well know, because you’re marketing professionals, nobody’s going to go to it. So if you’re not driving traffic to your website, nobody’s going to go to it. Well, everybody who has a conversation with you will go to LinkedIn. Yes, they will. I think it’s a vanity metric, like, especially if you’re trying to stay in corporate, if you’re looking to, you know, if you’re testing the waters to go out as a consultant, we might have a slightly different conversation. But when people are looking to make investments and going the consulting route, I steer them back from the website. That’s not one of the things I think they first go to market with, because you don’t know your value proposition yet, you don’t know your ideal clients, you’ll just have to redo the whole thing anyway.

Drew: So let’s stay on this positioning theme a little bit deeper. Give an example, not just of someone being on a podcast, but someone you’ve worked with, or that you think of where as a marketing leader, their position was distinctive.

Catherine: Oh, I have a good one for this. I worked with someone who was, depending on the size of the company, you know, Director, VP, CMO-type level person, and her—we were digging around for her sweet spot. She was a marketer who actually loved working with sales. And you can probably back me up on this, there’s often a lot of clashing between sales and marketing. Sales thinks marketing has no firsthand experience, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Marketing thinks sales are entitled babies—like there’s a lot of friction in a lot of organizations between sales and marketing. But she actually loved working with sales people, hearing what they were doing in the field, empowering them with collateral and talking points and what they needed to be successful. And I thought that was very powerful and a true differentiator.

Drew: It is a place that you can go deep on, and that’s the key thing. I mean, I actually know a number of CMOs in our community that are really into that, but not all of them go deep there. So when we talk about that positioning and so forth, it’s a moment I feel like we should just talk about headlines on LinkedIn, because I look at a lot of headlines on LinkedIn of CMOs, and they all say the same thing.

Catherine: Data-driven marketing expert boosting profits for leading brands.

Drew: Right. I struggle with that, because the response is, “Well, someone said those are all the keywords that are being searched.” And I struggle with that because, you know, it’s a generic statement, and you’re not generic people. So what is the fine line? And should we even be thinking about searchability in the headline versus differentiation?

Catherine: Oh, yes, oh yes, we should, but we have about 200 characters, I think, to do it in. So what I would do, or what I like to do with people, is to come up with, you know, Chief Marketing Officer, you want that in there, right? And then maybe the industries that you specialize in, or your secret sauce around it. You can add some personality into it. There’s enough room. It is the most important piece of real estate on the internet—your headline. Like, if somebody only reads that, they should more or less know who you are and what you do.

Drew: We’ve talked about this before in other bonus Huddles, but there is a reason why you have to spell out Chief Marketing Officer, because LinkedIn search is not very good. I’m just going to put a thing on it, CMO might come up as Chief Medical Officer. So you really need to put CMO if you haven’t used the title. But if you’ve been the leader of marketing, can you still put Chief Marketing Officer?

Catherine: No, you can put marketing leader, marketing, Senior Marketing Executive. Don’t lie, folks. Everything is find-outable. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. You can always put a niche around it so that it shows you in the best possible light. But if you want to be cheeky, say aspiring CMO—that would be accurate.

Drew: Right. Aspiring Chief Marketing Officer, right? So you show up in the search.

Catherine: Yeah. And then you can put in parentheses, CMO, so that you hit for both. And I agree with you, Drew. I think I just tell people, computers are stupid—make it easy for them.

Drew: Right. Okay, so headlines are really important. Find and make sure that there’s some element of differentiation at some point—what your secret sauce is. Okay? I want to go now to the third point, which is not staying in touch with former managers, colleagues. One of the things that I’ve heard a lot of CMOs say during the interview process is that they are asking for two bosses, two peers, and two direct reports as references anyway, and they’re going to do back-door searching if you don’t give them the names. So there’s a logical reason to always be in the thing. But I just want to sort of add a little bit about why this is important for folks in transition who are already in transition. You know, that’s like the first step—go back to all these people.

Catherine: Yeah, I get it, but it can feel a little awkward to reach out to people if you hadn’t talked to them in five years, or maybe you had a very good relationship with them. And you know, if it has been five years and you’ve just been nose to the grindstone, or had some stuff going on in your life and you couldn’t keep up—don’t let that make you hesitate to reach out to people, because to date, I have not had anybody get snapped at or get a bad response from somebody who they hadn’t talked to in 10 years. I had to do this myself to get a client an introduction to somebody. I had to reach out to somebody I hadn’t talked to in 10 years. And yes, it’s squishy. You feel a little awkward, but couldn’t happen nicer. And that’s usually what happens. You may not get a response, but you hit them when they were busy or something. It usually has nothing to do with you. They meant to respond, and then they had a fire drill because that happens. Like, don’t take it personally, but you also the best opportunities you will likely be referred into by somebody, or you’ll need them, as you said, as a reference, Drew. Like, it’s very important to keep your references warm, because, once again, it’s a little squishy. Reaching out to people. “Hi, remember when we worked together eight years ago? I’m going to be interviewing for this job, and can I use you as a reference?”

Drew: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, the hard part, and the unfortunate part, is they’re going to figure out who you work for and find the connections they’re doing back-door anyway. So it’s just another reason why you have to preemptively reach out to both, and there may be some people in your background who aren’t fans that you may need to touch base with and revisit. You know, you may have had a wrong impression, or you thought you were interested.

Catherine: If you were a decent human, there’s friction in the office—not a news flash—but if you were more or less a decent human, time tends to heal those things. So don’t assume that they remember it that way, or that they even care. Especially after COVID, people are dying to connect. I would assume that the relationship is good, unless you hit the flame thrower on the way out.

Drew: I’m going to touch base on one point. So you talked about reaching out. They might be busy, and they might have one little trick that I do, because occasionally I’ll reach out to someone that I hadn’t talked to in several years: I copy blind copy myself on it. I hit the snooze button for exactly one week so it’s in my inbox, and it reminds me, in one week, I’m going to reach out to them again. And I do that twice, because think about frequency. You need 3x is a lot better than 1x, and, you know, we’re all overwhelmed with email. If you have their cell phone number, and I’m interested in your opinion, I often will text, if I have their cell phone number. There’s a certain intimacy there; I will text them first, because I’m like, I get 5x response on text versus phones. What’s your thought?

Catherine: I don’t have one. I like your idea. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn messenger, but another lot of people aren’t, because that gives people the opportunity to say, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of her in a while. What’s she doing?” Like, they can do a little background on you from that. The texting thing, yes, if you have their cell phone, that relationship is at a different level. So sure, reach out and text people. Most people are good with that.

Drew: I agree. And again, I’m thinking campaign management here. It is not inappropriate to send them an email, send them a message on LinkedIn. Maybe you stagger it by a day and/or text them, you know, because at that point in time they kind of know their sense of urgency, and they go, “Okay, I got to do it.” We did have one comment. They said they’re adding “decent human” to their LinkedIn profile. I love that. Thank you for that.

Catherine: You’ll hear me use that a lot, because that is a metric for happiness in the workplace. If you more or less work with decent humans, you’re going to have a better work experience.

Drew: Okay, so, all right, we’ve covered those things pretty well. I think there’s a flip side of this, which is, I know that a lot of CMOs regret not taking a headhunter’s call while they have a job or not helping a former colleague when they had the opportunity. There’s a quid pro quo—you’ve got to make some deposits in the goodwill bank while you’re going along, right? I mean, that seems obvious, but it doesn’t always happen.

Catherine: No, let me dog pile on that. So it’s good to think of it as research. Don’t you want to know what’s going on in the marketplace? Don’t you want to hear who’s hiring and how much? Maybe you’re grossly underpaid, or maybe there’s an opportunity you hadn’t considered. And yes, creating goodwill with executive recruiters at your level is one good avenue for finding your next job. Or you may be in a place to refer a colleague to a recruiter, which also builds goodwill. Like, you’re right, it’s a deposit in the karma bank, as I call it. Take it when you want to be in your job for five years, never had an interview, find yourself on the street, and you’re like, “Oh my God, kill me now. How am I going to do this?” Like, keep it current. It’s a muscle.

Drew: So just staying with the recruiters for a moment, we know that maybe one in four jobs will come that way. The rest are going to be your network. But the thing about the recruiter is, if you help, if one places you in another job, you have financial value to you. Two, if you’ve referred somebody they were able to place, you have financial value that ensures you will get your phone call returned when you need them. And it’s as simple as that. That’s the formula. Help them now while you have a job, okay? So taking interviews is a great thought, just to do it, just to stay fresh.

Catherine: Make a friend. By the way, that also builds your network. But if you find out about a job, maybe it’s not for you, but maybe you refer a person, and once again, you’re building goodwill and extending your network. Like, this is just a win-win.

Drew: Yeah, take the interview. I love that idea, and there’s so many good things that can come of it. You help build a relationship. You can help those people. It’s a very helping notion of again, karma.

That’s our Huddles quick take for today with Catherine Morgan. In the full Bonus Huddle, we also explored overcoming nose-to-the-grindstone syndrome, dealing with toxic work environments, and how to productize yourself. To continue watching right where this episode left off, visit the CMO Huddles Hub on YouTube. We’ve included a time-stamped link in the episode description that picks up exactly where we’re ending.

Now to get more Catherine Morgan, I highly recommend reading her book, “This Isn’t Working.” There’s a lot of good laughs in there and great advice. And follow her on LinkedIn. And if you want to participate in future Bonus Huddles, visit cmohuddles.com to join our free starter program. I’m Drew Neisser, and we’ll be back with another Huddles quick take very soon.

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!