CMO Pep Talk: How to Own Your Job Search

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!

You’re about to listen to a Bonus Huddle where experts share their insights into the topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles. In this episode, executive recruiter Erica Seidel delivers a CMO pep talk on owning your job search. She offers candid advice on assessing opportunities, setting the right criteria and staying in control through every stage of the hiring process. And I know it’s hard. 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 #1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, 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.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers! I’m excited to reintroduce you to Erica Seidel. Erica is an executive producer par excellence and operates a highly respected boutique. She joined us back in 2023 to talk about career management, and has since launched both a podcast series and a newsletter that I can’t recommend enough, and our live audiences obviously appreciate you, Erica, because they’re showing up for you here. So with that, hello, Erica, how are you and where are you this fine day.

Erica: Hello, Drew. I’m home in Cambridge, outside Harvard Square.

Drew: Alright. I was just in Cambridge, for heaven’s sakes. I should have brought you over. We were at Forrester for a lunch huddle.

Erica: Yeah, I used to work at Forrester.

Drew: There you go. So, one of the things we want to do is just when we start these things today, given the fact everybody’s busy, we want to make sure that we give them three things to think about right away that they may not be thinking about when it comes to CMOs from a hiring perspective. And then you and I can sort of go into those in detail, but perhaps you can just tell us, what’s the reality right now? What are sort of three things CMOs need to be thinking about?

Erica: Being intentional about finding out the culture of a company that you might be joining. Being intentional, broadly speaking, about having an ideal CEO profile or an ideal company profile, that’s one. I think another thing is that you’re on a bit of a tightrope, both when you are looking at roles and trying to become the CMO that gets hired or when you’re in a role. Because, you know, this is a role full of paradoxes, like grow now and grow in the future. I always talk about the peacemaker, change-maker paradox, right? Make change, but also do it in a way that makes peace. Be the creative person, but also be the super analytical person. And I think the third thing is that there’s a lot of emotions, a lot of angst, a lot of career trauma lately. Try to limit emotional leakage with people who are in charge of whether you’re going to get a job or not, and whether you’re going to stay in the job or not. Try to remember the love of the craft and the love of educating people about it. That would be my top three.

Drew: I love it, and we’re going to go through each of those, but yeah, I almost want to start with the third one first, mainly because this is a pep talk. And so if we start there, and we’ll come back to the others, you know, we meet a couple times a month with the transition team, and we try to keep things positive, but it’s hard. So remind us, what about the love of the job part?

Erica: Something interesting about CMOs. Before I started my practice 13-14 years ago, I managed the business at Forrester, which was a CMO group. What I noticed that’s different about CMOs is that you get them in a room together, and you don’t have to do much effort to get them to talk to each other and to learn from each other. That is not always the case in other executive search groups. I don’t know an executive search group outside of a few friends that I have that are very close and that I can talk to about weird situations.

This is not a market, and not a time to go it alone. I think the best people are tapping their networks to help them find jobs, having curated personal boards of advisors before they make decisions, before they have critical meetings or presentations. Even having networks of people that they bring with them from one job to the next, or consultants that they bring to the next. So I think if you lean into the warmth of the community—I know that sounds a little fuzzy—but that can be helpful. And some people do four or five CMO jobs, and then they want to do something else, and that’s okay too.

Drew: It is okay. It is not a life sentence. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your life’s work. I was just thinking about our Super Huddle and life after the CMO role, and what that looks like. But we’re not going to go there. I want to go back to a really important point in the job search process that folks think about, but not necessarily as often as they would if they were in the job. You talked about ICP and identifying the companies that you want to work with. Talk a little bit about what that means. In most cases, it’s round peg, round hole. Most of the hires are like that. I’m wondering if, for you, that’s the same thing. So what does that mean? If I’m a CMO between opportunities, help me think about the ICP and how they should define it.

Erica: Everybody defines it differently. The key thing is having some specific criteria that you are going to use when you evaluate roles. Some people are very open-minded about what they do, but usually it’s easier to be a little more focused. Some people have even a specific pressure-testing playbook.

For example, one of my podcast guests, Tracy Eiler, whenever she looks at a new CMO role, she has certain things she’s looking at. It could be anything: Is there reasonable product-market fit? Do they need to be profitable? Do they need to have a diverse leadership team? They shouldn’t have people all from one company like Dell on the executive leadership team.

It’s usually around the product, the market, the culture, the team, the CEO. Some people are allergic to CEOs who have only been a CEO once. Some people are allergic to founder CEOs. Some people are open to being a CMO as well as a number two. I also help CMOs build their teams. I think a big growth area is what I call CMOs hiring CMOs—people who have been CMOs in one place going to a number two role at perhaps a bigger company.

The key is having specific criteria for what you’re looking for and managing your energy so that you’re putting it towards the roles you are most likely to get. In this industry, CEOs and investors are looking for 11 out of 10 requirements, and in this market, they can usually find that. So if you have specific industry experience in one area, try to leverage that as much as possible because that’s going to help you.

Drew: I am thinking about the last five to 10 CMOs who are on the transition team who got jobs. Every single one, without exception, their new job looked like their old job—same industry, same vertical, and so forth. However, the CMOs that had jobs and moved often took more interesting turns. It’s so interesting—it’s like, “I’ll take a chance on you if you’re employed, but if you’re not employed, you better be 11 out of 10.” Does that match with anything you’re seeing, or is it all about 11 out of 10?

Erica: Seeing a lot of 11 out of 10, I do a lot of private equity-backed work. So, if it’s a much larger company, that might be different. Well, it’s funny. I don’t see companies being too picky about whether somebody is currently employed or not, as long as there’s a valid story. If somebody was, you know, employed for 3-10 years in a row with jobs lasting six months, 10 months, 11 months, that will raise some eyebrows. But, for instance, I have a client recently who said, “Oh, okay, these three people you presented all look decent. And this one, since they’re in between jobs, could join quickly and get the oars in the water quickly,” and that’s a plus. They weren’t concerned that the person was in between jobs.

Drew: So there’s pep talk point number one, which is: you are ready to start tomorrow. That’s a competitive advantage. I love that. So we can focus. Okay, good point, right? That’s a thing. So you’re ready to start tomorrow. And so I think that’s really not an insignificant thing. It’s a mindset thing, because a lot of what we’re talking about is getting into this positive mindset, and you’re dealing with emotional trauma. But the flip side is, boy, if you find the right place and you look like a really good match and you present yourself in the right way, it could happen fast. In theory.

Erica: We’ll have more time to do the prep work that is entailed, because if you have a big job, you will end up having to carve out time between an arduous interview process and the job. So I’ve had a bunch of candidates lately that I’ve said, “Okay, I’m only looking at this one thing,” or “only looking at two things at a time.” So if you’re in between jobs and you use your time wisely, you can research the hell out of companies, do some work to differentiate yourself.

Drew: And let’s talk about that. What is it like for people who you’ve helped place recently? Their level of preparation is probably higher than it was that they needed to do a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. What does that look like? What are they doing?

Erica: One thing they do is very simple: preparing a document or way of communicating for each job they had. Why did they enter it? Why did they leave it? How many people did they manage? What was their progression? For example, join the company at 20 million, help get to 50 million, started with a team of two and a budget of 1 million, and got to a team of 10 and a budget of 4 million. Profitability went from x to y, and this is why I left the company. I think you can do this even if you’re employed.

Another thing is just doing some show and tell. I love it when people come to an interview and say, “Oh, here’s my dashboard,” or “Here’s my ROI model. Let me walk you through this.” Sometimes people will take a leap and say, “Let me take a whack at what this would look like for this company. Here’s a new messaging that might work.” That’s a little dicey because you’re not going to know everything beforehand, but just showing that you want the job and that you’re excited about the job, and that your brain is activating, I think that’s great. It’s almost like if you show somebody some work, they kind of have to come around to your side of the table. It’s like you’re looking at the same thing together and on the same side of the table. So there’s an emotional benefit to that.

Drew: So a lot of things to unpack. One framework that I’ve found that folks have found useful is just hypotheses. It is okay to have hypotheses going into a job—you don’t have the answers, but you have hypotheses based on the research that you’ve done. That is a way of engaging on a strategic level. But I want to make sure that we unpack something you said earlier: there are a lot of things that don’t show up on the resume. So what are those things that don’t show up on the resume that are often asked about in interviews?

Erica: It’s the white space in between jobs. Why did you leave this job and why did you enter this other one? People care, especially early on in a process. They’re very risk-averse. It’s scary to hire, right? It’s like, “Wow, this is a really high-stakes thing, and I’m going to give my growth engine to this person.” I was interviewing Melissa Sargent for my podcast, and she said CMO roles are really “revenue rescue missions.” So if you’re a CEO or an investor considering handing over the growth range—whoever it is, CRO, CMO—it’s going to be a little scary.

Drew: I love the notion that CMOs are on a revenue rescue mission. That certainly speaks to some of the things you were talking about, which is the change maker. The change, particularly for PE firms, is to get more pipeline for less dollars. It’s funny, because everybody on this call knows it’s not just “put a quarter in, boom, pull it out” for more pipeline. There’s a lot that goes into driving more pipeline, a lot of which is hard to measure and will show up in revenue if you’ve done a number of things. Is there good product-market fit? Is everybody articulating the same story? Are they delivering value in conversations to customers? It’s everything the organization does, including how they treat their customers and employees, that will lead to better pipeline—not just something magical that the marketer does. However, there is a perception that CMOs are magicians and can be revenue makers. So how are you seeing CMOs walk that tightrope in an interview, saying, “Oh yeah, I can help you grow revenue” without putting themselves in an impossible situation of promising growth when the problem is probably not marketing?

Erica: Part of it is having an ideal company profile and things to look at, knowing when to say no to a role. Some roles aren’t set up for success. The sooner you figure that out, the better—it’s like knowing it’s far better to break up with the wrong person than to marry the wrong person.

Drew: So far in our pep talk framework, we’re saying that in the PE world, you need to accept certain realities of the job and be perceived as revenue-driving.

Erica: I think the other thing is having a good sense of short-term versus long-term alignment with the role. Often, what investors want, what a CEO wants, what a CRO wants is someone who can just deliver leads this quarter. There’s a pent-up demand for leads—they want the pipe and think about it in terms of leads, which is not necessarily pipeline. How can you get in and say, “Alright, need to focus on this short-term, this long-term. This is what’s going to take. I anticipate the payoff for these initiatives will be one quarter out, three quarters out, or a year out.” Maybe you only focus on short-term stuff, which is a bit like “fast food marketing” versus “farm-to-table marketing.” Many companies sadly need the quick hit, the fast food marketing. So you have to decide: Can I deliver that? Should I deliver that? And how do I talk about the long-term stuff? Do I do it in the background?

Drew: Yeah, this gets me into all sorts of frustrations that I rant about every Saturday. One being short-termism is a death sentence for CMO, because if you spend all your energy on short-term things, you are not doing what marketing can truly do, which is impact employees, customers, and prospects. You’re just looking at prospects who are in the market today. What we’re talking about here is getting a job. So I’m going to say, there is an expression, “In the long term, we’ll all be dead.” So short term is a fine time frame to get the job. One needs to know what levers you can pull in order to have some impact. Short term, I’ll live with that. And I think that probably our audience needs to live with that, right? We can’t have a long-term conversation and make that the basis unless the CEO and the investors say so, which is unlikely to be the case in a PE firm. Let’s talk about when CMOs win, meaning when they get a job and do it right. What were some of the building blocks that you’re seeing? So you place the candidate, or have already gotten them to the job. What’s going well?

Erica: A few different things. They’re providing value quickly, or at least the perception of value quickly. They are showing up well with the board, maybe coming in and saying, “Here’s my hot take. Here are my hypotheses.” They are building relationships internally. CRO is their best friend. CFO is their best friend in many cases. Chief Product Officer is their best friend too. CMOs have to have a lot of friends. They are constantly proving what they’re doing. Give me a small budget, I’ll do a great job, and then I’ll try to get more budget for that. There’s a lot of these cycles of rapid test and learn.

There’s a framework I put together that I think is really relevant when CMOs fail versus when CMOs do a good job. There has to be a straight line from CEO expectations to CMO responsibilities to CMO authority, incentives, and resources. I would add the timeline piece—are you on the same page in terms of short-term and long-term results? Because when a CEO thinks the job is one thing and the actual job is something else, bad things happen. If a CEO has expectations and the CMO doesn’t have the resources to get it done, bad things happen. If there’s an expectation that Rome will be built in a day and it doesn’t get built in a day, bad things happen. But as long as there are conversations about this, the CMO doesn’t end up being the “Chief Marketing Education Officer.” You have to educate, sometimes subtly. Nobody likes being hit with a two-by-four about what the role is. Those are some things that are happening when a person is successful in their role. That’s not surprising, right?

Drew: No, no. I mean, it’s, it’s not. I mean, the first chapter of my, you know, in CMOS, periodic table was about expectations and getting them right. If you don’t, it’s like a full stop. If your expectations are misaligned with the CEO and the board, it doesn’t matter what else you do. The notion of showing progress is funny. It goes back to a conversation that we had with Michael Watkins first 100 days about showing progress, but sometimes the showing progress is on a little thing that you could make a decision on and just got it done while you’re trying to figure out the bigger things and building that. I wonder. It’s funny, because I the relationship building and having being friends. You know, this is the sort of Never Eat Alone kind of strategy, but everybody’s remote, so it’s a little harder right now. So you really have to work harder, and it may mean you need to have to get on a plane to make sure that you break bread with every single executive at least once in the first quarter, just to make sure that you listen to them and listen being probably the most important thing of all of it, so when they fail. So we the successful thing. We’ve sort of, we’ve got, we have alignment. We’re showing progress. We built these relationships. What’s When? When it’s not working? Obviously, it’s the opposite of those things. But is there anything else we need to think about, from what you’re seeing, and why CMOS fail, and it fail is even the right word.

Erica: Well, right? That’s it. It’s failed the right word. And because a lot of what I see is companies saying, you know, is it the market or the marketer, growth is off? What’s the you know, where should we point the finger? And sometimes they’re pointing at the CMO, VP marketing, Head of Marketing, whatever you call it. And sometimes that’s not the right place to point. Sometimes it’s just, you know, the vibe can be on.

Drew: So it’s interesting, because right now, I think it’s like 70% of B to B brands are seeing longer sales cycles and slower close rates. You’re going to lay that on the CMO. It’s a go to market strategy. It’s a problem, and it’s also macro issues, but no one accepts those. So if we just look at it and say, we have longer sales cycles and we have worse close rates, we have a go to market problem, yeah. And you know, I think the CMO who can seize on that and say, okay, through a combination of things, we could make our product more appealing and easier to buy. From a combination of service standpoint, we could improve our reputation and make it easier for us to close. It’s just, it’s a reality right now that there’s this notion that you can simply put a message out there. If you do the message, get the message right and put it in the right places, you’re going to grow the business. It’s too complicated for service. Latest research is 22 people on the buying committee. Nine are not even in the company. So it’s, you know, again, this is a very, very complicated world.

Erica: I think there’s a really big difference between I have a marketing problem and we have a go to market problem. I remember this is great guy, Justin Steinman, and he always talks about, it’s not my marketing budget, it’s our marketing budget. So, like, you’ll meet with the ELT. How do we want to spend our marketing budget? And that is a there’s a slight difference there, but I think that can make all the difference so that you’re not pointing the finger at like one person that’s like, you know, this is our problem.

Drew: our problem well, and that, by the way, is really important in in the scheme of things, because you’ve got crazies out there saying, Nope, I want marketing to commit X, I want sales to commit y, I want partners to commit Z. In terms of, say, pipeline, when, in fact, it’s going to take at least sales and marketing together to close. There’s no such thing as a purchase today that doesn’t touch them. Marketing doesn’t touch it’s it’s lunacy to think about that. So if we’re just talking about first touch or something like that, it still feels problematic.

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Drew: Let’s get back to I’m a CMO right now, I happen to be between opportunities. What are some of the things that I can do before I have an interview and during an interview to increase the chances that I can land the role that I want to land.

Erica: So we’ve talked about a couple of them already. You know, conquering your career trauma, developing a kind of ideal role profile, or ideal CR CEO profile, and putting your energy where it’s likely to be kind of matched and valued, also figuring out, do you actually want to be the CMO, or do you want to be a CMO? Call it minus one, like somebody reporting to a CMO, maybe at a bigger company. You know, sometimes the compensation is, you know, quite similar. And you know, the role can be, you know, just as medium, just as interesting, maybe just as big of a budget. And you know, you don’t want your ego to get in a way of a potentially good job.

So once you’re in the interview process, as empathy for those lofty expectations, in a sense, because I know you said this a pep talk, in a sense, the fact that you know a CEO and investors, they have really high expectations on marketing. That’s great, right? That means that marketing, you know, is kind of like the, you know, the area that they’re really looking at to grow the business, and they’re not just putting it in the corner. And the fact that there’s so much scrutiny, you know, again, it just it means that it the role is valued. So have empathy for those lofty expectations. And I’d say, know when to rise to them and know when maybe they’re a little bit too lofty. Everybody has to kind of do their own due diligence there, like we were talking about before you asked about white space. Had off concern about that white space on your resume. Sometimes if, if you have been re recruited from a previous company, or, like, a previous boss has re recruited you, or previous colleague has re recruited you. That’s amazing. I love to see that. Like to, you know, it kind of gives social proof. And then I would also say, you know, like, anticipate in the process that there can be a hairpin turn from, do you know, marketing to, do you speak investor, right? So that’s another thing, just to be aware of. Also, you know, finally, I would say, top of the recruiter like, some of the best questions I get are things like, hey, like, what did the rest of the candidate pool look like? How do I compare? What are any, any concerns that you have about my candidacy?

Drew: And hopefully the recruiter will be honest.

Erica: Well, yeah, I mean, I, you know, it’s like, you just want to know what’s, what’s the shape of things? Obviously, a recruiter can’t tell you, Oh, there’s this person, and they came from this company, but they can help, sometimes a little bit more than you think. Again, this is the kind of the don’t go it alone. Have your board of advisors, you know, type of group.

Drew: So we have a question from the audience, which is, and I’ll just read it to you. You spoke to the holistic factors that drive revenue growth and successful companies. I either a lot of things going right, not just marketing. Any thoughts on how to frame that experience as an applicant when you know we had a great product, we had great sales, we have great marketing. How much credit should the individual take in the to from statements.

Erica: I think that there is value in the market to being associated with a company that had a good scale up story. You know, if you were at company XYZ, as they scaled from, you know, whatever, 50 million to 300 million. And you know, a company that ipoed, there’s going to be a halo effect on. On you, rightly or wrongly, right? Because maybe at scale despite your marketing contribution, maybe at scale because of partnership benefits, or maybe the overall market was growing three times the rate at your company. But still, I mean, take the win, you know, like you know, declare success. And because even if it wasn’t so much about marketing, you saw scale right? Like you if you see a company at, you know, two or three different points in time, then you know the implication is, like, okay, you can manage a team of five people, and then you can manage a team of 10 people, and then a manage a team of, you know, 20 people, and as budgets increase, this is kind of where you’re going to put extra money and how you’re going to evolve the team over time. Like, that’s all related whether or not the company scale because of you.

Drew: And I suspect, and you tell me that, that you can also, as you talk about, let’s say, 50 to 100 million. You can say, here are the things that I learned that were really important, and how different it was at 50 versus 100 and something that you learned as a result of it, even if you’re not, you know, yes, you were there. You can, you know, you were the head of marketing during that period. And you might as well take credit for the results that happened, because everybody else will. But, you know, I think it is fair at some point to say marketing, like everything else, is a team sport. And it was really important that sales was aligned and product was aligned, and our customer service was aligned, and we were all focused on, you know, we had this, whatever that really was behind the success of the company, so that you can speak to this larger notion.

Okay, now we have another question, which is, how real is this notion that some CEOs just don’t have an appreciation of what a great cmo can bring to the table. Let’s start with the fact that less than 20% of CEOs spend a day in marketing. So that’s one if we’re talking startup CEOs, first time CEOs, when would they have gotten experience as a marketer? Doesn’t happen, so, but they all watch the Super Bowl. So yes, they know marketing. You know, I I increasingly unimpressed with the savvy of the CEOs at startups that I see in terms of marketing.

Erica: And unfortunately, the onus then is on the marketer to start speaking CEO, CFO, investor, and less on the other side to learn marketing. But it also means that as a as a marketing leader, you have to be clear about what metrics you share when, and you know how much in detail you go into the, you know, the vanity metrics versus, you know, value metrics, etc.

Drew: And it’s interesting because, in a B2B versus a B2C company, let’s just take Procter and Gamble or Coca-Cola. It’s almost unimaginable that the CEO would not have spent some time in marketing, given how important marketing is to the selling of sugared water or the sell, you know, and so at P&G, you come up through it. But the fundamental difference is, when you’re a product manager, you have a P&L, and very few CMOs in B2B have a P&L. So that’s, I mean, that is the challenge and the big fundamental difference. Two things. So what about this? So right now, obviously, Gen AI is taking over everything. You know, there’s no doubt that it’s going to impact almost every aspect of work life. How important is CMO savviness on generative AI in and in showing in the hiring process. And are you seeing that now? And if so, what are some of the successful candidates showing?

Erica: Well, we were talking about it before. It’s like this arc of, you know, curiosity or enthusiasm, and then, you know, getting into experimentation. A lot of people are just at the kind of experimentation stage, but some of them are showing some efficiencies, and that’s good. And to your point, Drew, maybe, like, that’s not the right, you know, kind of metric for it. So, you know, I haven’t yet had a CEO say, “Oh, you know, I want the CMO to show how they can have a team that’s half the size, leveraging more AI, to kind of get there and achieve the same thing they do.” Talk about doing more with less, right? And so there’s a lot of ways to do more with less, but I’m curious about people, you know, on the, you know, I see there’s a lot of, you know, comments coming up, you know, from people who are more in the roles and such.

Drew: Yeah, and I think it’s just a matter of time. It’s right, whether it’s, you know, in the three months or six months, but particularly as the stories come out, we had Lisa Gately from Forrester join us, and she talked about how one of the companies was able to, I think, as a result of just streamlining certain processes, it was the equivalent of 14 full-time employees that they were able to sort of now, it wasn’t necessarily just marketing and so forth, but there’s efficiencies waiting to happen on all sorts of areas, and we’re seeing it in our community in terms of how the CMOs are using generative AI. And I’m just gonna make one other point. Because I can’t help myself, which is, we’re beyond experimentation at this point, or should be where it’s not go play anymore. It’s go solve a meaningful problem that the organization has, or that we in marketing have, and figure and once we set those things, then we can figure out, okay, so how do we use Gen AI to solve that problem and help us. And that feels like a really enlightened step, and that, if we’re thinking about a maturity model, that’s the big step from go play, which is go plan, you know, go solve a big problem anyway. So right now, as you’re seeing, it’s not showing up. That doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t in a month or two.

Erica: You know, because CMOs are seen as like the innovation people and the bring new stuff into the company. I think some people are saying, “Oh, okay, I now have this, you know, on top of everything else in marketing, I also have to, you know, be the kind of shepherd for AI and how the organization is going to use AI.” And some people are very happy to, like, you know, take on that, that mantle.

Drew: Yes, it feels like it is a mantle that a CMO can take up. And I know that Lauren Boyman at KPMG was a sort of, is on the internal adoption committee, and one was a leader of that. We talked about that at an event a year ago, and so, but it’s as far as I’m concerned, it puts the CMO on another plane. It’s not just, “Hey, you’re the marketing person,” but you’re also the organizational change driver that will enable us to be more competitive in the future. And that feels a lot bigger than, you know, drive some leads.

Drew: Yeah. Isabelle Papoulias, come on down.

Erica: Hi Isabelle!

Isabelle: Hey, Erica. How are you? I was just—it’s so great to see you here. You’re the best, seriously, small world. Yeah, I just wanted to provide—I’m a focus group of one, but I’m in three different interview cycles right now. And I mean, not even now, but I mean, AI has never come up with a single company in my interview process, which I find fascinating and just food for thought for everyone here. I, it doesn’t come up until I bring it up. And I think that’s definitely extra points, but it’s interesting to see how like CEOs are, I mean, at least the ones I talked to, are not thinking about this. And I think the opportunity, like you said, Drew, is not to just to bring it up in the conversation, in the context of how marketing uses it, and, you know, productivity and stuff, but it’s broader. What’s your AI philosophy for integrating it within the organization to help you meet your objectives as a company. And how does that trickle down by function? And I’m completely stealing this from Tani, by the way, who did a webinar a few weeks ago, right? But that CRO philosophy on how to think about it enterprise, why? Why it is helping me having conversations with CEOs when I’m seeing that AI is totally not on the radar.

Drew: Yeah, it would feel that way. Isabelle, that knowing it, understanding it. And this gets back to something Erica, you and I were talking about—the different efficiency is a short-term thing, and it does, and it sounds great, but I think opportunity to be better, faster, not just faster or, you know, yes, you could talk about efficiency, but it’s about efficiency towards what gain, and if your marketing is more effective and efficient, go you, right? But you know, the challenge is that so many folks went on ChatGPT early on, asked it to write something—it was pretty mediocre, and they walked away. It’s like, “No, it’s not about content creation.” So this is the one huddle that I think CMOs are facing, which is those people who are Gen AI just aware enough about generative AI to say, “Oh yeah, you can create stuff with it” to think, “Oh well, I don’t need an agency anymore. I don’t need copywriters anymore.” And that is, you know, is pretty far from the truth. So there is a, again, a maturity model that I think the CMO has an opportunity to lead. So thank you for that. Andy De, Andy, you have a question?

Andy: No, I was going to respond to that with a very contrarian perspective. The AI landscape is changing so fast that they’re grappling. They’re trying to figure out what their AI strategy should be. And by the way, Gen AI is reaching a point of diminishing returns, and AI is far more than Gen AI.

Drew: No doubt about that. I don’t think anybody’s arguing that it’s just transformative and interesting. Well, but my question is, Andy, are you seeing this in the marketplace?

Andy: It got me my last job. The job I landed was because I am a thought leader in AI.

Drew: So you fully embraced it, you read it right, and you were able to get a job as a result of that. Awesome. Ellie Ahmadi, your question.

Ellie: Hi, Erica, good to see you. Hi, Elly, hello. When I was reading a lot of job descriptions, my question is not the tactics, but are there truly differences in skill sets? When job descriptions say, “I’m looking for a CMO who has scaled from zero to 10 million or 10 to 50 and 50 to one,” the tactics could be different than the way we think about marketing, but are the skill sets really different?

Drew: Great question. Love that.

Erica: Between a zero to 10 and a 60 to 100…

Ellie: CMO who has scaled zero to X, because the job descriptions get so specific. I’m looking for a CMO to scale the company, regardless of the vertical, regardless of environment.

Erica: I have a client who said, at one point, because I was getting wrapped up in the whole, “Oh, this person has scaled from 10 to 20, but not 15 to 30,” or whatever. And he was like, “I want somebody with experience at a big company, who knows how it’s done, and also experience at a small company.” And I was like, “I can do that. No problem.” And so often that’s the spirit behind it. You can work in a bigger organization, and you’ve seen what happens once a company scales. You maybe have seen best of breed and have a nice network, and you’ve shown that you can roll up your sleeves. Sometimes that’s all it is. Sometimes people get very specific about it.

I wrote a couple of articles about this—the pros and cons—because, again, you could have a company that scales from 30, but the marketing team is more akin to a $100 million company, or your marketing team could be more akin to a $5 million company. So you can get kind of wrapped up about whether this candidate is absolutely the right one. And then in the end, it often comes down to: Can we picture this person in the role? Do they have the oomph to do this job? I think it’s a kind of silly reason to ding somebody if they have relevant experience in scaling, even if it’s not absolutely specifically what the company is planning to do.

Drew: Yeah, it is this 11 out of 10 thing. Well, you know, if I can find someone who’s done 50 to 100 million, great. And I’ve seen this now in the transition team, where someone said, “Well, it was 50 to 100, now they want someone who’s 50 to 500,” and they saw that as a completely different thing. And it’s frustrating, because they’re building blocks. At the end of the day, you’re going to hire, set a strategy, hire great people, and allocate resources—and it’s the same job. Unfortunately, that isn’t the hiring environment we’re dealing with right now.

So Erica, before we let these lovely people go and we promised a pep talk, let’s give them sort of three positive things to be thinking about in their moment of transition.

Erica: Positive things: You probably have more capability for a role than you think, and just by talking to people, you might surface things. For instance, I’ve interviewed people and said, “Oh, why’d you move from this company to this one?” They’d say, “Oh, I got recruited.” Or “My former boss went to this company and recruited me.” They didn’t know that was such a juicy thing for me to hear.

Some people have talked about joining a company and then scaling. Some can be very lackadaisical about it. And I’m saying, “Oh my goodness, wow, you’ve done this huge thing. I didn’t realize that.” Sometimes the experience is just right there under your fingers.

The other thing is, you only need one job. There’s less frustration or stigma to being between roles. That’s good. Some people are taking a while to find their next step, are out a little longer than expected, but then they’re very happy when they do land.

I think the other thing is that some years are not about work so much. Some years are more about personal milestones and personal messes and other things, and just knowing that work is one part of your life. Some years you’re packing in three years of career development, and other years it’s a little less, hopefully evening out over time.

Drew: I love this, because there’s such an aura of positivity: You’re more capable than you think, and don’t beat yourself up for what you didn’t do. Just remind yourself of the things that you have accomplished. Don’t undersell your capabilities.

You talked about focus being your friend and the fact that you just need one job, so you don’t need to pursue 100 necessarily. And then these personal milestones—I love that. The British have an expression called “garden leave,” where they’re off for six months or a year, just taking a walkabout, as the Australians would say. You don’t have to apologize for these things. They are very acceptable.

I think the last thing is to give yourself a little grace because it does take time. It does take time. So, Erica also talked about the need to prep, because you only need one job, but you might see the job that you need to prepare for and be able to answer some questions and fill in the white space. No excuse not to.

By the way, the whole purpose of our transition team is to make sure that you’re not doing this alone. For those of you in transition: Come check it out. You have a free month in our program, and you’ll get a lot of value just out of that. Our whole goal is to help you structurally work with others so that you’re not going it alone.

Erica, thank you so much for joining us.

Erica: Thank you, Drew.

Drew: If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

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!