Adam Grenier: evaluation

Transcript context

…Not anymore. Oh man. Okay, sweet. So, onto this next topic around the Growth CMO. So, you're this really interesting combination of marketing brain and also very analytical growth person, and I think you refer to this as Growth CMO, which I don't actually hear the term much. So, I'm curious, what is a Growth CMO? How do you define it? And why is it important? Yeah, so it's something I've just spent a lot of the last few years thinking about, specifically because now I've been at a handful of companies where we've brought in CMOs that in all ways are absolute world class CMOs, and they don't last, they don't fit and they don't succeed. And so I've spent a lot of time and figuring, well, why not? Some of it coming because of spending time with those people being like, "Why are you doing it this way? That's not how a company at our stage operates." Trying to do it the way that a traditional CMO would've done marketing for a company, et cetera. One of the key examples I like to use is brand, in that everybody when they think about brand they think of it as an action, not as a consistent ongoing investment, or they think about it as campaigns and things like that. And from planning to execution to learnings, a traditional CMO will drive learnings and identify learnings. And in my mind, I think a Growth CMO is looking at each brand investment as how do you then immediately follow that up with the next one? How do you shift to this fast product iteration mindset with even things like brand? It's very possible, but it's so counter to a lot of traditional marketing DNA. That, to me, means that we have a lot of mismatch marketing leadership, and that quickly eliminates trust with the marketing organization. It means that we rename everything marketing to product led growth, or growth, or referral programs. To me, it actually dilutes the value of marketing should be playing in the company. And it doesn't mean that the traditional marketing CMO isn't a good fit for some companies. I think the direct to consumer products are still very well suited to have a more traditional CMO. But I think product driven companies, product led companies, if you are CMO and your product leader aren't married at the hip, you're just missing out on just tons of opportunity, and the likelihood of things actually working very well consistently and compounding on each other. So, what are the attributes of this person of what you call a Growth CMO? Sounds like partly it's being much more performance driven. Sounds like a big part of it is understanding product and not creating these silos. We're going to market the thing, you guys go build this thing. But also as a person, that's a great CMO. What else do you look for?…

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