How to become a CMO.

I’m going to tell you how I became a CMO. And then I’m going to share a secret.

The path to the top.

There are three paths to take in a marketing career.

Two are specialized paths. On the summit of one, a leadership position in Growth. On the other, a position in Brand/Marketing. (/Let’s assume these climb up a mountain).

The 3rd path ends up splitting the middle, overseeing both Growth & Marketing functions, but as of today usually has the title Chief Marketing Officer.

What my useless degree in Marketing didn’t teach me:

Skill stacking.

Marketing as a department is increasingly a collective of specialists across disparate functions. Therefore the best marketing leaders have to have a breadth of knowledge that allows them to guide and support these individual functions while operating them together as one.

I came across the term “skill-stacking” recently which means to combine skills over time in order to add more value. What a great term! This is basically the summation of my journey so far.

Over the years I’ve held roles in analytics, strategy, social, branding, product marketing, and even business development. I’ve worked in Media, in Agencies, and now in-house.

I’ve taken on side projects where I learned to code with Javascript and Angular or design in Illustrator and Figma. Heck, I even got my Real Estate license and learned how to be a salesperson.

I’m not great at any of these things! But, I’m good enough - because I stayed in each for at least 2-3 years - to build a team, identify opportunities, call out bullshit, and even roll up my sleeves in most of the functions within the modern marketing team.

Swim in a smaller sea.

Inside a company like Unilever the Brand Manager track is cemented in the org. There are hundreds of them - each with an MBA. I won’t even go into my disdain for MBA programs here.

So long as you thrive with a high amount of ownership, join a startup. There will be less competition, more skill stacking, and you can find your way closer to the top faster.

You may have to leave and join another startup with an empty chair in the C-suite to really be the highest marketing leader but they’ll appreciate your startup background nonetheless.

Embrace your inner salesperson.

Your job as the head of marketing is not just to manage your direct reports but to manage up and across the org by protecting and advocating for your team constantly. You even have to learn the art of satisfying a board.

I had to learn to rewire my brain that my role isn’t to prove how smart I am or how deep my knowledge of our data went. My role was to instill confidence which paradoxically meant saying less and simplifying complex strategies into headlines and singular charts or tables.

Become a good salesperson by becoming a better storyteller.

Get lucky and take the risk.

The first head of marketing role I took on was offered to me by the husband of a previous boss I had. They took a risk on me even though I had never run a full marketing team before. However, it wasn’t pure luck and nothing was handed to me. My previous boss liked and respected me enough to vouch for me because I worked my ass off while reporting to her.

At the same time, I took a risk just as much as they did. During my interview process, I walked into a 1000 sqft office with shitty coffee brewing and the only half pint of milk in the fridge had curdled when I poured it. Don’t even ask if they had 401k or free health insurance. I took the job anyway.

My secret.

I recently took an EQ test and found out that I rank quite low for self-regard (although high in confidence). I think it’s a combination of imposter syndrome and insatiable ambition. Not really sure what I’m going to do about this - but anyway! - the point is I lied earlier.

At the beginning of this post, I described three paths to take each with its own summit. If that analogy held true I guess you could say I’ve reached a summit. I’ve run 3 marketing teams now and have also begun taking on sales functions as well as Chief Growth Officer for soona.

My secret is that becoming a CMO doesn’t feel like a summit. I’m not sure what the next dot to connect will be but this feels more like another skill I’m adding to my stack.

Let’s talk more

If you somehow stumbled upon this post on my website or in your inbox then let’s also connect on Twitter where I have absolutely no filter and make a fool of myself constantly. @rikin311