Does Your Company Need a CMO?

The University of Melbourne of Australia recently published a structural view of what a fully built-out marketing staff working under the direction of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could look like. The published bulletin indicated a multi-million dollar budget to support this infrastructure and ongoing marketing activities, placing it outside the boundaries of many companies. However, the org chart below shows the basis of a very well thought through staffing approach that can be scaled up or down to meet your specific needs.

The question is, does your company need a CMO? To answer this question, ask yourself a few more.

• Does your company have both a short- and long-term strategy in place that it regularly follows and are these strategies producing the positive business results you need to achieve?

• Does your company have an objective process in place to identify and prioritize your most promising initiatives?

• Does your company have a way of determining objective parameters to achieve your business goals?

• Does your company track and measure your “contact to lead to prospect to customer” ROI to determine the most effective way to market your products and services?

The foregoing are the responsibilities a CMO assumes from day one. They are at the core of what makes or breaks his or her first year and beyond. If your company is not continuously accomplishing these objectives, then you may need to consider hiring or contracting a CMO to help lead your growth curve.

Let’s assume your company does not have a CMO and that it shares these responsibilities among several managers in the “inner circle.” The following chart displays what the type of planning you should be doing.

As you can see, there are strategy responsibilities with expected outcomes to track and refine. In many companies, the idea of developing this detailed of a marketing communications program would be unthinkable and unrealistic. But if you stop to think about it, there is a very good chance that you may be suffering from declining sales because you haven’t designed a winning strategy, nor timed it annually with fruitful sales marketing programs.