Strong Results Won't Save You From a New CMO
A new CMO walked into Sonos last month and the first thing she did was cut the marketing team. Nobody saw it coming. Everybody should have.
3 things to know
1. A new CMO is one of the most disruptive events in a marketing career, and most people wait too long to respond.
The first 90 days of a new marketing leader follow a predictable pattern.
They audit the team structure. They decide which work the previous CMO overvalued. They bring in people they have worked with before.
This is not personal.
It is how leaders build accountability fast. The mistake most marketers make is treating this period as a waiting game instead of an audition.
2. The Sonos story is not unusual. It is the template.
New CMO starts. Tells the team she has a new vision. Cuts the people who built the old one.
This week alone: a new Cadillac CMO came from Uber, a new CMO landed at A Place for Mom and immediately shifted the entire marketing focus from one demographic to another, and Nvidia hired its first CMO in company history.
Each of those announcements will be followed, quietly, by a round of decisions about who fits the new direction.
That process is already underway. We have covered how this plays out at Geico and Xerox. The pattern holds.
3. New CMOs are not trying to keep what works. They are trying to own the next chapter.
This is the part that catches people off guard.
You can have strong results, a good track record, and positive feedback from the previous leadership team, and still be at risk.
What matters to a new CMO is whether you are useful to their priorities.
Results from two years ago rarely answer that question. How you communicate your value right now, in their language, does.
If you have not audited how you are positioning yourself lately, this framework is a good place to start.
2 moves to make this week
If you have a new CMO, get visible before their mental model hardens.
The first 60 days is when a new CMO is forming opinions about who on the team has strategic range and who is execution-only.
You want to be in the first category.
Find one place where you can show you understand the business, not just your function. Offer a perspective on something they are trying to figure out, not just an update on what you already manage.
One smart observation in a meeting lands differently than a full quarter of solid delivery.
If you are job searching, add CMO transition announcements to your weekly scan.
Every major CMO hire published this week is a signal. A new CMO means new priorities, new headcount decisions, and eventually new roles.
Companies like Cadillac, A Place for Mom, Sonos, and Nvidia will have open marketing positions in the next 60 to 90 days that reflect the new leader’s direction.
Following the announcement early puts you in the candidate pipeline before the job posts.
When you do get to the offer stage, this guide on how to properly research a role will help you evaluate it clearly before you say yes.
1 question to sit with
If your CMO were replaced tomorrow and the new one asked two or three people on the team to stay and rebuild, what would make you one of them?
If you are going through a leadership change, a job search, or a positioning question and want to think it through with someone, reply to this email. I work with a small number of marketers on exactly this kind of thing.
Hakan | Founder, Marketers Remote