CMO Board Meeting Success
5 Essential Strategies
The board meeting is our chance to review our performance, forecast the rest of the year, contribute to the long-term strategy, get the right resources, and prove our value. It’s scary because the board is judging us, and we don’t always have perfect, rosy news. But you can be successful despite business challenges if you bring strong insights, accurate data, and a point of view on what to do next. Here are five steps for success, informed dozens of CEOs, VCs, PE investors, board members and investors:
Know the Responsibilities and Language of the Board
Be Strategic, Clear, and Brief
Balance High-Level and Detail
Physically Prepare to be Confident and Effective
Consider This Slide Outline
#1 Know the Responsibilities and Language of the Board
The board of directors is responsible for strategy, overseeing management, and protecting the interests of shareholders and stakeholders. In both private and public companies, the board typically includes internal members like the founders, the CEO or CFO, and external members like investors, independent experts, or representatives from major stakeholders. Independents have often been CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, or other C-Suite executives.
For private companies, it's common for the board to be made up of founders, CEOs, and investors only, independents are less common. Investors have a big financial stake and provide strategic guidance and critical introductions. But they may have never actually worked inside a business as an operator. The board provides financial oversight and guidance to help the company grow and thrive, hires and fires the CEO, and makes recommendations on compensation and investments. Note that this focus (and their experience) is strategy, financials, and governance — marketing itself is generally not an expertise and often not a deep interest! Only 4% of the directors of Fortune 1000 boards are CMOs, according to Spencer Stewart.’ This data shows similar trends for the Russell 3000.
Because of this, board members often don’t want a CMO to get too deep in the weeds. They don’t care about acronyms and activities, they care about financial outcomes and generating more profit or growth. Too much detail makes you look junior like you don’t have mastery of your domain. Specifically, they would like a brief perspective on these questions, with clear data compared to historical numbers or benchmarks to support your analysis:
Strategic: What is your perspective on the market dynamics, customer insights and levers that marketing or the company can pull to drive more growth in revenue and profits over the next several years? What do we need to do to get there?
Present: Did you hit the pipeline and revenue this quarter - why or why not?
Future: Will you hit the pipeline and revenue for the next quarter and the remainder of the year - why or why not?
#2 Be Strategic, Clear, and Brief
Many CMOs over-index on the “present” - digging deep into funnel metrics, marketing qualified leads, and recent activity reports. Board members are looking for you to guide their strategic thinking. They are looking for you to digest and summarize the information FOR THEM so they can focus on what really matters. Here are a few key tips on being strategic, clear, and brief:
What’s most important for them to know, and why? How can you make the context, opportunities, risks, and plans simple and easy to understand?
Marketing stats are table stakes - how can you add to their knowledge about the core business and market drivers? Don’t just give a weather report. Bring a thesis to encourage debate and analysis.
Provide synthesized insights on your competitors, market dynamics, or customers. Are there relevant benchmarks or historical data? CMOs often earn their seat as the voice of the customer and market.
Besides informing company strategy, can you show that marketing strategy clearly aligns with the same vision, and priorities? Show alignment with the CEO.
YOU MUST BE ALIGNED WITH SALES & THEIR DATA - You must pre-met with sales and align your #s, plans, and remedies. There should be no discrepancies in pipeline numbers, no finger-pointing, only alignment that shows mastery of the problems and agreement on the solutions.
What is your ask or goal? Are you giving them an FYI, asking for advice, a decision, or money? Is it simple and clear?
Start the answer to every question in the board meeting with “Yes” / “No” / # / or “I don’t know.” Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” -- it will add trustworthiness to the answers you do know and share. Don’t banter on with long answers that don’t clearly answer the question.
Provide a small set of clear, impactful and consistent performance stats and why they matter. Report on the same stats quarter after quarter to build trust and understanding.
#3 Balance High Level and Detail
The board doesn’t want to pre-read endless decks and analyses. They want the digested summary. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want YOU to know and have all the details you need. The board meeting is like an open-notes test - you can bring all of the executive dashboards, graphs, and data you need to answer questions precisely. A few more tips:
Simplify your slides to the core summary, but consider adding supplementary data charts to the official pre-read appendix or just a day-of appendix.
You MUST trust and understand your numbers. Some CMOs actively plan insight / data projects ahead of board meetings to address known data issues. No one wants to get stuck the day before slides are due with unanswerable questions.
Consider pre-meeting with any board members (WITH THE CEO’s APPROVAL) to check your agenda and understand their hot buttons, concerns, and board history around your topics.
Don’t be obsessed with sticking to your slides -- follow where the board wants to go in the discussion. Sometimes, you’ll only discuss a few slides.
Gather all your most valuable data, and then ask yourself again: where can I simplify? “LESS IS MORE X 10,” says Christine Heckart, a former CEO, multi-time board member, and former CMO of Cisco.
#4 Physically Prepare to be Confident and Effective
The board can HELP you and the company get the strategy right. It can be scary, but you also don’t have to have solved every problem already. You need to show that you understand the problems deeply and have a solution, a timeline, and metrics to evaluate progress. Your confidence will be greater if you’re fully prepared. Practical considerations:
Do you know the exact dates of scheduled board meetings?
How early do you need to pre-send materials to the board? Some companies send a week ahead, some a few days.
Have you added the dates to your team’s calendars for prep? How does this timing relate to your Quarterly Business Review? Can it be used for analysis?
How much time does your CEO need to make revisions? Design?
Have you scheduled enough time with the CRO to align on slides and data?
Is your content visually appealing and inspiring? You’re the brand ambassador.
Have you blocked time before the meeting to center, relax your body, and prepare? (I once scheduled a super-stressful meeting right before a board meeting and came in frazzled. “Proper planning prevents poor performance…”)
Sample Prep Timeline
(After the board meeting) Debrief with CEO from last board meeting
(4-6 weeks ahead) Pre-meet with CEO on marketing agenda and topics
(4-8 weeks ahead) Assign any projects to your team to nail data and insights
(3-6 weeks ahead) Outline slides with team, build first draft (Can the Quaterly Business Reviews help everyone analyze and prep?)
(2-4 weeks ahead) Revise slides with marketing, work on your Q&A prep
(1-2 weeks ahead) Revisions with CEO, CFO, Sales, and Design
(2 days - 1 week ahead) Pencils down! Send pre-read to the board
(Day of) Rock the board meeting, have a happy hour with your team : )
#5 Consider this Slide Outline
Over the years, I’ve found it hard to get CMOs to share their board decks because they hold the company’s most valuable information, and they are too busy to make templates. I’d love to start a repository of examples, but for now, here’s an outline of common slides I see in effective CMOs’ decks:
High-level strategy - “What’s going on in the market” - synthesized insights on items such as competition, customer trends, Ideal Customer Profile evolution, win-loss analysis, Total Addressable Market/Sales Addressable Market context. How does this relate to your vision and positioning that will drive future growth? Any insights that evolve how you and the C-Suite are thinking about the company strategy? Look back at your fundraising decks (if you’re private); updates on how their investment will play out are relevant. Take a point of view to guide the conversation.
What are the marketing focus areas? What’s working and needs to be improved? How do the focus areas ladder up to the company strategy?
Stats from the quarter, forecast for next quarter and the year:
Pipeline % to goal, with context from last year, if needed. This may be broken out by segment (SMB/MM/ENT), region, product portfolio area, or different value ICPs depending on your strategy.
Most CMOs are reporting on both sourced and influenced pipeline and revenue goals, showing their full-funnel marketing contributions. These can be helpful to show in a trend line over time.
Some CMOs report on Marketing Qualified Leads (Hot debate on whether this is an appendix item - depends on your board, company and challenges.)
Some CMOs report on different conversion rates in the funnel
Latane Conant, CRO of 6 Sense and former CMO, sometimes shares the average profile of won and loss deals - win rates, average days to close, how many contacts were engaged on average, average selling price, etc, compared to the past to inform changing selling trends and opportunities.
Some CMOs, in some cases, do a sample journey map of how 1-2 really big deals from last quarter closed. They show the exact things a customer did over time with sales and marketing - maybe reading a piece of content, engaging with an SDR, attending an event, reading a white paper…. all the steps to close. A combination of data and storytelling works well together to demonstrate how people are actually buying and what’s working.
Leading indicators of future success like brand awareness and favorability vs competitors or organic traffic as a proxy for awareness and word-of-mouth. (There’s debate about whether this gets pushed to the Appendix as well)
Payback period / CAC:LTV / Magic Number or some quantification of the cost of acquiring customers. Boards often ask, “If I gave you $XM, where would you invest it, and what return could you get?” After all, they are investors looking for more profit or growth - where can they get the most?
Forecast for the next quarter / rest of year based on your current pipeline trends
Highlights of upcoming goals, outcomes, and plans
Highlights of inspiring projects (Sizzle reel)
As Chandar Pattabhiram, Chief Go-to-Market Officer of Workato and former CMO of Coupa, said, “I often share a few high-level, consistent slides at the board meeting. Sometimes, there’s a problem in the business or a concern that leads to a “proctology exam,” and I share all of the marketing details. But then, I go back to being strategic, simple, and brief.” 🤣
Good luck!
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.