How to Onboard Your CMO

Guidance for CEO's on how to quickly get their CMO up to speed

Onboarding key leaders is exciting. You’ve generally needed them for so long that you’re relieved to hand over the reins and all the concerns you’ve been carrying about their department. There are usually big fires for them to start fighting immediately, all while they are still learning. Additionally, as CEO, you need to move your attention to another area of the business that may have even bigger issues or leadership gaps. Sometimes, thoughtful onboarding gets lost in the day-to-day chaos.

CMOs are generally expected to assess the team and the company very quickly, make a plan, change, and elevate without breaking too many cultural norms, and quickly impact results, all while in the public eye. The honeymoon period is full of enthusiasm and optimism, while the challenge of how to drive change in the problems behind the problems takes longer to unveil. 

I recently made the following recommendations to a CEO about how to onboard a new CMO:

1. LAY THE FOUNDATION: It’s critical that as the CEO you promote and endorse the CMO before they even walk in the door. This starts in the interview process as you shift at some point from evaluating them, to endorsing them to anyone and everyone, all the time. Strong intros and endorsements to your board members should come early, as should endorsements to the other C-Suite leaders, the marketing team leaders and the whole company in the first all-hands. If everyone sees that you are fully committed, excited and will support this decision, even through difficult or unpopular decisions they’ll need to make - your CMO will have a better chance at success.

2. CUSTOMERS: Get them fast and deep exposure to prospects and customers  - can they shadow you in key prospect and customer meetings? Can you facilitate a listening tour with the X most successful customers? Can you share recordings of win-loss debriefs? How else can the get deep, and stay deep with customers on an ongoing basis

2. REFERENCE MATERIAL - Docs, docs and docs - can you help organize all of the critical resources they need to get strategic context? 

   1. The last 4 board decks

   2. The last fundraising deck, even if it was a long time ago

   3. OKRs and scoring from last year - company and marketing

   4. OKRs company and marketing for this year

   5. Financial plan for the company - all assumptions from finance and sales on attainment, close rates, product splits etc – last year and this year’s

   6. Marketing budget summary - last year and this year

   7. Company performance dashboards

   8. Marketing dashboards 

   9. Past QBRs that might be helpful

   10. Any market research that may have been conducted

3. TIME TOGETHER - You may think that because they are senior, they need less time from you. Eventually, this should be true, but initially, they need you to help give them quick context and help with filtering. Make time to meet 2x per week for the first few months. In-person time will also be critical as you build the foundations of trust personally and professionally.

4. PRODUCT AND COMPANY STRATEGY - Walk them through it in a meaningful way and make sure they are in the right key meetings.

5. UPDATE OKRs - Get alignment on goals for the quarter and year that incorporate their new insights.

6. 30/60/90 DAY PLAN - Some of this will be captured in the OKRs, but it could be helpful to have some more explicit shared expectations about the 30/60/90 day activities, decisions, and deliverables. 

7. DASHBOARDS- Encourage them to update and have clear dashboards in the first 2 months (see this post for a weekly marketing dashboard) 

8. FIRST BOARD MEETING - Give them plenty of advance warning, previous board decks, and guidance for the role you want them to play. Most likely: assessment of the market, company and teams, priorities, key metrics, and goals, sequencing, and asks. 

9. CULTURE AND UNMENTIONABLES - While you don’t want to promote politics or unduly influence their thoughts, it’s important to help them understand how to navigate the conflicts underpinning relationships that could disrupt their efforts. 

10. C-SUITE OFFSITE - Always helpful to do a personality types / working together session at the first C-Suite offsite they attend: DISC, Enneagram, Meyer’s Briggs - something that helps the whole team understand each others’ working styles, motivators, and personality drivers.  

For CMOs themselves, there’s a lot more detail around:

• Meeting with leaders, key movers and shakers, and their own team to get context

• Deeply inspecting the performance numbers and trends

• Planning their own offsite to refine OKRs, 30/60/90 day goals, budgets, visions

• Presenting at the first company all-hands

• Presenting at the first board meeting

• Identifying and promoting quick wins - learning to market marketing

As a broad and deep strategy, I’ve always enjoyed the book “The First 90 Days” - it has some great advice about onboarding in any role.

What else has been an important part of the journey that I haven’t covered?

Here comes the adventure…