MoneyWatch

Help! My New CMO Is Clueless

By Geoffrey James

Updated on: February 1, 2010 / 8:52 AM EST / MoneyWatch

The real world of business is full of "strategic marketing" that wastes time and money. A Sales Machine reader recently wrote me of the sudden appearance of this nonsense at his firm, in the form of a new CMO. Here's a slightly edited version of his email, followed by my specific advice.

I am vice president of sales and regional marketing for the U.S. region a worldwide $3 billion equipment manufacturer. My company has a handful of worldwide regions, each with a regional marketing team, and a corporate marketing team at headquarters.

Our new CMO is responsible for overall marketing at my firm, but he doesn't seem to understand how to do regional, tactical marketing that's in sync and embedded with sales. Instead, he refers to lead generation as "sales support" and focuses exclusively on corporate branding in the stratosphere.
I have a dotted line report to the CMO. He seems to be a good guy, intelligent and maybe competent, but he lacks a revenue generation mind set. How can I get this guy to back off and do something useful?

Glad to help. As I see it, there are two possibilities:

Possibility 1: Your CMO is an idiot. Only an idiot believes that "lead generation" is "sales support" and that "branding in the stratosphere" is a useful activity. This is not to say that his heart might not be in the right place, but he certainly can't be intelligent and competent and hold that opinion.
Possibility 2: Your CMO is playing politics. The real issue is who's going to control resources. He wants those "dotted lines" to report to him and he wants to control the marketing budget, so he's only going to spend money on corporate-level branding. He sees money spent on effective regional marketing as money wasted, because he doesn't control it.

Oddly, it doesn't really matter which of the two possibilities is true, because your response is identical. You must figure out a way to get control of the marketing budget so that it will be spent on lead generation rather than upon useless branding. To accomplish this, I recommend three steps:

STEP #1. Secure control of your own marketing budget by create a system that shows the specific impact on sales of all marketing spends in your own region.
STEP #2. Using that system, work with your CFO to surface to the CEO how money directed to "branding" rather than "lead generation" loses the company money.
STEP #3. Form a consortia with the other regional vice presidents and demand group approval of all significant marketing spends in your respective regions.

WARNING! You must move very quickly. If you don't castrate this guy toot-sweet, he'll consolidate control of the marketing budget... and you could end up working for him.

READERS: Any other ideas?