• by Steve Olenski , Yesterday

Last month, I spoke with a recruiter who was helping three companies search for CMOs. Once we got into the details, it became clear that none of them was looking for a traditional marketing leader. They wanted someone who understood growth strategy, pricing pressure, customer behavior, operations, sales and financial performance.

In other words, they were looking for a business operator.

I’ve had this conversation enough times to know this isn’t an exception. It’s a pattern. Companies say they are hiring a CMO, but what they are actually describing is what I call a CMO Plus.

The challenge is that most companies haven’t created a clear path for marketers to become one.

So, what do you do if you’re a senior director or vice president of marketing who wants to make that leap? How do you get the experience without already having the job?

You start building the path yourself.

Get to know finance. If you don’t already have a relationship with your CFO or someone in finance at your level, introduce yourself. Ask them to lunch. Tell them you want to understand how marketing affects the financial side of the business—and how financial realities should influence marketing.

You don’t need to become a finance expert. You do need a strong working knowledge of the numbers that drive the company: where margins come from, how budgets are allocated, and what financial pressures the business confronts.

Learn how operations actually operates. Find someone in operations and ask them to walk you through what they do every day. Learn where execution breaks down, what constraints they face, and how decisions made by marketing affect their world. When one of my business partners moved from CMO to COO, his entire perspective changed. He gained an operational lens he realized he’d needed all along as a CMO. 

Get in bed with sales. You need to understand how the sales system you are feeding actually runs. When was the last time you joined a sales call? If the answer is “never” or “I can’t remember,” change that. Participate in the pre-brief, listen to the call, and join the debrief. Learn how sales qualifies leads, how the CRM works, how an MQL becomes an SQL, and what happens to the demand marketing generates.

That wider understanding will make you better in your current role. Your ideas will reflect operational and financial realities, making them less likely to be roadblocked because another function “can’t do that.”

And if every attempt to broaden your experience gets blocked? That tells you something too. Your current organization may not be the place where you can become the leader you want to be.