The Rise of the Growth CMO: What It Truly Takes to Drive Growth

While CMO responsibilities vary from company to company, almost all of them have one thing in common: A mandate to drive growth. Here's what they need to succeed.

Over the last 15 years, the customer journey and the media used to reach customers have changed drastically. So it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the role of the CMO has also changed, and the resources required to be an effective modern CMO must also change.

Buyer journeys: Long before they talk to sales, the modern customer has read reviews, watched demo videos, and signed up for a trial. The result: marketing needs to own more of the persuasion that typically falls to sales. Moreover, marketing needs to have influence (if not ownership) over the product trial experience. 

Media landscape: Today we have sophisticated tools like tracking pixels, deep links, attribution models, incrementality testing, and referral codes to measure the impact of every marketing effort. 

The result: whereas Don Draper spiked primarily on storytelling, the best marketers today are data natives who can wield technology, tools, and spreadsheets as well as taglines. In fact, in the businesses where I’ve led marketing, the marketing team is way out in front of every other department in terms of their use of data and low-code and no-code tools. 

According to one McKinsey report, “the CMO is now more than ever viewed as the CEO’s “go-to” growth partner.” The report argues that “CMOs and marketers must lead from the front as unifiers” across other departments to craft a customer experience that delivers revenue growth. 

With these new expectations, it takes a different kind of CMO —a Growth CMO—to lead the organization to success.

Gartner’s Chris Ross said it best: “The center of the bullseye for the vast majority of CMOs is growth, which CEOs look to CMOs and their teams to drive. For all the other things CMOs need to manage, they should never take their eyes off that ball.”

What Is a Growth CMO?

Whereas a traditional CMO oversees a function, a Growth CMO owns an outcome: efficient revenue growth. Growth CMOs (sometimes called Chief Growth Officers) specialize in driving rapid business growth through data-driven experimentation and quick iteration to identify scalable marketing strategies. The Growth CMO's approach is agile and focused on rapid customer acquisition and revenue expansion. Most importantly, a Growth CMO measures impact: they use varied and sophisticated techniques to prove the impact of their efforts.

What Does It Take to Be a Growth CMO?

Whereas most of my mentors spiked on relationship-building, branding, and storytelling, the modern CMO is different.

So what makes a good Growth CMO? 

1. Customer centricity: I see it as part of my mission to not only be the customer’s voice, but also its advocate. This means constantly challenging the team to make the customer experience more seamless.
   One simple example: I worked for an online coding school called Coding Dojo. They typically put the sales or “admission” call behind a “wall”—you could only speak to them after you’d completed an “application.” I understood that while this was “how things have always been done”, it was a mistake: people don’t apply to a school until they’re almost at the end of their decision-making journey. A good salesperson wants to talk to prospects at the beginning of the decision-making journey.
   So we started offering pre-application “Q&A” sales appointments, where our admissions team can help advise the student on the factors they should be using to make the decision in the first place. The result: Coding Dojo’s customer growth doubled, and the company was recently acquired by Perdoceo (PRDO). 
   

2. Impact Measurement: The most successful CMOs live and breathe data. They bring at least three types of data to strategic conversations, including competitive insights, market insights, and customer insights. But beyond that, Growth CMOs understand how to design experiments that return data that can be used to make decisions.
   For example, at Codecademy, we often announced new courses to our vast user base before we ever started building them. We designed product announcements as tightly-controlled experiments so we could predict demand for courses before we invested the product resources required to build them.
   

3. An Iterative Approach: While traditional marketers think in terms of annual planning cycles and multi-quarter campaigns, agile marketers take an iterative approach. They experiment, learn, and adapt strategies based on real-time data and insights, allowing them to confidently execute projects in record time. Though there are fewer tentpole campaigns, new creative is being shipped and tested every week, resulting in an ever-evolving brand.

Experience Driving Substantial Growth

A growth CMO should want to be held accountable for growing the company. They unabashedly embrace their role as a revenue driver by participating in and leading ROI-driving strategic initiatives–and it’s these initiatives that make all the difference.

After studying 860 executives across the globe, McKinsey identified a “Growth Triple Play” of three elements that resulted in accelerated revenue growth: Creativity, analytics, and purpose. Companies that use the Growth Triple Play in their strategy had 2.3x the average growth rate compared to companies that don’t use any of these elements, and are 1.8 times more likely to be in the top quartile of growth within their sectors.

So What Resources Do CMOs Need to Be Successful Drivers of Growth?

The same McKinsey report brings up an important point: more and more CEOs are looking at marketing to own growth as marketing is uniquely positioned to drive growth and help businesses succeed. However, “there’s much less consensus about the role of the CMO among the rest of the C-suite. Only 44 percent of CFOs and 62 percent of tech leaders agree that growth belongs to the CMO.”

I've struggled a great deal as a CMO who was expected to own growth, but who didn't have the tools and resources needed to be successful. More than once, that lack of alignment and support has resulted in me leaving a company. And I’m not alone: CMOs have the shortest tenure among the C-suite, with a median of 4.2 years in 2022. 

If the company expects the CMO to own growth, these are the areas we’ll need resource alignment from in order to succeed. 

Dedicated Data Resources

The culture of growth is all about measuring impact. This means investing in complex data pipelines: From ad platforms to marketing automation tools to CRMs to data warehouses, to BI tools where end-user marketers can measure the impact of their work. If the data team does not commit to building and supporting this infrastructure, marketing can’t succeed. 

I recently got into a debate with Tejas Manohar, CEO of data pipelining tool Hightouch, on this exact topic. I’ve worked with so many businesses where marketing isn’t able to properly measure the impact of their work. 

A simple example: I was talking with a major furniture e-commerce platform that was spending easily $1M/mo on paid advertising, but was unable to measure which ads resulted in purchases. The best they could do was measure which paid ads converted to fabric-swatch requests and use that as a proxy for purchases. 

I shared a case study where I was able to prove that we saw a double-digit improvement in CAC when we switched to optimizing for a lower-funnel purchase event. 

Put another way: By implementing better data pipelining, we were able to grow the company’s revenue by 20% in a single quarter with that single change. 

Dedicated Engineering Resources

Although this has changed at Tier 1 startups like Ramp and Calendly, I continue to be surprised by the lack of growth engineering teams. I would see Marketing submitting requests to Product, which invariably puts marketing requests near the bottom of the queue. The results are similar to the above: small website optimizations that could result in double-digit revenue growth spend months or years stuck in a backlog. 

Today I’m much more circumspect: I minimize dependencies on engineering by investing in no-code tools. Some examples: We’d use Webflow and an outside web development shop for the main website, Unbounce for landing pages, and Amplitude for data.

Control Over Customer Touchpoints

Successful growth CMOs know the importance of well-designed customer touchpoints. They allocate engineering and design resources not only for the obvious points of contact in the buyer’s journey but also for new products that can influence onboarding to drive retention and repeat purchases. One example is the HubSpot ROI calculator: It lets potential customers visualize how they could make the most of a HubSpot product, while simultaneously giving HubSpot free access to valuable data about their market.

Influence over product to drive differentiation

Growth CMOs understand that the best products stand out because of their purpose: a recognizable sense of mission for both the company and the customers. Purpose elevates the goal beyond simple revenue generation, driving down what the brand stands for. The best Growth CMOs put purpose at the center of every creative and analytical decision to create solutions that can spark and sustain long-term growth.

The Reality of Driving Growth

While CMO responsibilities vary from company to company, almost all of them have one thing in common: A mandate to drive growth. As you’ve read, this is a monumental task that’s easier said than done.

While measuring everything is a big part of being a Growth CMO, the role calls for other qualities aside from exceptional quant skills. Growth CMOs encourage a culture of data-centricity, creativity, and agility, all of which revolve around an organization-wide“north star”—the company’s overarching purpose. This is the best chance for Growth CMOs and marketers to increase their odds of success and create the impact they desire.