How to think about the bigger-picture role and value that marketing can bring to growth and sales.
For years, companies have put their chief marketing officers in a box. They ask them to build the brand, launch campaigns, generate leads, manage the website, and make sure the company is visible. Then they turn around and ask why the company isn’t growing faster.
The expectations of the CMO have changed, but in many organizations, the role hasn’t.
Gartner found that just 14 percent
Gartner found that just 14 percent of the CMOs they surveyed make enterprise growth strategy decisions. Another Gartner study found that only 34 percent of CEOs and CFOs are aligned with their CMOs on marketing’s role in supporting growth. You can’t expect a CMO to help drive enterprise growth while keeping the role confined to marketing execution.
The CMO role has been changing for years
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I started my career in public relations, helping build CEO brands, develop executive positioning, and secure national media opportunities. That work still matters, but over the course of my career I’ve learned that the CMO’s job is much bigger than communicating what an organization wants the market to believe. The modern CMO needs to understand how the organization creates growth.
It became more clear over a decade ago while working with a CIO on an online client experience. We could have approached the project as a traditional marketing exercise by deciding what content or advertising to show customers once they logged in. Instead, we mapped the client journey and looked at how every interaction could improve the experience and deepen the relationship. The conversation quickly became much bigger than marketing.
Growth happens between departments
Revenue growth requires understanding what happens across
Revenue growth requires understanding what happens across the business. Marketing may generate demand, but if sales isn’t converting it, increasing the marketing budget won’t solve the problem. Product may build something customers want, but if customers don’t understand its value, the opportunity is lost. Operations can undermine a strong brand promise with an inconsistent experience, while something as routine as invoicing can create unnecessary friction.
These aren’t necessarily marketing problems, and the CMO shouldn’t own all of them. But someone needs to understand how they connect. That’s where I see the modern CMO playing a more strategic role: connecting customer insight, sales, product, operations, technology, and brand to identify where growth is working, where it’s getting stuck, and what needs to change.
Every executive also owns a piece of the customer experience. The CFO influences pricing and billing. The CIO shapes the digital experience. HR influences the people delivering the experience. Sales sets expectations. Operations fulfills them. Customers experience this as one company.
I think of these interconnected pieces
I think of these interconnected pieces as an organization’s growth ecosystem. The CMO should understand the ecosystem well enough to help leadership make better decisions about growth.
If your CMO spends most of the day writing, designing, or managing individual tactics, you’re probably underutilizing the role.
AI makes this even more important. Writers’ and designers’ work moves upstream too. A designer can create systems and templates that technology helps scale. A writer can establish the narrative, voice, and point of view that AI can help apply consistently. Technology can handle more repetitive production, giving talented people more time for judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.
The same should happen with the CMO
The same should happen with the CMO. The opportunity is to use AI to create more capacity for the CMO to understand customers, identify opportunities, align functions, and help leadership make better decisions.
I still hear CEOs say they need a new campaign, more leads, a new website, or a stronger social presence. Sometimes they do, but those aren’t the first questions I would ask.
I would start with the entire go-to-market system. What is the organization actually trying to accomplish? Where is growth getting stuck? What is happening in the pipeline? What are customers telling you? Does the experience match the brand promise? Are sales, marketing, product, and operations working toward the same outcome?
Only then can you determine whether the answer
Only then can you determine whether the answer is a campaign, a website, a change to the customer experience, or something else entirely.
This is where I see the opportunity for the CMO role. Its value increasingly comes from making sense of the market. The role can bring customer insight into executive decisions and connect functions that traditionally operate independently. It can also help the organization determine where to place its bets.
Not every organization needs a full-time CMO. But every organization serious about growth needs someone thinking at that level. Without it, the consequences show up as duplicated work and conflicting priorities. It looks like wasted marketing investment and inconsistent customer experiences, resulting in slower growth.
The CMO of the future won’t be measured
The CMO of the future won’t be measured primarily by social media impressions, ad clicks, or how much marketing gets produced. Those metrics still matter, but they measure activity. Pipeline influence, customer growth, retention, differentiation, and revenue tell a much bigger story.
Which leaves me with a question I think CEOs should bring to their next leadership meeting: If marketing isn’t responsible for growth, who is connecting the pieces that drive it?
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