A Playbook for Building an Elite Marketing Machine During Your First 12 Months as a CMO
Started from the bottom, now we're here.
After years of hard work climbing the corporate ladder, you finally achieved what all ambitious marketers strive for. You just landed your first job as a CMO in a new, exciting startup - congratulations!
I was given the opportunity from one of my first consulting clients, a SaaS startup. After a few months, my marketing strategies helped the business take off, and that led to me being offered the newly-created job as Chief Marketing Officer.
I had finally achieved those glorious three letters on my resume: C-M-O. Then it hit me; oh shit, now what do I do? Where do I get started?
I just finished my first 12 successful months on the job for our startup Real Estate Lab (more on that in a future post). I was prepared and ready for this opportunity by spending more than a decade as marketer constantly learning and working on getting better at my craft, but like anytime you move up in your career, you don't know what you don't know.
What I do know: Per Marketing Week: "The average tenure for CMOs fell to 40 months in 2020, the shortest it has been since 2009, according to new research from leadership advisory firm Spencer Stuart."
If you've only got 40 months to prove your value as a CMO, how will you spend the first 12?
I've got the expensive Master's degree on my wall, but I learned way more from Blog Posts, Whitepapers, Twitter threads, Google searches, and YouTube videos than any formal class.
That's why I'm inspired to start this blog to share what I've learned to help people like you.
If you don't want to f&*k up as a first-time CMO, follow this playbook to make sure your marketing strategy is rock solid, with a foundation developed in the right order with the latest best practices.
Now as a CMO, the day-to-day tasks of each person will vary depending on the company, of course; I'm simply providing the framework to tackle the major marketing strategies and tactics as you build the company.
I'm sharing what I learned in a monthly breakdown of what's important and the most efficient and effective order to complete your big development projects.
Some of you with a larger team can knock out these tasks quicker than my timelines below, but for those running lean and doing all of the work yourself, I'd pace out these steps to allow for time to think and build properly - especially if this is your first time leading the development on these projects.
That said, here's my playbook on how to spend your first 12 months as a CMO in a startup:
The Comprehensive Playbook to Becoming an Elite One-Person Marketing Machine:
First Things First: Understand That You're Born in the Dark
Like Bane, any new CMO will be born in the darkness, molded by it.
You'll be given the keys to the marketing car, but you probably need to fix the car, or even build it from scratch (especially in a startup).
The CEO will expect the car is full of customers, but you won't know who should be in the car (yet).
Investors/owners will expect the car reaches a destination, but you won't have a roadmap (until now).
You'll be in the dark. Alone. It can be chaotic. You might get lost or overwhelmed. Learn to thrive in the chaos to keep the car going and you'll grow from it as a professional.
Month 1: Analyze Internally & Externally
If you're in an established company, you'll need to know your team and learn their skillsets and personalities before you can develop workflows. If you're in a lean startup, you'll be doing most of the heavy lifting yourself.
Naturally the first few weeks in a new job has a learning curve as you go through orientation and get to know your teammates, tools, company processes, etc.
But as an All-Star marketer, you want to dive into data ASAP. Set expectations by telling the CEO that you'll have your playbook done within 90 days, update when needed, and get to work.
You'll want to begin to gather intel and look at things both internally and externally as you develop your gameplan.
Internally: Once you know what/who you're working with, look at what the company is currently doing. Begin your marketing audit by looking at creative, content, and marketing channels. Take inventory of what resources are at your disposal and what infrastructure investments need to be made.
What systems are currently being used (CRM, Email, Social, Analytics, etc.)? What needs to be implemented/improved? What is the company's current marketing look like? Are there established goals? How's engagement on your website? What social media channels have they used? How sophisticated are the tracking & data pipelines?
If these systems don't exist - get to work on building and implementing them.
Clarify responsibilities within your team and make sure to align Sales + Marketing and establish agreed upon metrics to evaluate the team's performance. Establish your status updates (I like a recurring weekly team meeting) and critical business workflows for the immediate future. As CMO, it's your job to report on the business metrics, industry trends, and, most importantly, revenue.
You'll be making improvements along the way across verticals; in the meantime, make sure the business can operate appropriately.
Is there low hanging fruit - i.e. quick wins you can achieve by automating manual processes involving critical / valuable tasks right away?
Externally: Conduct a competitive analysis to look at the current landscape. Who's the market leader? Where do they excel? What's their messaging and content look like? What insights can you get by conducting a SWOT analysis on the industry?
If you've never done a competitive analysis before, I'll go more in-depth on this in a future post, but here's my go-to template to get you started:
Once you know the data, you can use strategy canvas tools free like StratNavApp to visualize their strategies so you can uncover opportunities where you can find a "Blue Ocean" (if you haven't read Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim I HIGHLY recommend it).
Month 2: Research Your People, Products & Purchases
By now you'll be deep into your data dive, so continue the analytical work by focusing on customers, current products, sales processes, conversion rates, and revenue.
Does the company have a standardized sales process? Is it documented and tracked? How sophisticated is the customer data, and how accurate is it? Does your company have lead scoring and qualification systems in place? Are you tracking attribution with UTM codes? Do you have automated reports / dashboards to visualize company data?
Don't worry if you don't have all of the above working - most companies aren't doing some/all of these things. I'll tell you first-hand that I'm not aware of ANY pro sports team doing these things, at least on the sponsorship side, and these are billion dollar companies we're talking about.
While you don't need EVERYTHING in place to do your job, you see the value in this level of data sophistication, so advocate for the resources you need to be successful.
There's a lot to unpack here, and every marketer's data strategy will vary depending on the company and resources available.
The main point is that you need to know your customers, your value propositions for your products, and your sales cycle.
People: "Customer Profiles", "Buyer Personas", "Audience Segments" - whatever the hell you want to call it, you need to know the type of people you're marketing and selling to. Start working through your CRM data and look at who is visiting your website, interacting with your content, and buying your products. Depending on your needs, I've used paid tools like Nielsen Scarborough for years to get a wealth of information about local populations to supplement CRM data.
That said, while we can argue exactly what demographics and psychographics are important, I recently had an epiphany from a Twitter thread from ex-PayPal marketer Matt Lerner (h/t @matthlerner):
Before you spend another minute researching your customers, I recommend you check out Matt's post. He's got a great framework for how you can instead research your customers by "Jobs to Be Done", i.e. asking customers or competitor customers questions like:
What were you hoping to do?
Why is that important to you?
Where did you look?
What else did you try?
However you go about it, know who you're trying to market to and what motivates them. How many people are there in your total addressable market? What percentage of them are your current customers?
Products: After you solidify your target markets, look at you products. What value can you/are you currently creating? A great way to look for opportunities before you develop campaigns is by creating a value proposition matrix.
A good explanation can be found on Gary Fox's blog:
Then you can begin developing strategy for product development, messaging, and content with what you discover. Continue to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
What opportunities can you uncover for your products and services? What can you add/change to be more valuable to your customers? How are you communicating you value propositions? What can you reduce/remove that are a negative ROI on company resources? Look at the numbers and continue to develop your strategy.
Purchases: Do you already have sales? How did they happen? Where did they come from?
After you establish your product + market fit, look at the current buying cycles & processes. The most efficient sales processes start with the buyers. You need to map out how you WANT your buyers to buy from you, then match your sales activities to enable this ideal experience.
Start by mapping out the current process your buyers go through, then brainstorm the ideal process. If there is no existing process - start from scratch and make educated assumptions to test later.
Month 3: Map Sales Processes - Demand Generation, Acquisition & Conversion
Now that we've mapped our ideal buying cycle with the outline of our matching sales process, it's time to put it to work.
Let's look at a traditional sales funnel:
This is a simple look at a traditional sales funnel, but this is outdated and only looks at half the equation. You find customers, sell, then move on.
In any business that has reoccurring payments, such as a software subscription or any type of ongoing client, what you do after the initial purchase is infinitely more important than the sale.
Customer retention builds loyalty, increases customer lifetime value, and collecting payments from existing customers is way cheaper than acquiring new ones each month.
So I developed a proprietary "Sales Hourglass" to replace the sales funnel. This illustrates the importance of developing processes around not only finding customers, but delivering more value over time to drive retention.
I established 12 pipeline steps within 4 customer phases as seen above. There's also a 5th phase, which is where contacts go when they aren't in an active pipeline step. People can enter or exit your pipeline at any given moment, and you need a plan for what you do with your contacts to get them to re-enter the sales process or disqualify them completely.
Every business is different so these steps can certainly be customized for your needs; that said, here's how I generally define my pipeline stages and criteria I establish for each step/phase:
Demand Generation - How you generate awareness
Unaware - the segment of potential customers that fit your profiles but don't know about your company
Aware - the segment of potential customers that fit your profiles and have heard about your company
Suspect - social media follower
Conversion - How you close a sale
Prospect - engages in a sales conversation (cold call, DM, in-person, etc)
Lead - shows interest in product/service
Opportunity - qualified lead that shows interest and has ability to buy
Relationship Management - How you onboard new customers
Client - new customer within the first purchase cycle (i.e. monthly paying customer within their first month)
Engaged - customer after their first purchase cycle (i.e. monthly paying customer that's been a customer for > 1 month)
Satisfied - customer that completes our initial survey with positive feedback
Propagation - How you grow customer loyalty and repeat business
Advocate - customer that is engaged or satisfied and has brought on at least 1 other customer as a referral
Renewal - customer that has been a paying customer for > 1 year
Champion - customer that has been a paying customer for > 2 years and has referred at least 1 other customer
Nurture (NOT PICTURED ABOVE) - How you handle people after they've been disqualified from your pipeline
Short Term Nurture - people that are interested but can't purchase at the moment
Long Term Nurture - people that aren't interested yet
Disqualified - people that you've determined aren't potential customers
You can use this framework to list out the criteria of your contacts, what they do, what you want them to do next, then match that up with what you need to do to move them down to the next step.
Regardless of how many funnels you are using, each and every person you are actively marketing and selling to should fall under one of the twelve pipeline steps - but how they enter the pipeline will determine where they should start out in the process.
For example - a general new social media follower would be in step 3, but a new social media follower that sends an inbound DM asking about a product/service would enter at step 5.
Segment your contacts into actionable steps to have a gameplan for how you'll treat every individual inside of your campaigns.
Don't worry about the daunting task of identifying EVERY single touch-point throughout the customer lifecycle; as long as you've established the framework for the pipeline, you can always edit the actions you take.
For example, in the pipeline I shared above, look at 4c/Step 12: Champions. Our criteria for this step is reaching the pinnacle of our customer rankings, having been paying for more than 2 years. We know we want to incentivize and reward these customers once they've hit that milestone, but as a startup not even 2 years old, we don't know exactly what those incentives and rewards will be... yet.
And that's ok - it's in the long term plans to reward loyalty, and before anyone reaches that step, we'll have it figured out.
As an elite one-person marketing machine, you know having things done is better than having them perfect. So develop your framework and improve things when needed to continue making progress.
Some more advanced best practices here to consider implementing include Lead Scoring, Lead Qualification, Advanced Tagging in CRM, and Nurture Procedures. There's a lot to unpack here, and I'll have a follow up post breaking down these strategies.
The main goal of any good sales process is to have standardized steps with rules/criteria for how people enter or exit each step, and actions you take to get them to move. Combined with Lead Scoring & Qualification systems, your sales team can focus on the people most likely to buy - which in turn, means that they aren't wasting time on people that likely won't.
If you haven't standardized a sales process before, you can use this template to help organize your strategies with the best practice of focusing on the buyer activities and purchasing cycles:
While I can't give you all of the secrets to my processes, I've included examples of tools and metrics to show you how I've built sales process maps with my businesses with my free template below:
As with any development project, build with the mindset of continuous improvement. The important thing is that you standardize your sales process, train your sales team to follow it, and have tracking metrics in place to analyze and refine it over time.
Month 4: Bring Your Brand to Life
Once (and only after) you have finished the first 3 months of learning the status quo, developing your core business strategies, learning about your people/products/purchases, and building/mapping your sales processes, are you ready to start building your brand.
This is a fun part of the year and where most people naively start - the sexy process of choosing brand colors, a logo, and building content (website, social media, company collateral like business cards, etc.).
The fallacy founders can fall into with starting with the logo/website before doing the due diligence with establishing the necessary research is that it's human nature that founders want a brand that they relate to - but the founders aren't customers.
So many founders create a brand that represents them or that they like without considering the people who are (or will be) customers. This is largely driven by ego, as everyone wants to promote their company as soon as the ink is dry on their Articles of Incorporation.
While the visuals are important and we know the world can't wait to see your cool new logo, the value you deliver will play a far larger role in the success of your company than PMS color codes. That's why you've taken the time and energy to properly lay out the strategic foundation to set yourself up with the best odds of success your first 90 days.
You'll already have some of the intel required for these steps ready, but it's important for startups to go through the proper process as you build your brand.
Step 1: Finalize Target Audiences - You've already completed your customer research and segmented your target audiences into primary and secondary segmented personas by their motivations.
Now solidify who you're trying to attract and remember to use feedback from these segments to create a customer-focused foundation as you continue through the brand-building process.
Step 2: Establish Brand Purpose - Brands elicit emotion, and there's a lot of psychology at play. People want to feel part of something bigger than themselves, i.e. that's why sports teams have such passionate fans.
Use the intel gathered from your competitive analysis to create a sense of community within your customer base, where you discovered the "blue oceans" you want to 'swim in' and you can make informed decisions regarding what messaging resonates with them at a level that evokes a emotional response to their pain points.
Who are you as a brand and how are you different? What problem are you actually solving? Why should people care?
Continue to connect hypothesized value propositions to your test positioning statements to refine your content and communications as you go to market.
Step 3: Build Out the Brand Strategy - Now it's time to establish your brand strategy. Here is a great framework example for how this should look from Six Degrees:
This flow chart shows the full structure for how to properly lay out your brand strategy from internal to external factors and it is imperative to put these items down on paper as you continue to the next step.
Step 4: Develop Compelling Storylines - Marketing is about effectively communicating your story (action) to encourage customers to do or think something specific (reaction). Everyone loves a good story.
What's the purpose of your brand? Who do you want as customers? Why should they believe you? How do you want them to interact with your brand and what experiences are you trying to offer them?
Remember to employ the Continuous Improvement model you used in the previous month: Research and develop > Test > Analyze > Improve and refine > Automate and scale > Repeat.
Step 5: Create the Brand Identity - Consider your target market segments what would appeal to them as a representation for the value your company is promising to deliver. Create an appealing logo with a standardized color palette/fonts. Build a clean website and social platforms that effectively demonstrates your value propositions. Establish your company voice and personality in communications.
The goal here is developing all the needed imagery and content to enable the right people to interact with your brand.
Step 6: Live the Brand - Brands take a long time to build, and they can be damaged in an instant. In the unfortunate reality of "cancel culture" today, one tone-deaf social post can ruin years of equity you've been diligently building. It's important to have documented mission and vision statements that the executive team lives by everyday as a company representative.
Train your employees on the new brand and ensure that your brand is positioned for long-term success.
Month 5: Develop Your Data Analytics Strategy
After months of completing your various daily tasks, you're now almost done developing the complete strategic framework for your business.
By now we've tackled the core fundamentals of any successful business, but how are you going to track and measure performance?
The last strategy hurdle to jump over is developing the plan for your data and analytics.
List out all of your data sources, and begin thinking about the important metrics to track in each vertical. Where is the data coming from? How do you want to analyze each data point? What transformations need to happen before each data point is ready to review?
Plan out what's important to you business, what's important to track, and how you want view the performance of the impact you're having on your business.
Are you posting on social media, and want to see what posts are driving website traffic? Facebook Pixel tracking gives you click data per post, but about about if you want to break down different campaigns/topics? Have you been using UTM codes to track acquisition?
Are you writing blog posts, and want to see how many people read your blog then sign up for a free trial? Have you been using Mixpanel to merge the visitor to the trial signup event to track conversions?
Below is an example roadmap for your B.I. Dashboard/Analytics solution (*the transformations will be customized depending on each of the data sources your company is using):
Once you determine what data is important and where it comes from, you can make sure you've implemented the proper systems to collect each data point.
If you can standardize your processes, measure and track the necessary metrics, and then use that data to analyze, you can set yourself up for continuous improvement to drive your company for years to come.
Month 6: Build the Infrastructure
Now that the major strategy work is completed, it's time to start building. What resources (software, new hires, agencies, etc.) do you need to secure to implement your strategies and business processes? What vendors are you selecting for your technology stack? What work can you do yourself vs. should you outsource?
Building a startup from scratch is challenging and exciting, but the amount of work can be daunting and stressful.
One issue I've had in my career is "analysis paralysis" - getting so caught in the weeds researching a topic that it takes too long to make progress and move forward with a decision.
As a CMO, you need to be able to make decisions It takes years of experience to know what it's important and what doesn't really matter.
At a basic level, what tools do you need to generate revenue? For a SaaS company for example, you'll need a website, a system to manage contacts, a system to collect money, and a system to send emails.
Website Builders build websites. Is Wix better than Wordpress or Webflow? Depends. Who's building the site? What's their skillset? How do you want to manage your content?
CRMs manage contacts and automate workflows. Is Keap better than HubSpot or SalesForce? What's your budget? How familiar are you with building out a CRM system? What level of automation are you looking for?
Payment processors collect money. Does your website provider offer some built-in payment processing like Wix? What WP Plugins do you need to deploy? Or is it better to link to PayPal or Stripe?
Email services send emails. Is MailChimp better than Active Campaign or Constant Contact? What about using Zapier with Gmail?
We're in a time where there's so many tools out there to choose from, and there's so much crossover that every startup tech stack is different. There's no right or wrong way to accomplish a task, you just need to decide what's most important.
What's considered a better tool is relative to the situation of each company. Who's using the tool? What's your budget? Does it meet your basic needs? What's the easiest tool to implement and integrate into your business?
At the end of the day, your business needs to generate revenue and it's your job as CMO to choose the right tools for the right job.
Luckily for you, you've already developed your strategies and processes, so you know what jobs NEED to be done and which ones DON'T. You can't get caught up wasting time using and building systems that don't fit what you're trying to accomplish as a company. You also don't want to bog down your team (and budget) with a ton of tools that no one uses.
Choose the tools and systems that fit your strategies and processes, not the other way around.
For all of your analytics, make sure your tracking mechanisms are tested and working properly so that your data is cleansed and accurate as you open the pipeline and data starts flowing. Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Google Optimize are all great free tools, and all have a learning curve. There's tons of resources out there to teach yourself to be pretty proficient quickly.
Start at the most critical systems that your company needs, do enough research to make an educated decision, select the tool, then move the hell on to the next project.
Month 7: Design Data Pipelines & Dashboards
After you've selected your necessary tools and implemented your systems, it's time to have your data work for you.
As an elite marketer, you want to focus on executing campaigns, tracking performance, analyzing metrics, and using data to continuously find ways to improve EVERYTHING.
Your strategy is rock solid, you've developed best practice processes, and now you've got months-worth of data that you've been collecting at your disposal.
The nightmare of any marketer implementing these sophisticated data pipelines? The arduous task of manually compiling, normalizing, and analyzing your marketing data on a regular basis in a spreadsheet.
That's where Business Intelligence tools come into play.
You've got all these separate data sources, and now you need to centralize them into one place so that you can easily get fed updated dashboards for you to use to make decisions.
Above is an example Technology Stack and Data Pipeline, showing how the data flows between sources. The big goal here is centralize all of the data into an isolated data warehouse, make any needed data transformations, then feed it to a dashboard tool to display your data so you can analyze effectively.
Tableau is the industry standard; Google Data Studio is free.
Getting the data flowing on clean, interactive, functional dashboards is no easy task; it took me months of researching and learning to understand the complexities of building this type of automated data pipeline and dashboard design.
If you write code and know SQL/Python, then you can probably build out these connections yourself. I know one thing - I'm educated enough about databases/coding to be dangerous, but I know that it's not my area of expertise and we were personally better served having our developers build the data warehouse plug in the APIs.
There's different ways to extract and transform your data, and different tools that you can use to visualize your data. As discussed in Month 6, the utility of the tools will determine if they meet your needs or not.
Plan the work, work the plan, then move onto the next project.
Month 8: Launch Campaigns & Traction Tests
In the world of marketing, "campaigns" refer to the plans that you implement to acquire and convert customers.
In the world of CRMs & Automations, "campaigns" refer to the plans that you implement to accomplish anything through your systems, including customer acquisition and conversion.
Once you've standardized your sales process, look at the complete life cycle of your customers and simplify your processes to identify the areas where actions need to happen.
In the example above, I've created a complete Customer Life Cycle Process Map, listing out all of the steps needed to close sponsors for a sports organization. This shows what communications and actions needed to happen to find, close, and onboard a new customer.
With this process map, you can see the steps that are currently manual and what you can easily create an automation campaign around.
The easy automation campaigns to start with are communications that need to happen at a specific time, such as when a new user signs up for an account. You will likely want to send them a "Welcome/Onboarding" email to thank them for trying out your product with some information to get them started. You don't want to have to be glued to your computer to kick out this email manually, so design a template within your email provider to link with your CRM that deploys the email automatically.
Once you've designed all of the automations within your company infrastructure, move on to the marketing content you're using to attract new contacts into your pipeline, be it blog posts on your website, social posts, or paid ads.
The goal here is to start running "Traction Tests" to analyze the effectiveness of your Value Propositions that you identified while building your customer profiles. Create content that communicates these value props and find out what messages resonate best with your target markets.
Start by casting your reel in ponds where your fish live, i.e. start communicating on channels where you've identified that your potential customers live, and test out your messaging with the proper tracking mechanisms in place to analyze performance.
Are you pre-product? What about if you're pre-content? That's completely fine.
Create a simple landing page to collect email addresses. Run some organic or paid social posts that communicate a problem and promote a white paper about the problem you will solve. Test out 3-5 messages and see which one drives the most traffic to your landing page.
These tests allow you to hone in on whether your hypothesis about the marketing channels or value props need to be adjusted. Not finding enough traction volume? Try different channels. Driving traffic to the landing page but not converting on capturing contact info? Try different value props.
Develop and run these traction tests to refine your channel strategies and messaging before you invest heavily in paid advertising to ensure your best odds of success.
Month 9: Create Marketing Funnels & Go-to-Market Strategy
After testing your value propositions and marketing channels, it's time to roll out your go-to market strategy. How are you finding new customers?
You've identified the channels and messages that resonate, now create the campaigns and funnels to attract new contacts into your pipeline.
You have your standardized sales process established, so what tactics are you implementing to drive conversions?
A B2B sales stat that sticks with me is from an Eloqua B2B Study:
80% of all significant sales occur only after a minimum of five continuous follow ups …yet only 8% of people ever reach the fifth time.
In regards to Lead Qualification, your process should include at least 5 touch points before disqualifying the contact.
An example of this structure would look like this:
This sample process shows how your team would reach out to a Lead to qualify them before passing the lead to your sales team. In lean startups where the marketer is also selling, there might not be a handoff per se; but the structure is in place for when you grow as a company and can scale the process - more on this in Month 11.
You've identified your customers, where you can find them, and how you can attract them - but what about after they become a customer?
Month 10: Refine Customer Management, Fulfilment, Service & Retention
As you continue building your campaigns, do not neglect the people already paying you. Again, remember that Customer Retention is more valuable to your bottom line than acquisition.
What's the point of closing 100 new customers if 95 of them cancel within the first month?
You only get one first impression. People expect superior customer service these days, and surprisingly a lot of companies (specifically SaaS companies) don't prioritize customer management.
As you nail down your acquisition and conversion processes, make sure that you remember key points of the customer journey where you can add value, enhance your brand, and create a better experience with your products.
Are you making it easy for people to buy? Do you provide a clear quick start guide to help onboarding? Are you asking for feedback along the way? What's your company standard operating procedure to handle cancelations? How long does it take to respond to a customer service question?
As you solidify your sales processes, make service processes an emphasis to track, manage, and improve.
Month 11: Learn to Automate & Scale to Grow
Being an elite marketing machine, you've already been developing automations along the way (as we've discussed above).
The constant process of building a complete automated company is never over, as any manual work your employees do on a day-to-day basis creates opportunities for improvement to enable scalable growth.
Whether it's weekly reporting, conducting analyses, assigning tasks, designing social posts - anything that is a manual task has the potential to automated.
You cannot scale if you're bogged down with manual work. Hiring more people internally or outsourcing work externally is only an option with a bigger budget. And you won't have a bigger budget unless you close more revenue, so lean startups require you to do more with less bandwidth.
As you grow as a company, establishing company pillars such as your culture, mission, vision, strategy, processes, brand guide, etc. are now standardized and documented so they can be easily and effectively communicated during new employee onboarding.
Consistency within your company is an important factor for building a successful team that can achieve profitable, sustainable growth. All your work will be for nothing if your team doesn't buy in and believe in the company.
Create great products with great marketing strategy and business processes, hire great people, build a great team, and take over the world.
Month 12: Develop One, Three, and Five Year Strategic Plans
You're now closing out your first successful year as a CMO. Business is booming, clients are happy, and you're securing the bag.
Now plan how to take things to the next level.
At your annual company meeting, review major business objectives and establish key milestones to work towards.
Plot the course and trajectory that the you'll work to take the company, and use this intel to develop one, three and five year strategic plans for these objectives, strategies, and tactics.
You've spent a year building the rocket ship - now take it to the moon.
Summary: Never Stop Getting Better
Becoming and expert at anything takes 10,000+ hours of grinding and improving. Becoming elite takes the right strategy.
I hope this playbook helps at least one person out there who also strives to get better everyday as a marketer.
Go out there and win @ work!
Have any questions or feedback? Leave a Comment below!