Scrappy business people are fantastic people to work with — lean, mean, execution machines. But there comes a point where all scrap and no strategy results in a hard working team that are running to stand-still. Many small company CEOs lean too far into the COO role, at the expensive of setting — and ensuring…
Scrappy business people are fantastic people to work with — lean, mean, execution machines. But there comes a point where all scrap and no strategy results in a hard working team that are running to stand-still.
Many small company CEOs lean too far into the COO role, at the expensive of setting — and ensuring execution of — the strategy. If anything, CEOs need to lean more into the CMO role.
A good marketer is invaluable (and hard to find), but CEOs need to be careful not to think marketing and strategy are interchangeable. Positioning the company (the market facing piece of the over-used, often mis-understand term: ‘strategy’) is the CEO’s job.
For decades the responsibility for missed targets would fall on the sales leader. “If only we had a great VP of Sales who knew this market, then we’d grow!” Those stop-gap hirings would come and go, being blamed by marketing for poor execution and product for a lack of detailed understanding.
Now it’s the marketer who’s being taken to task. “We just aren’t getting good leads, or enough of them, and we’re not being creative enough or running a wide enough variety of campaigns and channels”.
