How To Be The ‘CMO’ Before Hiring a CMO

Prior to appointing an official CMO, it's common for a CEO or co-founder to assume the interim CMO responsibilities, one of the co-founders and/or the CEO usually handles this role. While marketing is arguably in the top 2 highest priorities, there’s a lot on your plate at this stage, so maximizing what’s important is crucial.

What to Prioritize

In the role of an interim CMO, focus on capturing a significant share of the company's Total Addressable Market to drive optimal profitability

Before your company has a true CMO with a bunch of direct reports, this responsibility will likely fall to one of the founders. Here are the most important things you and your team must focus on:

1. Have a crystal clear understanding of your unit economics, payback periods, and first-order margins (see lesson on unit economics).

2. Understand your Total Addressable Market (TAM), and your ideal customer profiles.

3. Prioritize demand creation.

   • Let your audience know you have what they’re missing. Educate them, build trust, and brand awareness by meeting them where and how they are.

   • Where do your ideal customers spend time? Show up there first, without buying impressions (organic marketing)

   • Once you have some positive signals of what works with your audience organically, you can translate this content into paid advertising.

   • Meta is still the strongest paid advertising channel for creating demand (Read more in a later lesson).

4. Capture demand effectively.

5. When prospective customers are ready to buy, we make sure they know how to buy, and prefer buying, from you.

6. Bring insights from the market back to product development.

   • No product is perfect. Even unique products that are good at driving new customer acquisition may not have longevity because the product quality isn’t stellar, leading to low brand loyalty.

   • Through marketing insights and customer feedback, you should be set up to continually tweak your product and customer experience in order to create, capture, and maintain demand.

   • Know what your customer’s objections are. What feedback patterns emerge from customers? What patterns emerge from customers who say they had a 10/10 experience?

Team Makeup

Since you likely don’t have much capital to deploy at the pre-7-figure stage, you’ll have to be scrappy with day-to-day responsibilities. The ideal is for one of the founders to be able to do everything listed below, especially if you’re in the CPG space and are able to get good unit economics with direct-to-consumer sales.

Our rule of thumb is that at least one founder/leader should try their hand at each of the below roles, and be dangerous enough to understand the dynamics of each before hiring more help. However, if that person is unable to execute well enough in any one of these areas in order to get over the 7-figure hump, you should likely find someone who is exceptional at that thing.

For example, we often see founders who understand the general dynamics of producing creative for platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but aren’t actually that good at creating content that has some virality to it. In this case, the founders are typically more skilled at driving the operations/supply chain of the company — and that’s okay.

Here are the main responsibilities needed:

Strategy

• Is focused solely on the 5 tenants listed above ^

• In charge of determining how much revenue is needed from net-new customers versus returning customers and how that effects initiatives

• Orients the team to targets and goals, and holds team accountable for most delegated tasks within mission critical initiatives

• Looks at the holistic customer journey metric

• (Don’t outsource this pre-7-figures. Getting to $1m in top-line revenue is really not that complicated strategically. It’s difficult, no doubt, but the playbook is plain to see in the wild. This should be done by a founder.)

Brand Management

• Defines how the company’s brand is positioned relative to its competitors within the market

• Upholds the communications standards and brand identity guidelines

• Focused mainly on top-of-funnel, brand awareness tactics

Social Media Management

• Content calendar planning across all organic channels

• In charge of posting on platform

• Responds to all comments and direct messages (and directs any customer issues to customer service)

• Pulls analytics and insights from each platform to understand performance (and cross-pollinate for paid advertising)

Media Buying

• Sets daily and monthly budgets for Paid Social and Google in coordination with the Strategist

• Adds and manages campaign structures on ad platforms

• Reports key metrics and brainstorms new creative ideas with the Strategist

• Works with the Strategist on micro-optimizations post-click to help convert customers and improve ROAS

Content & Creative

• Works on both net-new video, GIFs, and images as well as iterations of existing content

Here are three team makeup structures we have seen be successful:

Scenario 1

Founder/CEO manages:

• Strategy

• Brand Manager

• Creative

• Social Media Management

• Media Buying

Scenario 2

Founder handles:

• Strategy

• Social Media Management

• Media Buying

Freelancer(s) (~$2k/month):

• Creative

Scenario 3

Founder handles:

• Strategy

Full-time Brand Manager (~$6k/month) handles:

• Creative

• Social Media Management

• Media Buying

Additional Operating Principles

Through our experience working with over 250 companies, we’ve observed that the strongest interim CMO’s (at startups), as well as CMO’s at larger organizations, focus on the following three things:

1. Managing overall marketing performance like an investor.

   • Hiring & performance reviews

   • Everything is built on top of your team and culture, ‘nuff said. Invest in them.

2. Establish momentum and autonomy

   • Nurture the newest and most important initiatives to get them off the ground, all while training your team to manage on their own, at scale.

3. Portfolio management

   • Approach your entire marketing mix using an investor’s lens. Diversify over time, and don’t expect every program to work, perform equally, or be operated by the same team. Focus on the high-level return on investment across your entire "portfolio."

4. Improving team decision-making “inputs.”

   • Testing Processes

   • Without a disciplined testing process upheld by strong leadership, a team will inevitably devolve into “random acts of marketing” under the guise of progress. By having a disciplined testing process, your team will be set up to make more methodical progress. Yes, you need big ideas, but those are not enough to scale sustainably.

5. Data (Triangulation)

6. Ensure your team has MULTIPLE sources of analysis in order to discern what is working, and what is not.

7. Ensuring the marketing team has clear priorities that are aligned with the overall business roadmap.

   • Long-term business goals

8. What is the roadmap for the next 5-10 years? What do the stakeholders want from the business? Is it a lifestyle business or is there an exit strategy?

   • Annual targets

   • What are the worst-case, conservative case, and best-case scenarios for your revenue/profitability projections? How would you adjust strategy in each?

9. Quarterly cadence

   • State your quarterly objectives in a manner such that everyone from Senior VP’s to Interns can understand and contribute.

As a CEO or co-founder taking on marketing responsibilities, prioritizing the right areas is key to driving your business forward. Understanding unit economics, your Total Addressable Market, and ideal customer profiles is essential. Focus on demand creation and capture, and use market feedback for product improvement. Building a versatile team capable of handling strategy, brand management, social media, media buying, and creative content is crucial, even with limited resources. Effective marketing leaders manage performance with an investor's mindset, make data-driven decisions, and align marketing efforts with the company's long-term goals and annual targets. This approach sets a solid foundation for future growth, preparing the ground for a dedicated marketing leader to scale the business further.