The company tells you it wants to “Turn marketing into a revenue driver, and leverage AI”.
They expect you to add 25% to the sales pipeline by the end of the year.
The job sounds exciting, and the ambitious growth targets are a welcome challenge.
Then, after the first few months, you realise there’s:
- Huge martech debt
- Siloed departments
- Not enough resources
- Marketing is sales support at best
- New initiatives take forever to roll out
- C-level doesn’t understand what marketing does
- Marketing has never measurably contributed to business metrics
All these are expected for a company in a digital transformation phase, but each will massively impact your ROI timeline.
So many CMOs face a disconnect between the expected outcome, and the time needed to build functional marketing.
This is one of the reasons for CMOs to have short tenure (3 years). You either burn out, quit, or get fired because there’s no quick ROI.
Companies need a reality check about where their marketing is today, and what results can be reasonably expected.
Chasing trends (AI) or having unrealistic expectations (25% pipeline growth) will simply cause an endless stream of CMOs with very little progress.