“The hardest part for me as a CMO is managing expectations,” shared the CMO of a $6 billion tech company. “Leadership around a CMO wants more demand, more brand, and they want it immediately,” she added. This is not an unusual scenario. However, it is a critical one to break down, as it also leads to many hasty moves that can doom CMOs.

Managing Expectations is Everything

There’s a good reason the first chapter of my first book, The CMO’s Periodic Table, was Setting Expectations. If there’s a mismatch in expectations, the CMO loses, even if the CEO’s, board’s, or investor’s expectations are lunacy. It's on the CMO to get alignment.

Managing Expectations Starts Before You Take the Job

Landing a CMO job is tricky. There is a lot of pressure to promise the moon, or at least more than your predecessor. This is a trap. Odds are, a substantial improvement to a company’s growth rate will not result from marketing wizardry alone. And it certainly won’t happen in one quarter. Experienced CMOs know this and set expectations with clear timelines and milestones before they start, and won’t take the job if these things aren’t acceptable to the hiring execs.

Hasty Move #1: Assuming Your Predecessor Is a Moron

“I think CMOs do each other a disservice when they don’t build on the work of their predecessors,” noted the 3x CMO referenced above. You’ve got a lot to do in your first year, so understanding what’s working and what isn’t is essential. The only way you can do this is not to make assumptions and avoid disregarding everything that’s already in the works. Past initiatives may be just about ready to bloom.

Hasty Move #2: Redoing the Website

You may think the message is wrong. And that the visuals are off the mark. But rushing to rebuild the website is a fool’s errand. Many brands are already struggling to get organic traffic – rebuilding your website is a sure way to see that trend accelerate. Instead, start with a few hypotheses and run as many A/B tests as you can [and fix your LLM exposure issues]. If site architecture is the ultimate problem, fine. But more likely, you have a differentiation problem, one that will take a corporate-wide initiative to fix.

Hasty Move #3: Revamping the Brand without Repositioning

There’s a reason that some CEOs see Marketing as the “arts and crafts” department. Too many of their conversations with marketers involve color schemes and logo designs. Your logo may indeed suck. Your visual design may also suck. And those things should be fixed, BUT not before you have a new go-to-market story that is truly differentiated from your competition. Getting there often requires meaningful changes to the product, pricing, and customer support. It requires repositioning the brand.

Don’t try to put a new coat of paint on an old barn. Rebuild the barn from the ground up.

When CMOs set expectations around differentiation, they get the time they need to make lots of good things happen.

Written by Drew Neisser