Wendy White, Chief Market Officer at daxko, delves into the reasons why B2B CMOs often face quick turnovers and failures in their roles. She emphasizes the importance of aligning expectations between boards, CEOs, and CMOs, conducting thorough due diligence before accepting a position, and understanding key metrics like pipeline health, product-market fit, and organizational culture. Wendy sheds light on the critical role of data in marketing success and the significance of brand reputation in shaping customer relationships.
“A CMO should focus on investing time in the right culture, executive team, and product fit for their career.” – Wendy White
As a seasoned B2B marketing executive with over 14 years of experience as a CMO, Wendy unpacks the importance of aligning CEO and CRO expectations for success. She delves into the true essence of a brand beyond logos, explores the vital role of culture in leadership, and shares valuable insights on data, customer experience, and the collaborative relationship between marketing and sales.
Follow Wendy White on LinkedIn
Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn
[Transcript]
[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we have an excellent guest. Wendy White, you’ve been involved in companies that were from Series A to just under a billion dollars in sales, and you love to talk about this. You started your career earlier as a propagandist for the military. I will let you expand on that and tell us a little more about your background.
[00:00:32] Wendy White: Okay. All right. Just to date myself, I have been a CMO four times in the last 14 years. I’ve been doing B2B tech-related stuff since college. But before college, and then during the early part of my career, I was a military intelligence officer specializing in psychological operations, which is essentially propaganda development. That’s where I started my career, learning how to do audience analysis and what we called psychological preparation of the battlefield.
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: How well that translated over to marketing, right?
[00:01:03] Wendy White: It absolutely was essentially marketing. It was thinking about the military’s objective and how to use communication vehicles like radio, TV, leaflets, and loudspeakers to influence either what was happening with the enemy or what was happening on the ground in the territory that armies would have to move through.
[00:01:23] Steve MacDonald: That could be a whole other podcast, but what we want to talk about today is something that, as CMOs, we are all affected by: Why do we fail so quickly? We have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. Why is that? Why, as part of the leadership of the company, is the finger pointing our way? Why are we the fall guy? We want to unpack that today.
[00:01:45] Steve MacDonald: You’ve got tons and tons of insights from your travels and your experiences. So, I’d love to just start out and turn it over to you. There are many reasons why—there’s not just one—but start us out with what you think are some of the biggest reasons why B2B CMOs fail so quickly.
[00:02:02] Wendy White: I think there are so many underlying causes of this problem, but it probably starts off with that fundamental mismatch between what the board and the CEO think they want, what kind of CMO they think they’re hiring, versus what kind of CMO they actually get. How well does the CMO interpret that, and then how do they manage their first 90 days, six months, or one year on the job? If the average tenure is 18 months, you can guarantee that by the end of that first six months, that CMO has probably already failed.
[00:02:39] Steve MacDonald: What you’re talking about just comes down to expectations from both sides, right?
[00:02:43] Wendy White: It is expectations. And I think a lot of that is you fail even before you take the job. It happens during the CMO’s due diligence. I always equate interviewing for a job to dating. You’re discovering all those things through that due diligence. What I have learned—through doing due [00:03:00] diligence very poorly in one example and very well in my later years—is that due diligence is incredibly important. It allows you, as a CMO, to make the right decision regarding culture fit, communication style, and collaboration style with the CEO.
[00:03:31] Steve MacDonald: What’s my runway? What kind of budgets do I have? What kind of resources do I have? What’s the belief set? Because one of the biggest things that happens is, as a CMO, we come in and we’re held accountable for things on two different extreme ends of the spectrum. One is very short-term pipeline development. The other is longer-term brand development—the expertise of the company.
[00:03:56] Steve MacDonald: A three-time B2B CMO once said on the podcast, “Tomorrow’s demand is today’s brand.” So, we know we have to work on that, but I’ve got a CEO, I’ve got a CRO, and then the board at the next meeting is asking about how this quarter is going and how the next one looks.
[00:04:12] Wendy White: First, you have to understand why they’re making a change and why they’re looking for you. If the answer—99 percent of the time—is that the pipeline isn’t strong, is that something you can walk in and solve within one or two quarters? Is there something systematically wrong? Is product-market fit wrong? Is the go-to-market motion wrong? Is the value proposition unclear? Is the data in such bad shape that you can’t tell any of those things? Any one of those could be a failure trap for the CMO walking in the door. You have to really understand what you’re getting yourself into.
[00:04:47] Wendy White: Just this week, I read a great article—it was a post on LinkedIn—that essentially said, as a CMO, if you’re walking in and the data isn’t good, you better understand that and you better have an agreement with the board and the CEO about how they’re going to invest to fix that data as you walk in the door. Not, “Come in and build a case and prove it,” because data is the lifeblood of marketing. One of your sure points of failure will be the inability to articulate what is working and what isn’t, and to convey that convincingly to the CEO and the board quickly. Data is another big source of failure—a lack of understanding of its position and strength and how much it will empower you as a CMO.
[00:05:32] Steve MacDonald: And when you talk about data, there’s data for everything nowadays. What’s the most important data a CMO should be tracking when reporting to the board, holding their own team accountable, and talking to sales about marketing success?
[00:05:55] Wendy White: Go back and start with due diligence and understanding that data coming in. Every CMO will care a lot about pipeline—we should. It should be our primary metric. But again, going back to that due diligence, understanding the health of the ability to measure pipeline is crucial.
[00:06:14] Wendy White: How well is Salesforce working? Are there any attribution tools? What does that data tell you? How well does the sales team manage its hygiene so that you, as a marketing leader, can actually understand what is contributing to pipeline and what pipeline actually looks like? Or are they managing their key wins through a secret spreadsheet the CRO keeps and reports on every week?
[00:06:35] Wendy White: You also want to understand product NPS, recurring revenue, and the causes for churn. Is it product-related? Support-related? That leads to understanding CSAT and transactional NPS.
[00:07:00] Wendy White: Lastly, employee NPS is crucial. You could be inheriting a demoralized team—maybe they felt undervalued, lacked training, or had poor salaries. Any one of these factors could crater your ability to execute almost immediately.
[00:07:53] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Something you said about a minute ago that I want to dig into a little bit more. You started talking about the NPS score, you started talking about CSAT scores, the whole customer experience.
[00:08:04] Steve MacDonald: So, there are surveys that have been out for a long time that say a percent of marketers feel that the customer experience is the greatest differentiator, the long-term sustainable differentiator that the company has. In SaaS, the minute we think we have a product feature that’s going to take us into the future, it’s copied. It’s not sustainable.
[00:08:28] Steve MacDonald: Selling off product, that’s one of the legs, the pillars that we have to stand on. Yet 60% of marketers don’t feel like they have the customer service organization in order to create that competitive advantage.
[00:08:43] Wendy White: There’s a fabulous book called Effortless Experience, and it’s written by one of the same people that wrote The Challenger Sale, actually.
[00:08:49] Wendy White: So, it’s like a very smart go-to-market person, and if you read this book, you start to understand the impact of something you mentioned earlier, which is this quarter’s brand is next quarter’s demand. This quarter’s terrible CSAT scores and NPS equals your incredibly negative dark funnel, which equals this quarter’s brand not being next quarter’s demand.
[00:09:12] Wendy White: So, this is why understanding things like NPS and transactional NPS are super important to a CMO coming in the door because you have to know what you’re working with.
[00:09:21] Wendy White: If you’ve got a massively negative reputation out in a private Facebook group where all your customers are talking with each other, or in a roundtable where they are involved and you’re not in it, that can and will bite you. A lot of that is very hard for a CMO in their original year of service to overcome because it is a six-year problem.
[00:09:41] Wendy White: Every terrible brand experience has a six-year repercussion, not a two-quarter repercussion. So, there’s this expectation from the board that you’re going to come in with this new messaging and positioning and you’re going to solve that. You’re not going to solve that.
[00:09:53] Wendy White: That is a fundamental flaw of the company’s business go-to-market, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take that job. It just means you’ve got to go in eyes wide open with an agreement with the board and the CEO on what the three-year plan is, how long it’s going to take you to help fix some of those things, and with an understanding of what’s going to be happening in the customer success organization to improve those scores or in the product.
[00:10:17] Wendy White: No company is perfect, no product is perfect, no success motion is perfect, but if you have terrible product NPS and terrible transactional NPS, it doesn’t matter if the market’s growing crazy—you’re never going to be able to capture your fair share of that market, and that could be a not good place for you to make the relative investment of your precious time as a CMO. So, these are just all the things you need to think about as you’re getting ready to take on this role and considering whether you will fail or not fail.
[00:10:44] Steve MacDonald: And so, what you’re doing is you’re saying, I’m expanding quite a bit on the traditional role of the CMO, because the CMO’s traditional role in customer support and customer experience—that was a different department. The employee NPS score.
[00:10:57] Steve MacDonald: I had on a podcast the CRO of the year last year, and his CMO attributed 50 percent of their success to their company culture.
[00:11:08] Wendy White: There’s a reason why there’s so much discussion about culture—because culture will make or break a team, and culture will make or break a company. So, I get that, and I think you can understand culture, and employee NPS isn’t just about culture. It’s about all the other intangibles with the culture. Signals like the acceptance of a terrible travel policy where you’re sitting in the back of the plane, flying red-eyes to save money, or taking three stops when you should have been flying nonstop, but it was more expensive—things like that kill employee morale. Pay equity will kill employee morale. Micromanagement will kill employee morale, and all of those things are culture from the top.
[00:11:44] Steve MacDonald: So, I want to take a little bit of a turn here. I want to talk about the relationship between the CMO and the CRO. So, the question is, there’s traditionally been a misalignment between these two positions and fundamentally different goals. So, therefore, there has to be one go-to-market motion, which means that’s why there’s a trend.
[00:12:03] Steve MacDonald: A lot of CROs are sales. They should be chief sales officers. There is a growing trend that there has to be a revenue leader. So, a true CRO would actually be looking at all revenue functions in the company.
[00:12:19] Wendy White: There are very few true CROs. You might reorganize around that, but just putting somebody who knows sales and calling them a CRO does not make them a revenue leader. It just makes them a glorified sales leader.
[00:12:29] Wendy White: I’m not saying that you can’t have a revenue leader, but as a CMO, a CMO isn’t just about pipeline and revenue. It is about the brand reputation of the company, the social impact of the company—every part of the end-to-end company experience the CMO has to look after.
[00:12:45] Wendy White: I think the big problem is what’s happened is that the CMO has become the marketing officer, not the market officer, and what that means is it’s turned into CMO equals pipeline, and brand equals preparation for pipeline versus brand being about goodwill and value of the company all up. I don’t really believe in a CMO reporting to a glorified sales leader.
[00:13:10] Wendy White: I don’t believe in that. You can call it a president, you can call it a CRO—whatever you want. I think that the CEO owns that. The CEO owns go-to-market.
[00:13:19] Wendy White: On the other hand, I am a strong believer in the CMO and the CRO being hand in glove. What I mean by that is when you walk into the board meeting, there should not be a piece of paper between you. The board should not be able to divide you. You should not be talking attribution at the board level. You shouldn’t be discussing, “We didn’t hit our number because those sales guys didn’t enter their pipeline until we overspent on this versus that.”
[00:13:43] Wendy White: Absolutely, those could be the reasons, but you better be lined up with that CRO to go in and say, “Here’s what we’ve learned. Here’s what we’re going to do better.” It should be a collaborative discussion about revenue and pipeline. Of course, there are other topics that you both have, and as a CMO, I’ve got broader-ranging topics than just pipeline. But pipeline is clearly very important, and bookings are very important. But you’ve got to be lined up.
[00:14:06] Wendy White: The minute there’s a crack between the CMO and the CRO, the board is like sharks in the water, and they will go after that. So, you can’t let those cracks show at the board level, and really not in front of your CEO. If each of you is complaining about the other in front of the CEO, that’s just a recipe for failure as well.
[00:14:24] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. There are the pre-meetings. There should be. There’s one plan in front of the CEO, and there’s one plan in front of the board.
[00:14:30] Wendy White: And the one plan doesn’t just start with this quarter. It starts with: what is the three-year plan? What markets do we think we can win in? What ICPs do we think we can win? That has to be agreed to and aligned. And then, when you’re talking about resource planning for the year, I don’t care where the BDR team sits. It can sit in sales or marketing. It doesn’t matter.
[00:14:49] Wendy White: I sometimes think BDRs would do better in marketing because we tend to be more structured, and that’s a super-structured operational team. But it doesn’t matter.
[00:14:56] Wendy White: But when you think about investments for the year—what money are you going to put in direct response? What money are you going to put in BDRs? What money are you going to put in sales coverage? That’s the model that the CMO and the CRO, or the CMO and the head of sales, should be working on together.
[00:15:12] Wendy White: Because it’s all a balloon squeeze on what bets we have about what part of our revenue engine is going to perform in what ways. So, that’s a plan that should be, again, incredibly unified.
[00:15:25] Wendy White: Anytime I see a CFO off planning the revenue targets and the headcount targets for sales and BDRs, and marketing isn’t in the room, that’s an org where you can guarantee that the CMO does not have the rights to the table, and they should be out.
[00:15:39] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Tell me, because I want to have enough time to get over a couple more things that you wanted to talk about in terms of this. Talk to me about the brand, and it’s a huge part of the responsibility of seeing a lot of CEOs.
[00:15:52] Steve MacDonald: They think a lot of CMOs come in, and the brand means the style guide. Talk to me about what is the importance of the brand in the role that the CMO has in fostering and promoting that brand.
[00:16:02] Wendy White: Yeah. Any good CMO, or any good brand manager, or anybody who is a marketer worth their salt knows that the brand is not the creative identity. It’s not just the logo guide.
[00:16:15] Wendy White: The brand is the feeling that you evoke in your customers. It’s the belief they have in what your company can do and your belief in your ability to execute, lead, grow, and solve their mission.
[00:16:30] Wendy White: It’s the confidence in the company, the confidence that you are the right provider. The confidence that if I work with you, I’m going to get the right ROI. The confidence that if I work with you, I’m going to be successful. It’s those confidences you’re creating in the market. But it’s also the confidence that this is the right solution and the right time to go after it—something you’re creating in the market long before that company is in market. So, when they get in market, they think of you and come to you. You’re the obvious place they go to. They say, “What should my RFP look like? Let me go ask what that company says,” and they grab your RFP checklist, your writing guide, and they think it’s a Bible because you said it—because you’re credible. That’s what brand is. It’s not your style guide.
[00:17:06] Wendy White: When my team talks about brand and they always say, “If they talk about logos and whatever,” I say, “What you mean is the creative identity,” and I really force people to separate those two and use those exact words for the reason you just talked about.
[00:17:19] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it’s the kind of thing that, in the world of B2B, your brand is all about your relationship—that trust factor that you’re an expert who can help. And that help isn’t limited to what your product or your tech does.
[00:17:35] Steve MacDonald: It’s that advisor status, like what Gartner talks about—that trusted advisor. And that same B2B CMO that was on before, talking about “Today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand,” talks about how it actually impacts the sales process in tremendous ways—everything you just talked about.
[00:17:51] Steve MacDonald: It also shortens sales cycles because then the salesperson isn’t having to build all the trust themselves. They’re not having to establish themselves as a trusted advisor—somebody that should be listened to. No, none of our buyers want to be sold to. They want to be advised. They want to be helped. They want to be supported.
[00:18:12] Wendy White: They want to go on a curated journey, and they want you to believe that you can take them on that. And also, they want to go on that journey without ever talking to you for the first 70 percent of it. So, brand plays a really important role in getting yourself into consideration and in the conversation during that 70 percent of their buying journey that they’re doing without ever being on the phone with you.
[00:18:36] Steve MacDonald: And it’s getting worse. Gartner is putting it at 82 percent—the self-service buyer’s process.
[00:18:42] Wendy White: I believe it, and I don’t see that shifting back toward the more traditional sales model. I see it shifting in the opposite direction. I’m trying to bring as many “click-to-buy, click-to-experience” type experiences into our products now, because as we shift more towards post-millennial buyers, that’s their expectation. “I want to be able to chat. I want to be able to experience without talking to you.”
[00:19:09] Wendy White: My kids—my twenty-somethings—they would never call. If they had to call, they would never buy anything.
[00:19:15] Wendy White: They don’t want to talk to us. They want to experience it, understand it, do their work, and immerse themselves in it—even without talking to us.
[00:19:22] Steve MacDonald: If there was one bit of advice that you wanted to leave the audience with today—I’m a marketing leader, I’m a head of marketing, a VP of marketing—what is your advice for them? What’s the one thing that you would say, “Here’s what you really want to make sure that you’re going to do”?
[00:19:39] Wendy White: I think let’s go back to the idea of picking the right job. I have stumbled on this. I picked a real stinker at one point in my career, about eight years ago.
[00:19:49] Wendy White: It was bad, and I stuck with it for almost six months because I have that “go team” mentality—”It’s not them, it’s me. It must be me. I want to figure it out and fix it and fix them.” Terrible mistake.
[00:20:02] Wendy White: The key thing is to really understand—whether you’re in your thirties or your fifties, like me—your time is the most precious commodity you have to invest in growing your career, but also growing your wealth and your impact. So, picking the right culture, the right executive team, the right product fit—all of those things are super, super critical.
[00:20:26] Wendy White: There’s a great blog. Carol Dietrich writes a great blog, and she’s blogged about this topic. She’s got some good insights on the idea that your time is your number one investment. So, for me, I take that super seriously.
[00:20:37] Wendy White: I’m in the last ten years of my career. Maybe less, I don’t know. I always want to retire before I’m 60. But every day is a choice about the investment of your time. If you’re in a situation where you don’t have that great support, you’re fighting every day against the CRO, there’s no brand investment, and you’re just treading water on lead gen—get out and go find the next thing. I know the market still feels shaky, but the next thing is out there.
[00:21:03] Steve MacDonald: So, here’s my final question for you. You’ve been a B2B CMO four different times. What are you most proud of in your career that you’ve been able to accomplish?
[00:21:13] Wendy White: So, I have a daughter who is in her late twenties, and I look at her and think she’s going to be all the things that I maybe didn’t have the confidence to be in my twenties and thirties. Then I think about her and her mentors and want to feel like I’ve led that same kind of mentor relationship with the people that I have brought up through their careers and have worked with in their careers.
[00:21:38] Wendy White: So, probably the thing I’m most proud of is that I have many people who worked for me, who bounced back multiple jobs and have grown their careers from IC level up to VP level, and I love that. I’ve worked with them, grown with them, or taken them with me to two or three companies, and seeing them out there—this amazing executive getting ready to go be a CMO themselves—I love that. I love having that impact on people’s lives and that ability to help them, coach them.
[00:22:01] Wendy White: Some people on my staff jokingly call it the “Wendy White School of Marketing.” I got a call yesterday—”Okay, I went to the Wendy White School of Marketing”—and I feel proud of them because what you’re trying to teach them to do is have confidence in themselves, to be both a technical and functional expert, but also to be a seat-at-the-table executive. I’m really proud of those things.
[00:22:18] Steve MacDonald: I know there are going to be people who have additional questions. Would it be appropriate if we published a link to your LinkedIn profile?
[00:22:26] Wendy White: Absolutely. Yes, for sure, and people can reach out to me. My work email is wendy.white@daxko.com. I’d love to hear from people.
[00:22:33] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Wendy, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. What an important topic. It’s really a topic around the relevance of the CMO role—how do we make sure that it remains an important seat at the table, as you just said? Marketing has not always had that seat at the table, and we need to have it, and we need to earn it. So, thank you for everything today.