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Companies hire CMOs to create growth. The best ones know growth is a team sport.
Marketing can build demand, strengthen preference, improve conversion and create new paths to revenue. But none of that happens independently of the broader business. Budget decisions affect execution. Sales affects conversion. Product affects demand. Customer experience affects retention. And leadership alignment affects nearly everything.
That’s what makes the CMO role so interesting.
McKinsey estimates that only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience, and just 4% have held a CMO-like role. Meanwhile, more than 70% of Fortune 100 CEOs come from operations or finance backgrounds.
That isn’t a problem. In fact, some of the best CEO/CMO partnerships bring very different perspectives to the table.
But it does make alignment especially important.
McKinsey also found that while roughly half of CEOs said they were comfortable with modern marketing, 66% of CMOs said their CEOs were not.
That gap is worth paying attention to.
I’ve spent much of my career building marketing organizations, brands and growth programs. The longer I do this, the more convinced I become that great marketing performance comes from a combination of strong marketing leadership and a strong operating environment.
The CMO has to deliver. And the organization has to create the clarity that makes delivery possible.
Here are five things I’ve seen make an enormous difference.
1. A clear budget and clear accountability
Let’s start with money because eventually every marketing conversation gets there.
A CMO doesn’t need an unlimited budget. They need clarity around the investment the organization is prepared to make and the outcomes expected in return.
I learned the value of this during five years working within USAA’s go-to-market process.
By Q3, we were presenting a thoroughly developed strategy for the following year to the CMO and business-unit leadership. We brought the research, business objectives, target audience, strategy, programs, expected outcomes and, importantly, the specific investment required to execute it.
Then leadership made a decision: yes or no.
Some things were funded. Others weren’t. That’s business.
But once the decision was made, we had the runway to do the actual work required for a Q1 launch: creative development, campaign planning, partner coordination, sales enablement, measurement and execution.
And approval wasn’t the end of the conversation.
Throughout the following year, we came back every quarter and reported performance against the plan we had agreed to.
What did we say we were going to do? What did we spend? What happened? What were we learning? Where were we ahead or behind? What needed to change?
That’s an important part of budget autonomy that sometimes gets overlooked.
Certainty should come with accountability.
Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey shows why this matters now. Marketing budgets in the survey averaged just 7.8% of company revenue, 18% below the mean allocation four years earlier. Meanwhile, 56% of CMOs said they did not have enough budget to execute their strategy, and 54% reported insufficient resources.
When resources are constrained, clarity matters even more.
A smaller committed budget can be more useful than a larger theoretical one because teams can prioritize, plan and execute against something real.
Agree on the strategy. Agree on the investment. Establish the decision rights. Define how performance will be measured.
Then come back to the plan and hold everyone accountable.
Budget certainty is not budget abundance. And autonomy is not the absence of accountability.
I’m clearly not alone in thinking about this. Jonathan Metrick, a four-time CMO who has hired more than 25 CMOs, recently shared a smart list of questions marketing leaders should ask before accepting a CMO role.
One was remarkably simple:
Is there a defined marketing budget?
His take: if the answer is no, consider it a red flag.
I’d add one more:
Once the budget is defined, does the CMO have the authority to manage it?
Because approving an investment and establishing clear decision rights around that investment are two different things.
2. A culture where experimentation is expected
Every company loves the word innovation.
The word failure tends to be less popular.
Unfortunately, you don’t really get one without occasionally experiencing the other.
Marketing is full of uncertainty. A promising channel may not scale. A message that performs beautifully in research may fall flat in market. A creative concept everyone loves in the conference room may produce absolutely nothing once customers see it.
That’s not automatically failure.
Sometimes that’s the answer you paid the experiment to give you.
A strong CMO should build a system for making calculated bets, measuring them quickly, learning from them and moving investment toward the winners.
Experimentation still needs discipline: a hypothesis, a target audience, an objective, an investment threshold and an agreed definition of success.
And when a test doesn’t work, the question shouldn’t simply be, “Who got this wrong?”
A much more useful question is:
“What did we learn?”
One of my favorite shifts inside a marketing organization is moving the conversation from:
“I think…”
to:
“Let’s find out.”
It’s a much more productive mindset.
It also tends to make meetings shorter, which may be its own competitive advantage.
3. Clear decision rights, without shutting out good ideas
Marketing has an interesting place inside an organization because nearly everyone interacts with it.
We’re all customers. We all see advertising. We all use websites. We all have favorite brands. So naturally, people have opinions.
And that can actually be valuable.
Some of the best ideas I’ve encountered have come from people outside marketing who saw something the marketing team didn’t.
The trick is separating useful input from personal preference.
Put a new homepage on the screen and someone doesn’t like the headline.
Someone else would never click that ad.
Another person is certain the company needs to be on TikTok because their teenager spends six hours a day there.
I say that with love.
Mostly.
Input is good. I want smart people challenging marketing.
But personal preference isn’t customer research.
“I wouldn’t click on that” only matters so much if you aren’t the person we’re trying to get to click on it.
That’s why I continually bring subjective marketing conversations back to two questions:
What is the objective?
Who is the target audience?
Those two questions clear up an amazing amount of noise.
If two ideas are strategically credible, even better. Test them and let the customer have the deciding vote.
This is also where strong CEO/CMO partnerships really shine.
The CMO’s job isn’t to win every creative argument by invoking the marketing title. It’s to make the thinking behind marketing understandable to the rest of the business.
Here’s our objective. Here’s the audience. Here’s what the research tells us. Here’s why we made this decision. Here’s how we’re testing it. Here’s what success looks like.
That isn’t unchecked autonomy.
That’s accountable autonomy.
And it’s considerably more useful than designing marketing by committee.
4. Enough time to understand the customer
I’m a big believer in moving quickly.
I’m also a big believer in knowing where you’re going before you hit the gas.
One of my first priorities in a marketing leadership role is remarkably low-tech:
Talk to people.
Customers. Salespeople. Employees. Executives.
I want to know why customers buy. Why they leave. Why we win. Why we lose. What competitors they’re considering. What they call the problem we’re trying to solve. What sales hears every day that somehow never makes it into the marketing deck.
Then I want the data: CRM performance, conversion rates, win-loss analysis, website behavior, search data, customer research, competitive intelligence and sales-cycle length.
You need both.
And understanding the buying cycle matters enormously when setting expectations for growth.
6sense’s 2025 research involving nearly 4,000 B2B buyers found that the average buying cycle was 10.1 months. Buyers evaluated an average of 5.1 vendors, yet 95% ultimately purchased from a vendor already on their Day One shortlist.
That doesn’t mean marketing gets 10 months to disappear into a strategy bunker.
Far from it.
Accountability starts immediately.
Measure qualified traffic, engagement, conversion, accepted opportunities, pipeline creation and funnel velocity. There should be evidence that the engine is moving long before every deal closes.
But revenue still moves on the customer’s clock.
So instead of asking:
“How long should marketing take?”
Ask:
“How long does our customer take?”
Then work backward.
5. Full-funnel accountability
This may be my favorite one because it turns a lot of opinions into something much more useful:
Data.
Marketing is measured relentlessly: traffic, conversion, CPL, MQLs, SQLs, attribution, pipeline.
But if we really want to understand growth, measurement can’t stop when marketing hands something to sales.
Consider the familiar sentence:
“The leads weren’t good.”
Okay.
Maybe they weren’t.
Let’s look.
How quickly did someone respond? Was the lead actually contacted? Was there a meaningful conversation? How strong was discovery? Did the salesperson understand why the prospect raised their hand? Was the follow-up personalized? Did the prospect get thoughtfully nurtured if they weren’t ready today?
Or did they receive five variations of “just circling back” before being marked closed?
Those aren’t minor details.
6sense found that 79% of buyers initiated the first seller interaction themselves, and 94% had already ranked their shortlist before engaging sellers. The preferred vendor at the end of the selection phase ultimately won 77% of the time.
That means marketing may have spent months creating awareness, credibility and preference before a prospect ever raises a hand.
What happens after that hand goes up is part of the growth engine too.
I want to see the whole thing:
Source → Lead → Accepted → Contacted → Meaningful Conversation → Opportunity → Pipeline → Closed-Won
Then measure conversion and velocity between every stage.
If something breaks, diagnose it.
Maybe marketing attracted the wrong audience. Maybe sales followed up too slowly. Maybe discovery was weak. Maybe pricing killed the opportunity. Maybe the prospect simply wasn’t ready yet.
Those problems require completely different solutions.
“Marketing gave us bad leads” isn’t funnel analysis.
It’s a sentence.
Marketing should be accountable for the demand it creates. Sales should be accountable for what happens to that demand.
And both should be looking at the same growth engine.
Great CMOs still need to deliver
None of this is an argument for lowering expectations for CMOs.
Quite the opposite.
Give a CMO a defined investment, room to experiment, clear decision rights, access to customers, realistic time horizons and visibility into the entire revenue funnel.
Then expect a lot from them.
Expect strategy. Financial discipline. Customer obsession. Experimentation. The humility to admit when something isn’t working and the judgment to change it.
And yes, expect pipeline and growth.
The best CMO environments aren’t built on unlimited freedom. They’re built on clear commitments followed by clear accountability.
And the best CEO/CMO relationships aren’t built on one function always getting its way. They’re built on different perspectives, healthy debate, shared objectives and a common definition of success.
So when a CEO or board evaluates the marketing organization, I think there are two questions worth asking:
Is our CMO delivering?
And just as importantly:
Have we created the alignment that allows our CMO, and the broader organization, to deliver?
Great marketing leadership requires the right executive.
Great growth requires the whole company.
Because hiring someone to help build the growth engine is only step one.
You still have to give them the keys.
Related: The Marketing Plot Twist of 2026: Maybe We Need Less AI