The number one question I get asked right now is whether the CMO role is dying.
I hear it from marketers in my DMs, WhatsApp messages, and emails, all wanting to know whether they’ll end up reporting to a sales leader in the future. I hear it a lot from my founder friends, mostly in SF, who’ve told me their plans to split marketing between product and sales because the version of a CMO they want isn’t findable. And the data backs this up. CMO roles in B2B are down by 10 percentage points over the past 12 months.
A growing number of founders now see marketing as two disciplines. There’s a growth discipline, and there’s a brand discipline. One marketing leader has continually failed to do both well. So the founder puts brand and product marketing into the product org, puts growth and demand into the sales org, and no longer has to worry about the marketing leader they’re constantly disappointed with.
Recently, Kipp and I did a full Marketing Against the Grain episode on this, coming out next week. It’s the number one topic we’re being asked about, so we did a deep dive. Be sure to subscribe to our channel to get the full breakdown. Here’s a summary of my takes.
Why it’s happening
Two things changed at the same time.
Founders changed. They used to ask their network, “Is my marketer any good?” and took months to work out the answer. I’ve been asked so many times to look over a marketing leader’s strategy and provide commentary for the founder: Is this good? Are they doing the right things? Now I’m finding a new batch of founders have real takes on marketing. They value the craft. They’re deep in the weeds. They have a clear sense of what they want, and they can tell quickly when they’re not getting it.
And the work changed. AI has pushed both halves of marketing to extremes. The growth side has to be more technical than ever. The brand side has to be better at narrative, creative, and positioning than ever. It is very hard for one person to spike at both, so the marketing leader ends up disappointing the founder on one of them.
Kipp named the paradox well on the show:
Marketing has never been more important, and that is exactly what’s killing the role. Expectations went up faster than the people did.
To give marketers some credit, every other C-suite role is complex but single-discipline. The CMO is the only one expected to understand positioning, brand, events, demand, and paid, and to be judged on all of them by a founder who has strong opinions on what all these things should look like and how they should impact their company.
The real failure is hiring
If you don’t have breadth across all of that, you need to excel at hiring. This is where I see most marketing leaders lose the founder’s trust.
If you don’t have core knowledge of a discipline, you can’t hire well for it. So you keep flailing in that role. And when the founder sits down with your VP of Brand and comes away unimpressed, they don’t think, “That VP is weak.” They think “my CMO is weak.”
Why the new structure doesn’t fix it
Here’s my problem with splitting marketing between product and sales. It doesn’t solve the problem. It just changes its shape.
Very few sales leaders know how to hire an incredible demand leader. Very few CPOs know how to hire a great product marketer. So instead of one person who’s not hiring the caliber of marketing you need, you now have two, and they don’t share the same quality bar. You’ve doubled the number of people making the exact mistake you were trying to avoid.
The structure also assumes growth and brand are disconnected. They aren’t. Your paid advertising at scale should align with your positioning, because when you stop spending, you don’t want to be forgettable. A demand team sitting in sales is thinking about feeding pipeline this month, not about what you want to be remembered for.
You would never split your sales team between product and marketing. It wouldn’t make sense. We wrote a whole book, Loop, on the idea that marketing is coming back to a team of generalists who can do far more with AI. To get the benefit of that change, the team needs to work as one unit.
Don’t lower the bar
The truest thing Kipp said on the show: doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. You are better off with no CMO than the wrong CMO.
The number one thing a bad marketing leader does is build a team in their image, and that takes years to undo. And the number one reason fast-growth companies hire mediocre marketers is that the bar drops under pressure to fill the seat. Every hire I’ve got wrong in my career traces back to that. I needed someone fast, so I convinced myself this was the person.
What I’d tell a founder
For the last 10 years, “can you help me hire my marketing leader?” has been the most common ask I get from founders. I’ve never had an easy answer. I’ve always found there was a limited number of people who fit exactly what they wanted. And they weren’t willing to compromise.
Here’s the best advice I had for them:
Find the person who spikes in both disciplines and sell them hard. They exist. They are just rare and usually locked up.
If you can’t, pick any structure that lets you hire good people without lowering your bar for the person who will eventually run marketing. Reporting into sales is, in most cases, going to be a disaster. Sales work on short cycles, and marketing needs, at times, to split focus between short-term and medium- to long-term wins.
Or take a bet. Hire someone you believe can be your head of marketing in 18 to 24 months, and pay a great CMO to advise them for a year. Most of what that person needs is to know what good looks like, how to manage senior people, and how to set up clear feedback loops.
And build a keep-warm list. Your dream hires are never available when you need them. I check in with mine anyway. Some of my best hires took 12 months of conversations before anyone was hiring or being hired. Kipp’s extension of this is the best advice on the show: put 3 to 5 of those people on light advisory, ask them questions, and you’ve just multiplied your odds that one of them joins when the timing finally works.
So is the role dying?
No. It’s in decline because the bar went up and the talent pipeline didn’t. We’re in a period of personnel-to-skillset mismatch. A new wave of marketers will come up who can do both halves of the job, and the role comes back with them.
If you’re a marketer, that’s the opportunity. The founders aren’t asking for less from marketing. They’re not actively looking to not hire a CMO. Their expectations of what that person can do are just different. But if you can meet them, there are plenty of opportunities.
Until Next Time,
Happy AI'fying,
Kieran
Compartmentalizing marketing is a bit of a muzzle. Rebranding to “growth” as a CGO gives more of that sort of interweaving flexibility. But most of it is just how people define the role. The name carries too much with it, so changing it can be liberating.
Thanks for sharing Kieran. I so so sooo agree with you. I’ve been doing some shadowing work myself for young heads of marketing that have the talent but just need that little bit of coaching that they can’t get from the CRO or CEO. I do see this as a rather fractional function, 1/2 days a week otherwise you only see parts of it.