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What is a Growth CMO?

Gary Survis | December 11, 2018| 1 min. read

What exactly is a growth CMO? And what does one do? Answering these questions is essential for growing companies recruiting or assessing a marketing leader.

As Gary Survis, Operating Partner at Insight, explains in our Scale-Up Hack video "What Is a Growth CMO?" different organizations require different skills from their executives. Depending on where a company is in executing or scaling its vision, it may need a CMO who is more strategic or more tactical. 

A strategic CMO is one who can contribute insight, take a big-picture approach and hire the right talent. A tactical one, on the other hand, is in the trenches, using first-hand experience from product marketing or demand gen, for instance, to drive performance. 

Finding the right mix of strategy and tactics is important. You may need a 90/10 strategy-heavy executive, or someone with flipped attributes who is more tactical. A growth CMO is somewhere in the middle, blending the best of both strategy and tactics. Growth-stage businesses, Survis says, need a CMO who is present across the organization, who can collaborate as easily with sales as product teams and customer success. This allows a growth CMO to gather robust intelligence. As a result, they can help steer the organization toward success with customers based on what they need and desire, not just what the business wants.

Watch our video to learn more from Gary Survis about what makes a growth CMO.