Who needs a CMO

Being a Consulting & Outsourced Marketing firm, we at IBS get to meet business owners with varying sizes and types of businesses – from bootstrapped start-ups to profit-making mid-sized companies and even the large companies. One of our key observations is that, no matter what the scale of the business, marketing as a function and area does not always get the required attention.

This is not just the case for new age/digital marketing areas like social media or inbound marketing, but this issue spans across time spent in basic marketing thinking like brand positioning, value proposition to creation and deployment of marketing collaterals and communication.

The comforting truth is that today, given the spurt in new ways of working and collaboration, interesting ways to outsource work and available options, one does not always need huge budgets or a fancy marketing team to make all of this happen. To flip the question of this very blog’s title – perhaps we should really ask “Who doesn’t need a CMO?”

A CMO typically supports the Business Owner/ CEO by thinking, planning, strategising, executing and recalibrating the various aspects of the organisation’s marketing. She would help prioritise spends, research and understand the customer needs and help translate the business vision into an actionable marketing plan. She would add the tools needed in the organization’s marketing arsenal, choose the best vendors to work with and manage the results one wants from Marketing for the business.

So why don’t many organisations have a CMO yet? High hiring costs, requirement to spend time in on-boarding the CMO, lack of a basic team to support the CMO in her execution, or maybe it is not a full time requirement right now, the reasons could be many.

For such organisations, working with a shared or outsourced CMO-on-hire is a great solution at the current life stage. By doing so, they can:

  1. Get access to this kind of talent at a portion of the cost
  2. Get access to a full-fledged team of marketers without having to invest in the people or infrastructure
  3. Begin with the end in mind – get a sense of metrics, what to measure and so on for what gets spent on marketing
  4. Invest little to reasonable time from the CEO / Owner level to make this happen

At IBS, this is one of the core ideas with which our journey began. By offering this very service – of an outsourced CMO or outsourced marketing team to growing organisations, we are able to ease a significant part of the business owner / CEO’s bandwidth. This in turn, allows them to do more with their time and resources. It is also a very fulfilling proposition as it gives us a sense of tremendous ownership and satisfaction, when our work directly impacts the intensity and quality of an organisation’s marketing efforts. Needless to say, there are challenges and constraints in the model, that need to be addressed right from the start. Nonetheless, given the benefits, we increasingly find, quite a few business owners, who are ready to embrace the idea of an outsourced CMO.

If you would like to understand how this works, give us a call or mail in to inception@inception.net.in, We have some interesting examples of how CMOs-on-hire work. Besides, we love nothing more than talking to different businesses and understanding their approach or expectation from marketing as a function.

About the Author:  
Pavithra is Founder & Partner at Inception Business Services. A Marketing & Management professional with a keen interest in people and passion for ideas, Pavithra moved from being a Banker & Wealth Management professional to entrepreneur. Working with start ups, Brand management, Customer engagement, Content creation and Coaching/Training are areas of work that most excite her. She is a multi-tasking entrepreneur, mother of a 4 year old and wife of a businessman. Mail her at pavithra at inception.net.in.