3 Must Haves for Increasing CMO Tenure at SaaS Companies

Chief marketing officers are adept multitaskers, skillfully balancing responsibilities such as driving growth, building brand equity, and ensuring customer satisfaction. In the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry, some CMOs juggle P&L responsibilities while others focus more on the advertising and promotion arms of the business. The job description, with its varying definitions and subjective fine print, can cause confusion around responsibilities and misalignment around expectations and ultimately, turnover. One thing is for sure: SaaS CMOs, and CMOs in general, perform different roles at different places.

Most CMOs average three years or less in their role, boasting one of the highest turnovers in the C-suite. From what we see, it is typically a combination of miscommunication, job dissatisfaction, and underperformance that contribute to the revolving door, eliciting not only internal disruption, but further recruitment and severance costs.

This begs the question: what is the prescription for reducing CMO attrition in SaaS environments? Though there is no silver bullet for solving the turnover epidemic, there are ways to mitigate the issue. Leaders must analyze reasons for turnover and retention, determine what the CMO role solves for organizationally, ensure proper onboarding, and encourage collaboration with peers to heighten retention – and overall business impact.

How do you increase the tenure of your CMO hire?

Think hard about CMO job clarity

In many cases, there is a mismatch between the job description, CEO expectations, and CMO authority. Impractical alignment of responsibilities, expectations and performance metrics can lead to the role’s potential failure.

To increase retention, clearly communicate performance expectations at the onset, and most importantly, take note of the type of person being hired. They must be agile, comfortable leading teams through fast-paced change, and have their finger on the pulse of the industry.

Smartly set expectations on when you expect to see changes after you hire a CMO

The SaaS industry is known to be energetic and rapidly changing. CMOs must quickly adapt to market changes and employ new technologies to meet ever-evolving customer expectations. Many struggle to keep up with the fast-paced nature of the position and fight against the industry’s current. Many CEOs expect immediate changes when they hire a new CMO, but depending on the nature of the business and product, it is important to think through timelines around role evaluation, and have the right expectations for how fast changes will occur.

It takes a village to raise a good CMO

With high stakes and a plethora of competition, many CMOs find it difficult to differentiate their products or services, secure market share, and meet revenue objectives. It is critical to think through how your CMO will get up to speed with your products, your competition, and your industry. Simply expecting them to catch-on quickly with all these elements often causes misalignment.

CMO hiring objectives

It’s important to go back to the basics, define the role, and answer the most important question of all: what business challenge are we solving for? Getting the mission of the role succinct, and then empowering your CMO to execute against it with authority may help prevent this from happening. CEOs should ask themselves questions like:

• At the highest level, what is the CMO's purpose in our organization?
• Considering our business priorities, what metrics-based, time-bound outcomes do we need the CMO to deliver?
• Considering our C-suite's existing capabilities and what we'll be asking this person to achieve, what experiences, skills, and competencies do we need this person to bring to the table?

Matching the scorecard to the business strategy, especially in three key functional areas, will help foster cross-organizational alignment and set the CMO, and the entire C-suite, up for success.

CMO archetypes

To reduce turnover, define the type of CMO that best suits the organization’s goals. By design, should they be responsible for P&L, or should their focus be dedicated to driving marketing communications? Either way, being transparent about the personification of the role and level of authority will prevent future headaches from occurring.

• Enterprise P&L role: Achieves growth by strategizing and managing commercial efforts, and is accountable for product innovation and design, sales, distribution, pricing, and overall marketing communications.
• Strategy role: Leads strategic growth and development. Responsible for driving innovation, customer insights and analysis, and product design. Holds no P&L responsibility.
• Commercialization role: Drives sales through marketing communications, including advertising, digital content, social media, promotions, and events. Supports the centralized function that drives innovation and holds no P&L responsibility. Nearly half of CMOs (46 percent) have this type of role.

C-suite collaboration and ownership

The first 100 days are central to success and will dictate a CMO’s future in the organization. It is imperative that a strategic onboarding plan exists to ensure a productive start, as well as 1:1 meetings with C-suite peers. Lastly, CEOs should set ambitious yet attainable goals with the CMO. The most crucial piece of all: the CMO must, in tandem, take the initiative to pave their own path to success.

Eighty three percent of global CEOs agree that marketing can be a major driver of growth. They need to establish marketing as a catalyst for value and assume accountability for ROI. For instance, we’ve seen great success when CMOs partner with the CTO to develop a joint strategy on digital transformation, with marketing support. The best CMOs stay on the pulse of tech trends and bring new ideas and data points to conversations with the leadership team. They need to own their role with confidence.

Final thoughts

In the fast-moving and fiercely competitive world of SaaS, a capable CMO can serve as the driving force behind sustainable growth and market leadership. With a firm grasp of the market, a clearly defined role, and equity at the C-level, CEOs are able to retain high-performance marketers who set their companies up to win the hearts of their customers for the long haul.