What Skills Should CMOs Prioritise in 2023?

Leadership Triage: What Skills Should CMOs Prioritise in 2023?

How can CMOs juggle essential skills in 2023 amid a rapidly evolving digital landscape, economic headwinds and a talent shortfall?

It is widely known how the marketing leader has become the multi-hyphenate role in the executive team. From developing their core skills in brand and purpose, to re-learning events and field marketing techniques, to data-driven and sales-enhanced capabilities, the CMO has an array of muscles they can flex.

B2B CMOs and their teams in particular are stretched. Their increasingly digitised futures require renewed, and new, focus. We spoke to members of our CMO community at The Studio to dive deeper into this hot topic.

CMO insights from: 

• Sally Croft, CMO and Head of Corporate Relations Europe and LatAm, Ericsson
• Steven Goddard, Head of GTM Strategy, Nutanix
• Sumeet Vermani, Founder and CMO, SKV Consulting
• Steven Wastie, CMO, Menlo Security
• Michelle Urdiales, CMO Latin America, Maersk

What skills should CMOs prioritise for themselves and their teams? 

The panellists agreed upon core attributes. These included:

• experience navigating change;
• an almost obsessive attention to detail;
• prioritisation that borders on triage;
• sound knowledge of the customer and the business.
• Additional skills also now include empathy as a leader, business strategic alignment and technical expertise. 

If these sound like too much for one person to master, it is because it is. Across the industry there is softly spoken murmurs that, with the sheer range of skills needed for the executive position to potentially master, it is impractical to demand this of the CMO. This is where the nature of prioritisation comes into play. B2B CMOs ought to challenge themselves not to be master of all things, but a generalist as much as possible, with specialisms that suit their personality and/or the business, leaving other key skills to trusted team members. 

Learn how each of these marketing leaders prioritises their own particular armoury of attributes, from technology to sales alignment, by watching the roundtable highlights below.