I switched from marketing manager to CMO in four years. It was quick. It was exciting. And frankly it was a little painful. I lost my sleep. I lost hair. I made a lot of mistakes and learned most of what I now know on the hard tour.
What I quickly recognized is the following: To be a great marketer is not The same as a great marketing manager. Especially in a growing environment. The skills that promoted me, the practical things, the campaigns, the creative goods not the same, which I needed to run a team, align with cross-functional departments or report a CEO.
This gap will hit you quickly as soon as you are on the hot seat.
So if you are on this way, whether you are new, lead a team for the first time or strive for the CMO role, this contribution is for you. These are five Mindset shifts that have helped me make this jump and that still influence the way I have today.
How to go from the marketer to CMO
1. Lead with the story, not with the strategy.
One of the greatest way of thinking that I had to do as a marketing manager was learning to run with history, not with the tactical plan.
It is tempting early on to drive directly to the strategy: Which campaigns should we carry out? Which channels should we optimize? But over time I noticed a pattern. The companies that broke through did not start with tactics or even with a traditional strategy. They started with a story: a clear explanation of the change in the market and why their product therefore existed.
At Drift, this story was “conversation marketing”. It reflected a real change in the way people wanted to buy. Nobody wanted to fill out and wait a form. They wanted to get answers in real time. This sentence gave our customers the language to explain why we were important. And our team clarified what we built, why it was important and how we should talk about it.
Your task as a marketing manager is to define this type of story and then to strengthen it continuously. What changes for your customer? What displacement do you try to navigate? And how does your product help you to react?
If the story is clearly, repeatable and grounded to something real, everything else – positioning, messaging, road mapping – becomes easier and more aligned.
Drift was not the only company that built his strategy for a story. Drift Kings Media did it with “inbound marketing” and gainsigt made it with “customer success”. In both cases the story came first and the strategy followed.
2. Learn how to communicate with your CEO.
In the past, I thought that the way to show effects was to list everything that the team worked on. I had put together long status updates that were filled with details about campaigns, performance and team activities. I thought it would show how productive we were.
But I quickly learned that the leadership does not have the context (or the time) to follow the tactical details. They focus on two things: income and narrative. You want to know:
- How does marketing help us achieve our goals?
- And do we tell the right story on the market?
As soon as I understood that, I changed the way I communicated with my CEO. I stopped listing updates and offering a point of view. I shared what we saw on the market, what worked or not and what might have to change. I also started to think more about what the CEO was responsible for and how marketing could support it.
Learn to communicate so much leadership. That doesn’t mean overlap. It means knowing what your management team is about and helps them to clearly see how marketing is associated with these priorities.
3. Test before you have team builders.
If you grow a marketing team, it is tempting to solve every problem by setting. Do you need PR? Bring in an agency. Would you like to expand into events? Publish a job. But I learned on the hard tour that the attitude normally backfires without clarity.
At the beginning of my career, I made a few employees in whom I could not quite articulate how the success looked. I only knew that we needed “help”. But without a clear feeling for the role or the results, it was difficult to guide, support or evaluate the work. And in some cases it led to more complexity than dynamics.
What worked better was to try to solve the problem internally. Sometimes that meant taking it on me. In other cases, I would ask someone in the team to run a small pilot. Could we test a webinar program internally? Try a basic PR -Outreach round? Assemble a few partner co-marketing campaigns?
These experiments have always taught us something. They gave us a clearer overview of what the role should actually contain, how we measure success and what kind of person we need to have it in the long term. When it was time to stop, we were sharper, faster and far more secure in the decision.
Pro tip: Not sure how to start? Perform a shabby version of the function for 3-4 months. This short sprint is usually sufficient to test the demand, to clarify the scope and to decide whether this is a full -time role, a freelance contract or something that you can visit again later.
4. Think beyond your function and find friends.
Something that I hadn’t expected when I entered into a marketing leadership role outside Marketing.
As an individual employee, they often concentrate on a single channel or a number of programs. But as a leader, they have to work more like a general manager. You still think about performance and pipeline, but also about special features, budget, cross -functional orientation and even internal morality.
I tried to do everything myself early on. I would open Salesforce reports, create forecast models and create stress via Budget table calculations. I thought to be a good leader, to own everything. But over time I realized that it was not sustainable or strategic. I did not have to “be” finance or sales. I had to find out how I can work closely and match them.
That meant regular check-in, not only to update each other, but to really work together and build up trust. What do we all try to reach this quarter? Where do our work streams overlap? What do you need from marketing and what do we need from you?
If these relationships are strong, marketing becomes more than one function. It will be a multiplier for the business.
5. Lay your own swing.
At a certain point, each team takes a break. Maybe you are waiting for a product introduction. Or your budget was not approved. Or guidance is the roadmap rethinking.
If that happens, it is easy to feel stuck. But one of the most valuable lessons I learned from Drift was that marketing does not have to wait. You can create your own momentum to move to success.
We carried out monthly starts every first Tuesday of the month, no matter what happens. Sometimes it was a large product publication. In other cases, it was a new report, a customer history or a podcast series. What counted was not the size of the start, but the consistency.
These starts gave the team a feeling of rhythm. They kept us visible on the market. And they have created an internal urgency that actually contributed to promoting the execution in other teams.
You don’t have to wait for a “big moment” to make noise. Just undertake to appear. The movement you are now creating can indicate the sound for how the rest of the org.
Make the shift from a marketer to the guide
The jump to the marketing leadership is no longer about doing more. It’s about thinking differently. From tactics to the story. From activity to effects. From executing campaigns to building trust in the entire business.
It means learning how to communicate an owner, align your team to a greater story and make decisions that drive business forward – even if there is no momentum of giving them a move. The earlier you make this shift, the more you will be ready when the opportunity comes.