The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence

By Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro and Dan Faulkner

The role of the Chief Marketing Officer has never been more complex—or more critical. As the marketing profession rapidly evolves, today’s CMOs and tomorrow’s marketing leaders are expected to balance visionary strategy with precise operational execution.

The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence delivers a practical framework to help you meet that challenge head-on. Drawing on decades of experience leading marketing teams at startups and multi-billion-dollar companies, authors Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro, and Dan Faulkner present a comprehensive playbook for modern marketing leadership.

This guide provides a best practices approach to forming clear marketing goals, developing strategic plans, building impactful campaigns, optimizing budgets, and measuring real marketing ROI. It includes practical models, proven frameworks, and ready-to-use templates that help you structure an efficient, results-driven marketing strategy tailored to your organization’s needs.

Whether you're a seasoned CMO or an aspiring marketing leader, The Next CMO offers actionable insights to help you:

Establish goals aligned with your business objectives Create scalable, strategy-based marketing plans Craft campaigns that drive measurable impact Optimize your budget for efficiency and effectiveness Demonstrate marketing’s contribution to business growth

In today’s data-driven, fast-moving marketing landscape, operational excellence is no longer optional—it’s the foundation for success. This book is your essential guide to becoming a high-performing marketing leader and driving long-term value for your business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665711371

Peter Mahoney

Peter Mahoney Peter Mahoney is the founder and CEO of Plannuh, a company providing the first AI-driven platform to automate marketing operations. Before founding Plannuh, Peter spent more than 30 years as a marketing and product executive with experience as a CMO for startups through multi-billion dollar public companies. Scott Todaro Scott has devoted his 28-year professional career to perfecting the marketing craft. He has held marketing leadership positions with seven companies, 4 resulting in successful exits. Scott holds BBA and MBA degrees with concentrations in marketing and was an adjunct professor for 4 years teaching marketing strategy to MBA students. Dan Faulkner Dan Faulkner is the CTO of Plannuh, where he is responsible for the delivery of the world’s first AI-driven marketing management platform. Dan has 25 years of experience in product management, strategy, and general management. Dan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and a Masters in Marketing.

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Copyright © 2021 Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro, Dan Faulkner.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1139-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1138-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1137-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917450

Archway Publishing rev. date: 09/08/2021

CONTENTS

About the Authors

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Problem with Operational Marketing Leadership

Chapter 2 The Impact of Ineffective Marketing Leadership Execution

Chapter 3 The Elements of Operational Marketing Excellence

Chapter 4 Your Marketing DNA: Stakeholders and Culture

Chapter 5 Building a Winning Marketing Plan

Chapter 6 Goals-Based Marketing

Chapter 7 Defining, Creating, & Applying Marketing Strategy

Chapter 8 Redefining Marketing Campaigns

Chapter 9 Successful Management of Your Marketing Budget

Chapter 10 The New Marketing ROI

Chapter 11 How to Present Marketing Results to Your CEO and Board

Chapter 12 The Operational Marketing Index

Appendix

Conclusion

Templates and Exhibits

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Peter Mahoney

Peter Mahoney is the founder and CEO of Plannuh, a venture-backed software company providing the first AI-driven platform to automate marketing leadership. Before founding Plannuh, Peter spent more than 30 years as a marketing and product executive with experience as a CMO for startups through multi-billion dollar public companies, including voice and AI leader, Nuance Communications. Peter is also an active board member, angel investor, advisor, a sought-after public speaker, and the host of The Next CMO podcast. Peter has a large following on Twitter via his @nerdCMO account. Peter graduated from Boston College with a double major in Physics and Computer Science and still lives a stone’s throw away from campus with his wife and three adultish children.

Scott Todaro

With a passion for marketing, Scott has devoted his 28-year professional career to perfecting the craft. As CMO and co-founder of Plannuh, along with Peter and Dan, Scott is committed to improving the marketing profession by creating a software platform to help marketers optimize their strategies, plans, and budgets. Scott has held marketing leadership positions with seven companies, 4 resulting in successful exits, and has managed hundreds of marketing professionals. In addition to his professional experience, Scott holds BBA and MBA degrees with concentrations in marketing and was an adjunct professor for 4 years at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell teaching marketing strategy to MBA students. Scott lives outside of Boston with his wife Maureen and family. Follow Scott on Twitter @stodaro24.

Dan Faulkner

Dan Faulkner is the CTO of Plannuh, where he is responsible for the technical strategy and delivery of the world’s first AI-powered marketing management platform. Dan has 25 years of high-tech experience, spanning research and development, product management, strategy, and general management. He has deep international experience, having led businesses in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, delivering complex AI solutions at scale to numerous industries. Dan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics, a Masters degree in Speech & Language Processing, and a Masters degree in Marketing. He has completed studies in Strategy Implementation at Wharton. Dan lives in Andover, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

FOREWORD

The next CMO. That is to say, the next generation of CMOs. I know them well. I talk to them all the time. I’ve been lucky to work with a handful of future CMOs on my teams at Drift and Privy. And through DGMG I hear from them every day, whether that’s in the DGMG community, my podcast, or even just comments on LinkedIn.

There are the students, just learning the ropes and trying to get their foot in the door.

There are the young marketers, fresh out of school, trying to find their place in the marketing world.

The established marketers, with a few years of experience under their belt, are looking for a boost that will get them up to the C-suite. And even current CMOs, who have scaled the marketing mountain and want to stay on top of their game.

But independent of their skill set and expertise, they all have one thing in common: none of them went to school for B2B marketing.

Regardless of age or experience, everyone who shows up on my site comes seeking those magic marketing secrets and systems that can’t be read in a book or conveyed in a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation at an all-hands meeting. The kind of knowledge that can only be learned after years of testing, failing, re-testing, then failing again. Things like: How to plan, select a strategy, build a budget, and set and execute on goals. What channels to pursue and which to ignore.

It’s stuff that every rising marketer has to grapple with at some point. I remember a younger, more naive Dave Gerhardt saying that he was only going to run marketing plays that his customers loved. Forget about demand generation. Forget about goal setting. It’s all about the brand and creating memorable experiences. That made for good clickbait, sure, but it’s far from the pro-level operating system you need to run a marketing machine today for a high-growth business today.

And while I’m still an unabashed brand builder (and will defend that position until the day I die), it’s a lot easier to only focus on brand plays when you aren’t the one who owns the marketing number. Once you’re in that leadership position, the cold, hard fact of marketing comes into focus: it’s all about driving revenue and growth.

That doesn’t mean that you need to abandon brand building entirely and only focus on what generates instant ROI. On the contrary, brand-centric channels like social media, podcasting, YouTube, etc. can be great long-term growth drivers. It just means that you need to understand the business impact of all of your marketing activities.

What is the why of everything that you do in marketing?

What’s the strategic intent of increasing your social following, doubling your podcast downloads, or investing in your blog?

Great, you have a marketing plan. Now how are you going to execute? What are your guardrails?

These aren’t easy questions to answer. Heck, I still deal with some of these challenges on a daily basis, 10+ years into my marketing career. But they are questions that you need to think about and work through if you want to advance up the marketing ladder.

That’s why I have so much respect for the whole Plannuh team. Because there is no set OPERATING SYSTEM for modern marketers today. What Peter, Scott, and Dan have done is finally provide some long sought-after answers to those marketing FAQs. They’ve managed to blend the operational side of marketing with the creative side to help you build a brand that is in service of revenue, not working against your business objectives. This book will give you the insights, templates, models, etc. that you need to implement a strategy that works for YOU and YOUR business, no one else’s.

I don’t know why I’m still selling it; you already own the book, and you know how good these guys are. Enough from me, the really good stuff starts on the next page. End of foreword.

- Dave Gerhardt

INTRODUCTION

Early in 2020 - right at the time we were all starting to ponder whether the pandemic might impact our businesses - we were finishing up content for the first edition of The Next CMO.

We have been operational marketing advocates for our entire careers and were excited about the content, but didn’t know if we were writing for a small group of fellow operational marketing geeks, or an entire profession that was grappling with massive change and increased fiscal and operational scrutiny.

But with over 10,000 books in circulation in less than a year, the enthusiastic response to our first edition made it clear that we were addressing a broad and accelerating shift in the way the marketing function was managed. And like telehealth, remote working, and digital transformation, the operational marketing movement started with a groundswell but shifted into hyperspeed when the pandemic forced us all to rethink our entire marketing plans in the space of a few short weeks.

The Great Replan of 2020 made it clearer than ever that strong operational practices translate to agile organizations. These nimble teams can change their approach, maintain focus on their goals, and reprioritize resources to emphasize their highest-return campaigns, while shifting resources away from the money losers. And whether the pandemic drove massive cost reductions or massive growth, operationally-strong marketing teams fared much better than their less operationally-disciplined peers.

We are incredibly excited about this new, expanded edition of The Next CMO. We had the opportunity to expand on popular topics like campaign planning and ROI measurement, and we have added new content including:

• How to present marketing results to the board and CEO

• Defining, selecting, and applying marketing strategies

• The growing need for marketing campaign managers

• Statistics from the Operational Marketing Index to help you benchmark your level of operational marketing excellence

• More best practices and templates to help structure your strategic and operational marketing

We consistently hear from our readers that they really appreciate the templates and tools that we included in the book. With that in mind, we have expanded the templates and have made them available in digital format on TheNextCMO.com for easy access and download.

Whether you are new to The Next CMO or a returning reader, we are confident that our second edition’s expanded content will enable you and your team to step up your game as operationally-excellent marketers.

Peter, Scott, and Dan

CHAPTER 1

The Problem with

Operational Marketing

Leadership

Warning: There is some tough love in this chapter.

It is widely understood that CMOs suffer some of the highest turnover rates in the C-suite. How can that be, given the fact that marketing executives who reach the top rank in the profession have spent years honing their ability to communicate the value of their products and services?

The fundamental problem is that marketing has become increasingly complex over the last two decades, and at the same time, the expectations for effective execution and accurate measurement of marketing functions have grown significantly. And while most marketers have implemented automation systems for delivering and measuring the tactics of marketing, the more strategic issues (including building, measuring, and optimizing the overall marketing plan) are managed manually. As a result, the processes for managing the overall marketing function often buckle as the complexity grows, causing ineffective strategic execution and the inability to clearly demonstrate the value of the marketing function.

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) covered this topic extensively and proposed some recommendations in a 2017 report called "The Trouble with CMOs." It offers some solid recommendations to remediate this issue, including aligning expectations and finding the right skills match for the CMO role. But those suggestions don’t address the underlying strategic execution problem.

When you look at the results of the "Forrester SiriusDecisions 2019 Global CMO Study," it is clear that CMOs themselves know what needs to improve based on their self-identified areas of focus including:

• Marketing Strategy & Investment

• Marketing Planning & Campaign Strategy

• Transformation

• Marketing Value

• Marketing Organization Design & Development

In short, CMOs agree that their main focus should be defining and executing strategy while proving the value of marketing. Unfortunately, CMOs struggle with both strategic alignment and measuring the true return created from marketing budget allocation.

The Fundamental Responsibilities of the CMO

The CMOs who participated in the SiriusDecisions study seem to have a view of CMO responsibilities that is aligned with our perspective. When talking to CMOs about approaching a role, or CEOs about hiring a CMO, we tell them that the fundamental elements a CMO must execute are to:

• Set goals

• Define (or refine) your strategy

• Build a plan that is designed to achieve those goals

• Execute the plan

• Optimize the plan when change inevitably happens

• Communicate results

Unfortunately, CMOs are not getting it done. Our assessment comes from over seventy collective years in marketing and business. Peter, for example, spent thirty years as a marketing practitioner, including a thirteen-year stint as an executive (five as the CMO) of a public software company that grew to $2 billion in annual revenue and made over a hundred acquisitions during his tenure. After leaving that company, he created our company to address these issues. Since then, we have reviewed well over a thousand marketing plans from companies of all sizes, industries, and levels of maturity.

Based on that large body of evidence, we can confidently posit that the issues are pervasive. We can also point to many instances in our own careers where we have struggled with each one of these core responsibilities. In other words, we are guilty too.

Assessing the Gaps

Let’s explore some of the gaps in a little more detail. We have seen persistent issues in each of the following six areas:

1. Inadequate (or completely absent) goals

Every marketing organization should have a clear set of objectives that are aligned to the overall business’s objectives. The marketing objectives should have specific metrics, targets, and milestones defined. In practice, many marketing teams either don’t have clear goals, or the goals aren’t well communicated through the organization. In some cases, the goals are well defined, but there is no connection between the goals and the actual plan. Without a direct connection between the goals and the plan, marketing goals start to feel like an aspirational suggestion.

2. Poorly defined or communicated marketing strategy

The lack of a clear marketing strategy is one of the most significant causes of inefficiency in a marketing plan. Your marketing strategy is the means by which to make decisions about the appropriateness of marketing investment. For example, if you have a targeted account marketing strategy, a broad awareness approach might not be the best idea. You might instead leverage some Account-Based Marketing (ABM) tools to target your messages to the companies that are on your list. When we review a marketing plan and see a cornucopia of approaches, we often ask the marketing team to articulate their core marketing strategy. While the marketing leader can often describe