By Tim Sweeney
The Value of Peer Groups for Marketers
The “fail fast” start-up mantra, which found its way into the marketing lexicon over the past couple decades, is a hotly debated business philosophy. The idea is that the quicker you fail—and learn from it—the quicker you can set out on the right path. If you have a boss and others to answer to, however, the ideal path would be to avoid failing altogether by learning from the successes and failures of others.
The opportunity to learn from others is one of the reasons Peter Krainik started The CMO Club 10 years ago, creating a place for senior marketing executives to find the sounding boards they didn’t seem to have. The club is comprised of client-side brand CMOs who share interests, experiences, passions, and a desire to help their peers solve problems. Krainik, who worked for Mars, Inc., for 15 years, later as CMO at DoubleClick, and then as head of global marketing at Avaya, says the idea came to him after attending three consecutive unproductive and uninspiring CMO events. He realized people in his position needed a real “club.”
“With what seems like weekly technology changes, new fractional media opportunities, changes in content-sharing vehicles, new solution providers for CMOs entering the market, and the emergence of new competitors to CMOs’ brands, CMOs need each other now more than ever,” Krainik says. “I feel strongly that no one knows more about CMOs’ challenges and how to help CMOs solve their challenges than their peers.”
Since those in positions of leadership often have less time than most to find their footing in a job and often don’t have peers within their own companies’ walls to bounce ideas off of, it makes sense that they would seek out a peer group like The CMO Club. But peer groups may offer even more benefits for individuals just beginning to find their footing in marketing positions or for those starting to climb the corporate ladder.
At just 34 years of age, Andy Stief has accomplished a great deal in his short career. The Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for PGIM Real Estate Finance in Washington, DC, has worked in marketing-related positions for his entire career. Because his industry colleagues earlier in his career were members of the American Marketing Association (AMA), he became a member as well. And this past November, Andy became a member of The CMO Club. Stief is also a member of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), for whom he serves on the Marketing Officers’ Roundtable.
“Operating within the commercial real estate financing industry meant joining MBA was a must, and I was really attracted to the marketing-focused group they put together, because I wanted to contribute to and learn from the conversation going on about how marketing is impacting the industry,” he says.
Stief says there are two major benefits of interacting with marketing peers. The first benefit is the opportunity to build a professional network that can lead to career opportunities, offer the chance for CMOs to hear about trends, and even lead to the discovery of new hires. The second benefit is the opportunity to validate problems and find resolutions. Stief operates with the knowledge that if he has certain challenges in his role, there’s a strong likelihood that others have encountered similar obstacles in their positions.
“It helps to validate the challenge and even frame it correctly when interacting with peers,” he says. “Odds are also good that one or more people have also developed a solution. Maybe not something you can make a carbon copy of in your company, but at least it’s enough to get you thinking about possible solutions you may not have thought about before.”
The differences between The CMO Club and forums or groups on sites such as LinkedIn are the “safe” environment and the “no sales pitch” rule of the club. Krainik believes this low-pressure environment is the most important benefit for CMO Club members. “We want deals to happen and partnerships to form, but all based on mutual interest, not solicitation,” he says. “It’s been interesting to watch the members police this framework and call out people that don’t live by these rules. At every dinner, summit, or virtual roundtable, we review and emphasize the safe environment for being open in asking for help and helping others.”
Krainik says CMOs join The CMO Club for three reasons: to get their biggest challenges solved with the help of their peers in a trustworthy environment behind closed doors; to build long-term relationships with peers for fun and as their own inner circle when they need help in the future; and to build their own personal brand through interviews, roundtable participation, opportunities to speak at summits, and CMO-curated research. They stay in the club, he believes, because it has become a sort of family, in which personal commitment to friends in the club stands above all else.
“The world, technology, and marketing options are changing so fast that they can’t do it alone anymore or rely on their agency,” Krainik says. “They need the experience and insights from peers that have tried it, come up with great ways to stay current, motivated their teams, and demonstrated success with their CEOs.”
The ever-evolving marketing landscape has made it important for even those with the biggest titles in the industry to look to previously unlikely sources for ideas. Krainik says that when he was at Mars, Inc., 15 years ago, the brand never really went outside the industry for insights.
“Today the roles have reversed, with so many bright smaller-company CMOs helping larger-brand CMOs in the club,” he reports. “Technology, marketing tools, new distribution networks, and customer engagement ideas are many times the sweet spot of smaller brands. At the same time, insights from larger-brand CMOs on leading the brand beyond the marketing department, building a culture, and working effectively with your board are valuable to members.”
The willingness to learn is always a good trait to maintain, even at the top of the ranks within an organization. The top dogs of marketing in The CMO Club are not afraid to solicit advice, especially in the right environment. In 2016, the club rolled out a mobile app for its members, and now over 450 CMOs are accessing it each week. An “inner circle” section on the app, where CMOs can ask for help from their peers behind closed doors, is one of the most valuable programs for the group’s members. A member might ask if anyone has worked with a certain agency, request feedback on new ROI metrics they are rolling out for their team, or ask if anyone has tried a new advertising program from Amazon and how to optimize it. The club also has a vendor recommendation program for members only—like Yelp for CMOs—where members benefit from the recommendations of peers to help build their short lists for tasks such as agency reviews. “The key is to make it easy and efficient to give and get help from peers,” Krainik says.
As you might expect, the topics that the members of The CMO Club are discussing are the same ones Stief is searching for peer information on. He says one of the topics he most often looks for outside guidance on has to do with what he calls “the marketing technology stack.” Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, project management platforms, email campaign platforms, intranets/portals, social media scheduling tools, content management systems (CMSs), and analytics tools all fall under that category.
“How all these systems interact, what rules you have in place to manage them, how to troubleshoot common problems, what is out there that can help me solve a problem that I might not know about—all of these are questions that routinely come up,” Stief says. “For example, I was at an MBA Marketing Officers’ Roundtable just last week in Washington, DC, and one of the topics we spent the most time on was Salesforce (given that most of our companies use that CRM) and all of the various complexities associated with it, including user adoption, data fidelity management, and usage rules. Other popular topics on my short list are email marketing, video marketing, and social media marketing.”
Although there are no junior members in The CMO Club, Krainik recognized the need to connect his group to young marketing stars in junior roles at various organizations. After all, what better way to understand how to market to young people than to talk to young marketers? That’s why in 2016, The CMO Club rolled out the Future CMO Club, which has morphed into The CMO Club’s mentoring program. The goal is for CMOs to share and mentor the next generation of marketing leaders.
More than 100 CMOs in the club now mentor other members’ marketing directors and VPs through The CMO Club’s mentoring summit via virtual roundtables and on a new CMO Club Mentoring podcast for more junior marketing stars. “In addition, at every summit we have a group of these future CMOs onstage sharing insights to help our members stay connected with this next generation,” Krainik says.
The sharing of knowledge, of course, goes both ways. Andy Stief is living proof that it doesn’t hurt a young marketer to mix with more established professionals.
For a professional in a junior marketing role, there is always the chance that a supervisor might not see the need for them to step outside the industry to learn a few new tricks of the trade and rub elbows with contemporaries. Or maybe the supervisor is a bit threatened by their thirst for knowledge or the chance to make new contacts. Krainik recommends that professionals in such a position ask their CEO or boss to clarify their top three objectives for the year, then identify hurdles or challenges to achieving those objectives. “Show how your involvement in the group will give you answers and more efficiently solve the big problems,” Krainik advises. “It’s a trade-off of money and time. What is the value of a cost or time commitment versus putting the money or time elsewhere? If the answer is that it’s not the best use of time or money, then don’t do it. Also, many CMO Club members leverage the continuing-education value for them personally. If their company is committed to their growth, it’s not an issue.”
