High expectations and low support for CMOs + a framework to recover

The marketing function is mandatory for virtually EVERY business - but CMOs are consistently ranked among the “shortest tenure in the C-suite”.

Yes, finding the right fit for each seat isn’t trivial. You can tank the company with the wrong CTO, COO, CRO, CSO as well. And some hires are simply inexperienced, or lacking the foundational marketing principles, or coming with a completely different set of skills that don’t fit the role expectations.

But many talented operators and strategists get fired because of unrealistic expectations and/or the inability of the CMO to communicate how strategies are shaped and what is needed to deliver.

Why are marketing leaders in such a dire state?

Your mileage may vary, but after thousands of conversations with C-level leaders, both CMOs and CEO/CROs, as well as investors and board members, common patterns that come up more often than not:

1. CEOs hire CMOs hoping they will turn the organization around. CMOs can’t fix tech, or get full buy-in on pricing, or dodge company scandals or misbehavior at the workspace ending up on Glassdoor.

2. CMOs are consistently not assigned all 4Ps of the marketing mix - Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Hundreds of CMOs I’ve met were only tasked to fix the last bit: Promotion, and possibly a second P, Place (distribution channels). It’s rare to see CMOs involved in product management, UX, pricing conversations at all.

3. It’s common to swap CMOs when companies are going down. There are usually multiple reasons for that, and expecting a turnaround in 6-12 months is wishful thinking.

4. Marketing leaders are often understaffed. The distribution of product teams, admin/ops teams, sales teams to marketing is frequently not in favor of marketing (including vendors/contractors).

5. The performance marketing era of ~2017-2022 kept trimming brand budgets. Solving a specific problem through a laser focused campaign does not improve upon how marketing works in the grand sense of things.

6. CEO/CFO measuring marketing by artificial metrics such as MQLs, having little to do with SQLs and opportunities later, causing disparity between company objectives and KPIs.

7. Short-term push to perform during long-term business cycles.

This list is not comprehensive, but it keeps coming up during conversations.

As an executive advisor and angel investor, I see this firsthand in different organizations.

As the CEO of DevriX, I speak to CMOs in the middle of their career journey at an organization, failing to set the right expectations early on, often pressed to deliver upon unrealistic expectations, pitching the wrong offers to the wrong audience, through outdated channels, not accounting for generating touches and amplifying brand exposure and company awareness through the right mediums.

Especially during the downfall of B2B in early 2023 (described in my previous newsletter), the pressure to perform was higher than ever - back when old playbooks no longer worked and performance marketing failed (in an era of SEO underperforming and social media automated by AI).

What CMOs and marketing leaders need to do next was best summarized by one of my advisors, Steve Patti:

Steve is consistently advocating for marketing leaders to step up and repair the cycle between themselves and the rest of the executive suite. Highly recommending his feed and articles to both marketing leaders and other C-level members aiming to bridge the gap and understand the other core executive functions.

This trickles down to rebranding, website rebuilds, social copy, and everything else

As CMOs start on the wrong foot, with unrealistic expectations, short time frames, and limited control over the 4Ps, that consistently impacts initiatives they have to manage and design under the hood.

After 15 years delivering martech solutions and hundreds of site rebuilds and migrations, we’ve seen the red flag in DevriX time and again.

In fact, I have at least 4 RFPs in our pipeline this month alone for website rebuilds with delivery estimates of 10 to 15 weeks, including narrative such as:

• “Design must be (superlatives), matching expectations of (industry)”

• “Restructure navigation/informational schema to improve visitor journey”

• "Goal is to appear on page 1 of Google”

• “…needs to support buyer decision-making”

• “Layout should be intuitive for all our personas”

• “Current site does not perform; our audience needs to interact with it intuitively”

In other news, CMOs who took the bait pass the ball to new hires and vendors to “figure it out, fast”, with limited to almost NO context of how the organization operates, the specifics of the audience, detailed definitions of the ICP, and various nuances across their current portfolio of customers + account-based list of prospects.

Worst of all, organizations need to accomplish all marketing and delivery functions from start to end, but within the time frame and budget of just ONE of the steps.

Achieving quality and accuracy for 5-15% of the budget within ~10-20% of the time frame is impossible. You’re bound to fail. And that’s just the framework within which many CMOs and marketing VPs operate today.

The project delivery template we’ve designed for these RFPs

In an ecosystem racing quickly to the bottom (virtually anything digital), returning to first principles matters. My core focus is mapping out complete journeys and frameworks, understanding the broader executive landscape, and refining the principles for everyone in the board room.

The “Biggest Business Challenges” article, which started in early 2019, has been taught at over 40 universities today and is consistently ranked in SERP’s 5.

And for site deliveries - often coming from reputable global brands, educational or financial institutions, fast-growing SaaS brands, and legacy brands in traditional businesses - we are sending a variation of the following breakdown of steps a build needs to include, based on our professional solutions for private equity and global brands with clear processes and strong executive teams:

To summarize the high-level initiatives for a similar venture, we're looking at:

1. Customer intelligence and market research

2. Strategic positioning and messaging (plus value proposition refinement)

3. UX/UI design and information architecture

4. Content development and optimization (including the consolidation of SEO pieces after a thorough analysis of the current SERP and a reverse research of competitors from step 1)

5. WordPress platform development, integration, and optimization

6. Marketing technology stack (utilizing our HubSpot, Semrush, Meta partnerships and integrations with other key B2B partners)

7. SEO and AI SEO strategy, optimization, and future planning

8. Demand generation assessment and integrations (lead magnet development, specific landing pages for paid media, CRO, marketing automation workflows, email enrichment with free sequences or educational courses)

9. Regulatory work - accessibility, GDPR/CCPA, sustainability, AI/copyright act initiatives

10. Partner program digital experience (data clarity, smoother onboarding and offboarding experience, and gamification - a key mechanism to retain and expand partner-led GTM motions)

11. Launch

12. Post-live continuous improvements/packages - data integration initiatives, support and monitoring, OKR, fractional resources to support further

This list can (and does) evolve and we have supplementing resources for each phase, plus we outline that the full process is in the 6-figures, and takes 8 to 12 months or longer in certain cases. So while individual activities are possible, neglecting the full journey cannot effectively achieve the results we expect from an isolated task.

Many of these lessons I teach in my book, “MBA Disrupted”, which expands on market research, audience definition, offer creation, GTM motions, and business model refinement in depth.

I brought WordPress retainers to market in the same way in 2015

I’ve been pushing this variation of a framework hard, referencing established GTM frameworks taught by industry leaders and organizations - Gartner, Forrester, Bain, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, and many more. These principles apply for mid-market and SMEs as well, even if budgets don’t correspond to what billion-dollar companies can afford.

We coined “WordPress retainers” back in 2015 the same way, which I further advocated for and trained over 200 agencies and teams to adopt the process in tech and deliver the best of all worlds to professional businesses relying on WordPress solutions.

I’ve led a handful of relevant GTM and positioning keynotes on that at global WordCamps, business, marketing, and tech events in the 2015-2019 period, and dozens of additional podcasts and guest interviews to help more professional businesses invest in long-term partnerships, strong foundations, and core principles to retain and expand contracts within their core markets.

Upskilling the market was simply necessary - and I’m taking a similar approach with the market transformation, GTM, and revenue operations solutions we undertake with our strategic assessments and operational execution internally.

Just as technical transformations and scaling enterprise-grade solutions fast were in demand in 2015, mapping out revenue lifestyle journeys is necessary today.

After advising hundreds of executives individually through my Growth Shuttle advisory firm, investing in 20+ fast-growing startups (including beehiiv, doola, RAD Intel, Substack), and supporting dozens of businesses scaling from low-7 figures to $50M+ and SMEs exiting to private equity and managing post-merger integrations continuously, we shape more of these RevOps and FinOps transformations for PE and mid-market companies over the past 18 months and in the coming years.

As DevriX turned 15 last month, the next chapter of our journey is only getting started.

Mario

 📚️ Books I read this month (mostly flat, been focusing on podcasts while traveling)

• Ray Dalio’s “How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle” (45% in)

• Hooked - on habits and cues and product alignment (50% in)

• “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen - a detailed intelligence brief of what happens if things really turn to the worst (30% in)

• “The Sweaty Startup” by Nick Hueber (10% in)

• “Revenue Architecture” by Jacco van der Kooij (40% in)

🧑‍💼 Agency hiring hasn’t changed in 5 years - my early 2021 piece on agency hiring for Entrepreneur was still valid in 2023 and remains true today.

🕴️ Unpacking Revenue Operations - been busy building strategic RevOps frameworks across the organization as DevriX has been going through an organizational transformation with external consultants, redefining KPIs and score cards this quarter.

📱 Phone usage isn’t business-friendly - taking a stab at using phones for business and why that’s wishful thinking at best. If CXOs were truly using phones to do their jobs, mobile apps would look completely differently today. It’s a catch 22 right now.

📝 Documenting everything matters - discussing some responsibility shifting during conversations with stakeholders that don’t end up having buying power - always a slippery slope.

❌ Going down-market failed again - we rarely make an attempt to serve smaller businesses and startups, and it usually backfires - including this time. Spoiler - I ended up settling this with an unusual move, but the bitter test remains and a lesson relearned again.

🔖 Smarter attribution in ABM. Compare attribution platforms that show what truly drives conversions.

🔖 Custom operational reporting. Align KPIs and automate decision-ready insights.

🔖 Explain your models. Explore LIME, SHAP, and AI transparency techniques for regulated industries.

🔖 Machine learning vs. rule-based. Machine learning attribution scales better with funnel complexity.

🔖 Redesign team communication. Accelerate execution with this strategic framework.

🔖 Enter new markets confidently. This market entry guide covers local risks and regional scaling strategies.

🔖 Privacy-first email strategy. Build trust with privacy-conscious practices.

🔖 Optimize e-commerce ROI. Discover CRO tools that don’t require higher budgets.

🔖 Measure what matters. Learn when custom metrics beat defaults in A/B testing.

🔖 Scale without overspending. Compare iPaaS vs. traditional integration to cut costs while staying agile.

🔖 Build trust to grow. See how data trust practices are giving tech firms a competitive advantage.

📰 China sets a new expo tech benchmark. NVIDIA, Lenovo and TCL debut breakthroughs at the supply chain expo, see the event highlights.

📰 Cartken shifts to industrial bots. The startup abandons burrito runs to focus on automation. Learn about the new robotics focus.

📰 Embraer backlog hits record high. The aerospace firm posts a $29.7 billion order pipeline, check the backlog details.

📰 Figma lets early backers cash out. The IPO plan emphasizes secondary sales for investors; dive into the secondary sales plan.

📰 Uber invests in premium robotaxis. The ride-hailer boosts its Lucid and Nuro stakes for their strategic move.

📰 Hyper automates non-emergency 911 calls. The voice AI handles routine dispatches; see the large-scale rollout.

📰 Everrati electrifies classic car icons. The startup converts 911s into EVs and you need to learn why investors back this restoration approach.

📰 Context-aware AI reshapes team communication. New tools fill knowledge gaps in remote work - learn how teams adapt.

📰 Data centers become ESG champions. Nordic sites reuse heat and run on renewables to support eco-friendly and sustainable models.

📰 Cantor trades tariff refund rights. Firms can monetize legal uncertainty via Cantor’s new offering; learn about their arbitrage model.

📰 OpenAI’s apps team charts a shift. Fidji Simo outlines a consumer focus in an internal memo.

📰 Homebuilder pullback warns of slowdown. Mortgage rates near 7% pinch housing sales; view the housing market warning.

📰 Consumer spending drop signals recession risk. Wells Fargo finds services spending decline often precedes downturns, indicating a red flag.

📰 Orchestra AI tracks hidden search traffic. The Spyglasses tool reveals AI-search exposure helping companies to tap into GSEO stats.

📰 Amber funds decentralized AI innovation. The accelerator commits over $10 million to AgentFi projects - learn about their funding effort.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers like these.

Greek Mythology Website: Highly engaging educational content site focused on Greek mythology. Monetized via Mediavine display ads with minimal operational costs. Over 100K indexed keywords, 4,270 referring domains, and an Authority Score of 47 - priced at $115,000.

D2C Water Filtration Equipment: Profitable, low-maintenance Canadian eCommerce business specializing in advanced water treatment equipment. Strong brand presence across Canada with high growth potential in the U.S. market - selling for $157,669.

Resell Travel Marketplace: A secure platform to resell non-refundable flights, hotel bookings, and packages. Generates revenue from premium posts and a 12% commission per transaction. Featured by major media outlets including WSJ, The Guardian, and ABC - priced at $405,000.

Premium Supplement Brand: French pharmacist-founded D2C brand offering high-quality nutritional supplements. 17,229 orders and nearly 38K customers in the past year via Shopify. Also active on Amazon, poised for national and international expansion - available for $530,850.

Subscription-based Creator Platform: A fully operational platform connecting fans with creators, designed to be family-friendly and brand-safe, ideal for influencers looking to monetize exclusive content and merchandise - priced at $1,500,000.

Health & Beauty FBA Store: US-based eCommerce business with $2.6M annual revenue and $55K monthly profit. Features a custom-built fulfillment infrastructure using proprietary automation and specialized machinery - reduced to $2,223,000.

Respiratory Medical Product: Globally recognized DTC brand offering a TGA-registered respiratory medical device designed to naturally improve breathing. Servicing customers in the USA, UK, EU, Canada, and Japan, with fulfillment via 3PL logistics - selling for $2,402,309.

Need My Help?

Keeping myself busy - here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling enterprises on top of WordPress? DevriX provides martech retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo and we manage high-traffic platforms (hundreds of millions of monthly views), B2B SaaS apps, partnership management solutions, supporting $10M - $250M businesses with scalability, custom funnels, CRO, big data augmentation, AI-driven processes, HubSpot workflows, programmatic SEO - and everything a modern business requires in digital in 2025.

🚀 Work 1:1 with me? At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($1,800/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($497/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

🌠 Feature your business across the community? The B2B Ecosystem includes this newsletter and 40 other digital properties (directories, newsletters, blogs, SaaS, and social accounts) targeting B2B executives. See how your business can benefit.

📈 International founder looking into US LLCs? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.

📊 Into digital M&A? I work closely with Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides the tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink.