Amanda Rabideau and Jill Richards | Fractional CMOs & The 90-Day Win
This video is a podcast interview with Amanda Rabideau and Jill Richards discussing the role and strategies of fractional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in achieving significant business wins within the first 90 days of engagement.
Conclusion
Fractional CMOs focus on identifying business goals, aligning strategies, and achieving early wins to build momentum. They emphasize the importance of understanding customer needs, clear messaging, and leveraging resources effectively to drive growth and ensure long-term success.
Key points
🔍 Identifying Business Goals: Ensuring that the company has clear, well-documented business goals that align with their marketing efforts.
📊 Strategic Vision: Developing a cohesive corporate strategy that ties into the overall business objectives and ensures all departments are aligned.
🗣️ Clear Messaging: Creating consistent and clear messaging to communicate the company’s value proposition effectively to the target audience.
📈 Early Wins: Focusing on quick wins to demonstrate value and build trust with clients.
💡 Customer Insights: Conducting thorough customer research to understand their needs and how they perceive the brand.
🤝 Team Collaboration: Working closely with internal stakeholders, including sales teams, to align strategies and improve overall effectiveness.
🚀 Execution and Resources: Developing realistic and executable marketing plans with measurable goals and ensuring the necessary resources are in place.
👥 Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging key stakeholders early on to ensure alignment with the company’s vision and strategy.
🧠 Marketing Education: Educating clients on the importance of strategic marketing and the iterative nature of positioning.
📋 Long-term Objectives: Establishing both short-term and long-term goals to guide marketing efforts and ensure accountability.
Summary
- Introduction: The podcast introduces the topic of fractional CMOs and their impact within the first 90 days.
- Amanda’s Background: Amanda discusses her experience in marketing at CoreLogic and working with startup companies to build data-driven marketing engines.
- Business Goals: Amanda emphasizes the importance of identifying clear business goals and ensuring alignment across the organization.
- Jill’s Background: Jill shares her experience in transformative technologies marketing, focusing on B2B software, data security, and clean tech startups.
- Corporate Strategy: Jill highlights the need for a well-defined corporate strategy that ties into the marketing strategy and ensures all departments are working towards the same goals.
- Early Wins: Both guests discuss the importance of achieving early wins by understanding the market, setting goals, and measuring success.
- Customer Focus: Amanda and Jill emphasize starting with the customer in mind, understanding their needs, and ensuring the right messaging and metrics are in place.
- Auditing and Assessment: Amanda talks about the importance of auditing existing marketing efforts to identify areas for improvement and potential quick wins.
- Low-hanging Fruit: Jill highlights opportunities to optimize existing efforts, such as improving lead capture at events or targeting the right audience on social media.
- Marketing Education: Amanda discusses the need to educate clients on the role of marketing, its data-driven nature, and how it can contribute to revenue.
Quotes
- 00:00: “There’s a lot of variety in how they kick off a new client engagement.” – Dean Waye
- 00:49: “One of the first things that I like to uncover, and it seems so simple but it’s often not done well, are the business goals.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 01:32: “When I’m starting out with an engagement, I want to know not your marketing goals, I want to know your business goals.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 01:46: “It’s surprising that a lot of times this isn’t something that’s formally documented.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 02:24: “Is everyone aligned to the same business goals? Because then we can determine what is our role and then get alignment across the organization.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 03:24: “For me, the corporate strategy is often not set, and so not just the business goal but also the strategy about how we’re going to go after that.” – Jill Richards
- 04:10: “They tend to be doing random acts of marketing, so you really want to tie that corporate strategy to the marketing strategy.” – Jill Richards
- 05:15: “One of the things that I find happens a lot is that they don’t really understand how they fit into the competitive market space.” – Jill Richards
- 06:50: “Start with the customer or the client, the end user in mind, because the more we can understand who it is that’s going to be driving the pipeline, the better.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 07:25: “You can get into a new client and find that the marketing team is being run by someone who just graduated and knows social media but doesn’t understand marketing.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 08:02: “It’s important to know where we are today so that we know how we can move forward tomorrow.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 09:10: “They’re not capturing leads well or they’re not following up on the leads well, or they’re not really targeting the events well.” – Jill Richards
- 10:35: “Marketing is no longer the arts and crafts department; components of marketing should be extremely data-driven.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 11:30: “Leads are important, but there’s a lot of different things that go into building that pipeline and those leads.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 12:45: “The technology is not a company and it’s not a product. The code is not a product; there’s a bunch of other stuff that goes around the product.” – Jill Richards
- 13:30: “People don’t always understand the breadth and depth of marketing. They think of it as the outputs they see, the tactical things, but it’s much more.” – Jill Richards
- 14:20: “A CMO really needs to be conversant across the entire spectrum for marketing and figure out what they need and where they need it.” – Jill Richards
- 15:00: “The role of the CMO is to say, ‘Here’s all the different tools we should be using to optimize and help you achieve those goals.'” – Amanda Rabideau
- 16:10: “Clients sometimes don’t understand that just because the CMO understands it doesn’t mean they’re the person to execute it.” – Amanda Rabideau
- 17:00: “If they don’t involve the fractional CMO and embrace them with open arms, they’re missing out on some of the value that the fractional CMO can offer.” – Amanda Rabideau