Katie Walter and Dennis Bailen | Fractional CMOs & The 90-Day Win
This video is a podcast interview with Katie Walter and Dennis Bailen 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 play a crucial role in understanding and aligning a company’s marketing strategy with its growth objectives. They emphasize the importance of leadership buy-in, clear communication, and detailed customer insights to drive early wins and long-term success.
Key points
🔍 Leadership Buy-in: Ensuring the leadership team understands and supports the marketing engagement is essential for success.
🗣️ Role Clarity: Clearly defining the roles and expectations within the engagement helps in achieving alignment and support from the leadership team.
📊 Customer Interviews: Conducting detailed customer interviews to gain insights into customer needs and preferences.
📈 Growth Strategy: Developing a detailed growth strategy that includes understanding the company’s vision, customer buying preferences, and the effectiveness of existing marketing systems.
💡 Early Wins: Identifying and implementing early wins to build credibility and momentum, such as optimizing marketing processes and aligning with customer needs.
🤝 Collaboration: Ensuring strong collaboration between marketing and sales teams, with aligned metrics and open communication, to drive revenue.
📝 Financial Assessment: Reviewing financials to ensure proper accounting principles are followed and ROI can be accurately calculated.
🚀 Execution and Resources: Ensuring that marketing plans are realistic and executable with the available resources.
👥 Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging key stakeholders early on and understanding their perspectives helps in aligning the company’s vision and strategy.
🧠 Complexity of Marketing: Educating clients on the complexity of marketing and setting realistic expectations regarding timelines and outcomes.
Summary
- Introduction: The podcast introduces the topic of fractional CMOs and their impact within the first 90 days.
- Dennis’s Background: Dennis discusses his extensive experience in marketing and consulting, emphasizing the importance of leadership buy-in for successful engagements.
- Initial Challenges: Dennis highlights common problems such as a lack of understanding of marketing’s role and the need for clear role definitions and engagement objectives.
- Katie’s Background: Katie shares her experience in B2B marketing and the importance of aligning the company’s vision and customer buying preferences with marketing systems.
- Growth Strategy: Katie emphasizes the need to understand the company’s growth targets and ensure the marketing team is aligned with these goals.
- Early Wins: Both guests discuss the importance of early wins, such as conducting customer interviews and optimizing the homepage to align with the company’s value proposition.
- Customer Insights: Katie focuses on gathering customer insights to inform marketing strategies and drive early wins.
- Growth Goal Breakdown: Dennis explains the importance of breaking down growth goals into granular components, such as new products, new customers, and existing customer sales.
- Strategic Alignment: Katie highlights the importance of ensuring that marketing strategies are aligned with the company’s overall business plan and objectives.
- Marketing Complexity: Both guests discuss the complexity of marketing and the importance of setting realistic expectations with clients.
Quotes
- 00:48: “Most of my work has been in business-to-business, and some of the problems I see is just a general lack of understanding of what marketing is and what it can or cannot do for the company.” – Dennis Bailen
- 01:11: “Typically, we’ll go over very carefully engagement objectives, the timeline, their role in helping to assure success.” – Dennis Bailen
- 01:45: “What I look for in general is leadership team buy-in. Are they engaged? Are they accepting the engagement?” – Dennis Bailen
- 02:47: “When I start a fractional CMO engagement, my Spidey Sense is looking for what’s the company’s vision and aspiration.” – Katie Walter
- 03:25: “The problems that I often encounter tend to be either there’s not clarity around what the growth targets are, or there’s not alignment between how customers want to buy and where the current marketing resources are pointed.” – Katie Walter
- 04:25: “My first 90 days are always heavily focused on customer interviews and voice of the customer.” – Katie Walter
- 04:57: “Just having the insight from the customer interviews is a gift to the leadership team.” – Katie Walter
- 05:38: “Customer insight drives a lot of the early wins.” – Katie Walter
- 06:42: “Customers will often say things to us they won’t say to the company itself.” – Dennis Bailen
- 07:27: “What we help them do is granularize that growth goal. Where is that growth going to come from?” – Dennis Bailen
- 08:30: “Helping guide the leadership team through the thought process and matching that up to their relative strengths or weaknesses is an early win.” – Dennis Bailen
- 09:50: “They often don’t see the last mile. How do all of these strategies actually connect to making a cash register ring somewhere?” – Dennis Bailen
- 10:15: “I see a lot of clients kind of drink their own Kool-Aid in the sense that they think they are unique.” – Dennis Bailen
- 11:30: “CEOs tell me they hate marketing because it’s a black box and they don’t understand it.” – Katie Walter
- 12:22: “It’s uncomfortable for leaders to say we got to do something about marketing but we don’t know what that is or what that means.” – Katie Walter
- 13:30: “Part of what I try to do is put the pieces together in a way that a marketing team can act on.” – Katie Walter
- 15:08: “If the leadership team is not aligned on what the company is trying to do, it might be too soon to bring in a fractional CMO.” – Katie Walter
- 16:35: “They are looking for someone to do their social media, and that’s probably not me as much as I want to be helpful.” – Katie Walter
- 17:10: “One of the biggest values that we bring as outsiders is authenticity.” – Dennis Bailen
- 17:45: “If a client doesn’t want that authenticity, then they’re probably not going to get the kind of value they could from a fractional CMO.” – Dennis Bailen