Trisha Hendrickson and Drew Friesen | Fractional CMOs & The 90-Day Win
This video is a podcast interview with Trisha Hendrickson and Drew Friesen 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 understanding the business context, asking the right questions, and identifying key areas for improvement. They emphasize the importance of aligning marketing strategies with business goals, addressing departmental silos, and achieving early wins to build momentum and trust within the organization.
Key points
🔍 Initial Assessment: Conducting a thorough evaluation of the company’s marketing efforts, including analyzing all available metrics and identifying key problem areas.
🗣️ Communication: Establishing clear communication with the leadership team and understanding their expectations and goals.
📊 Sales and Marketing Alignment: Ensuring alignment between sales and marketing teams to drive revenue growth and improve overall efficiency.
📈 Early Wins: Identifying and implementing early wins, such as optimizing marketing processes and aligning with customer needs, to build credibility and momentum.
💡 Customer Insights: Conducting customer research to understand their needs and preferences, which helps in tailoring marketing strategies.
🤝 Silo Breakdown: Addressing departmental silos to ensure a unified approach to marketing and customer needs.
🚀 Execution and Resources: Ensuring that marketing plans are realistic and executable with the available resources.
👥 Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging key stakeholders early on to ensure alignment with the company’s vision and strategy.
🧠 Marketing Education: Educating clients on the complexity of marketing and setting realistic expectations regarding timelines and outcomes.
📋 Long-term Objectives: Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes both short-term and long-term goals.
Summary
- Introduction: The podcast introduces the topic of fractional CMOs and their impact within the first 90 days.
- Drew’s Background: Drew discusses his experience in agricultural and manufacturing businesses, emphasizing the importance of building trust and understanding the market.
- Initial Challenges: Drew highlights common problems such as misalignment between marketing and business goals, and the need for thorough onboarding and extensive questioning.
- Trisha’s Background: Trisha shares her experience in the tech industry, emphasizing the importance of asking questions, listening, and aligning marketing efforts with revenue goals.
- Early Wins: Both guests discuss the importance of early wins, such as building relationships within the company, shoring up branding, and addressing low-hanging fruit.
- Sales Conversion Focus: Drew explains the importance of focusing on sales conversion and working backward through marketing efforts to identify quick wins.
- Marketing Investments: Drew discusses the balance between short-term and long-term marketing investments and the importance of auditing these investments for quick and long-term gains.
- Incentive Structures: Drew highlights the importance of ensuring that incentive structures for the marketing team are aligned with business goals.
- Brand Awareness: Both guests discuss the critical role of brand awareness in marketing and the challenges of getting a brand considered by potential customers.
- Client Misunderstandings: Trisha emphasizes the need to educate clients on the differences between marketing and branding, and the importance of analytics in measuring success.
Quotes - 00:55: “There’s a lot of variety in how they kick off a new client engagement. In fact, there’s so much variety it’s valuable to just listen to what opportunities they look for and what they tackle first.” – Dean Waye
- 01:40: “I like to come in knowing I know the least in the room. I think asking a lot of questions is really the first step to making sure that you’re coming to solve the problem they actually have.” – Drew Friesen
- 02:15: “Is marketing actually aligned with your business goals? Easy to say it is, but are you measuring it in a way that is with business goals?” – Drew Friesen
- 03:45: “A lot of times what it says on their website with what they’re really doing don’t align.” – Trisha Hendrickson
- 04:10: “You might think that offering service X is great, but you really make more money with service Y. Digging in, listening, and finding that having a seat at the table is really important.” – Trisha Hendrickson
- 05:00: “Building that relationship and not just with the C-suite. I go around and talk to all the people that are in the business because depending on what it is, there are frontline people, there are backend folks.” – Trisha Hendrickson