Wendy B Gratereaux and Bill Odell | Fractional CMOs & The 90-Day Win
This video is a podcast interview with Wendy B Gratereaux and Bill Odell 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 evaluating a company’s existing marketing infrastructure, identifying gaps, and aligning with the leadership’s strategic goals. They focus on quick wins and long-term strategic planning to drive growth and improve overall marketing efficiency.
Key points
🔍 Gap Analysis: The first step is to perform a gap analysis to assess the company’s current marketing capabilities and identify areas needing improvement.
🗣️ Communication: Establishing clear communication with the leadership team and understanding their expectations are essential for successful engagements.
📝 Early Wins: Identifying and implementing early wins, such as optimizing marketing processes and aligning with customer needs, helps build credibility and momentum.
📊 Assessment Framework: Utilizing a comprehensive assessment framework, including digital, non-digital, and customer insights, to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
📈 Customer Insights: Conducting customer research to understand their needs and expectations, which often reveals misalignments with what the company delivers.
💡 Strategic Planning: Emphasizing the importance of strategic planning and not rushing into execution to ensure sustainable success.
🤝 Collaboration with Sales: Ensuring strong collaboration between marketing and sales teams, with aligned metrics and open communication, to drive revenue.
🚀 Long-Term Vision: Focusing on long-term strategic goals and aligning short-term actions to achieve them, which is essential for sustainable growth.
👥 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.
- Initial Challenges: Wendy discusses common initial problems, including the need for a gap analysis to assess marketing capabilities.
- Communication with Executives: Bill emphasizes the need for clear communication with the executive team to align on goals and expectations.
- Early Wins: Both guests highlight the importance of identifying early wins, such as optimizing marketing processes and aligning with customer needs.
- Customer Insights: Bill discusses the importance of understanding customer needs and expectations, which often reveals misalignments with what the company delivers.
- Strategic Planning: Both guests stress the importance of strategic planning and not rushing into execution to ensure sustainable success.
- Collaboration with Sales: Both guests provide insights on what to look for when hiring a new head of sales, emphasizing communication, metrics, and cultural fit.
- Marketing Complexity: Bill explains that many clients do not understand the complexity of marketing and the importance of strategic foundations.
- Red Flags: Wendy and Bill discuss signs that a client might not be ready for a fractional CMO, such as lack of budget and unwillingness to share information.
- Finding Wendy and Bill: Information on how to connect with Wendy B Gratereaux and Bill Odell through LinkedIn and their respective websites.
Quotes
- 00:57: “The very first thing that you have to look at is you have to assess everybody’s capabilities.” – Wendy B Gratereaux
- 01:42: “What is it that you want me to come in to do? I ask a question: if I hit a home run, what happens?” – Bill Odell
- 03:11: “You have to start off with essentially what is it you want me to go do and it’s always a 90-day contract for me because I can’t do anything in less than 90 days.” – Bill Odell
- 03:58: “They wanted to reboot the brand and put in a go-to-market plan that could get them on a certain growth trajectory over five years.” – Bill Odell
- 05:13: “Typically, it’s very common for somebody to bring in somebody like me because they’re not hitting growth targets.” – Bill Odell
- 06:24: “They had MarTech and three other marketing automation systems, none of them were live.” – Bill Odell
- 08:03: “If there’s no customers, they have not fumbled into getting some traction because they had cool tech and some established relationships.” – Wendy B Gratereaux
- 09:25: “I like the first 90 days to be that getting everything in order, organizing what we have organized.” – Wendy B Gratereaux
- 12:28: “We forget the customer and forget that they’re people and are people willing to make a change.” – Wendy B Gratereaux
- 13:44: “My litmus test is give me six customers to talk to. I want to talk to six customers and I want them to be meaningful customers.” – Bill Odell
- 16:21: “You have to take chances and marketing is about taking chances and trying to apply creative thinking.” – Bill Odell
- 18:09: “Just because there was a gap in the market doesn’t mean there was a market in that gap.” – Dean Waye
- 19:37: “The real way that you end up creating value is finding the seam between what competitors are not doing that you could do that would be innovative.” – Bill Odell
- 20:50: “When you hire somebody with preconceived notions and set arbitrary goals because you read a blog, it forces unrealistic expectations.” – Wendy B Gratereaux
- 22:22: “Marketing is about finding the seam between what competitors are not doing and what you could do that would be innovative.” – Bill Odell