Meeting Marketing’s Mandate: How Companies Can Empower CMOs to Drive Real Growth

Companies increasingly look to their CMOs for more than brand awareness, campaign performance and lead generation. Today’s marketing leaders are often expected to influence revenue, customer loyalty and long-term growth, even as research has found that many CMOs believe their roles as designed hinder their ability to maximize marketing performance outcomes.

Part of the challenge is that CMOs and their executive colleagues may define growth—and marketing’s contribution to it—differently. For example, McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact through year-over-year revenue growth and margins, while only 35% of CMOs consider those to be top metrics. CMOs may also take a longer view of brand building and customer relationships, while CEOs and CFOs face pressure to demonstrate more immediate financial returns. But even when there’s little to no C-suite agreement on priorities, timelines and measures of success, a CMO is often held responsible for delivering growth—without the necessary shared framework.

Closing that gap requires more than expanding the CMO’s job description. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank are a curated group of experts with years of experience in marketing, including brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement. Here, several of them explore the mindsets and strategies that need to change if CMOs are to have the influence, alignment and operating support needed to achieve what today’s organizations expect of them.

“CMOs who drive growth are the ones who helped shape what’s being sold, not just how it’s marketed.”

– Emily Popson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at CallRail

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Bring CMOs Into the Conversation Earlier

Emily Popson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at CallRail, says the fix isn’t more budget dollars for marketing; it’s earlier involvement.

“CMOs who drive growth are the ones who helped shape what’s being sold, not just how it’s marketed,” she says. “Too often, marketing leaders get handed a revenue number with no input on the product roadmap, packaging or customer experience—the very things that determine whether marketing can hit that target or whether revenue churns right back out.”

Popson says CMOs need a seat at the product and revenue table from day one. 

“If the company is early-stage, build that strategy in from the start,” she advises. “Later-stage companies need to bring it into operational planning and use it to set the North Star, the plan to get there and the metrics to guide them.”

Empower CMOs to Connect the Brand Promise to the Customer Experience

For Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, marketing’s impact extends across every interaction between a company and its customers.

“One thing that needs to change is the separation between brand promise and user experience,” she says. “Many organizations still think of marketing as the function that creates visibility around the business, but growth is affected by every place where people encounter the brand: the website, product experience, sales process, onboarding, support, content and even the clarity of internal communication. CMOs can have greater impact when they are empowered to connect those moments into a more cohesive experience.”

Lentz explains that this strategy doesn’t mean marketing owns every function; rather, it means the CMO should help ensure the entire organization is saying, showing and delivering the same thing. 

“When marketing is limited to promotion, the work becomes reactive,” she says. “When it is connected to experience, it can help build trust, reduce friction and create the conditions for more sustainable growth.”

Make Revenue Growth a Shared Responsibility

Cerys Goodall, Founder and Fractional COO/CMO of The Goods, argues that one of the most helpful things a CEO can do is to ensure all senior executives understand how the business generates revenue and how each department contributes to that strategy.

“When everyone is aligned with a common revenue goal, marketing becomes a critical pillar that drives colleagues’ performance and opportunities for success,” she says.

Goodall stresses that this shared responsibility must hold throughout the customer journey.

“CMOs cannot do it alone,” she says. “They can build a market, drive acquisition and optimize conversion, but then they must partner to inform product and delivery and drive LTV. If this is where the system breaks, a CMO cannot fundamentally drive long-term growth.

“Product, delivery and operations must all share the entire customer journey and be responsible for revenue growth,” Goodall continues. “If all executives are not responsible for revenue growth in the same way with the same metrics, the funnel dies and customer value diminishes significantly. Alignment is key.”

CMOs: Build an Investment Case, Not a Budget Request

Bob Pearson, Chair of Pearson Advisory Group, encourages CMOs to approach the CEO as they would an investor.

“Peter Drucker once said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it,’” Pearson says. “We are at our best when we think of the CEO as our lead investor. Investors fund companies that have a compelling vision, a clear execution plan and a believable path to value creation. CEOs allocate resources for exactly the same reasons.”

That framing changes how marketing leaders present initiatives and pursue organizational support.

“A CMO who can demonstrate how an initiative will accelerate growth, improve profitability or enhance valuation is making an investment case, not a budget request,” Pearson says. “As entrepreneurs inside a company, our job is to think and act accordingly: Build the case, quantify the upside and earn the investment.”

“The fix isn’t giving CMOs a louder voice in someone else’s meeting. Instead, put marketing inside the same operating unit as the other growth levers.”

– Jonas Barck, Director of Customer Marketing at Mentimeter

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Position Marketing as a Growth Lever

Jonas Barck, Director of Customer Marketing at Mentimeter, says demanding accountability from CMOs must be paired with giving them some authority over the decisions that shape growth.

“Companies say they want CMOs to drive growth, but then they box them into branding and demand gen,” he says. “Growth actually depends on pricing, the product roadmap and the sales process too. You can’t be accountable for an outcome you don’t have authority over.”

Barck advocates for a structural solution.

“The fix isn’t giving CMOs a louder voice in someone else’s meeting. Instead, put marketing inside the same operating unit as the other growth levers,” he says. “At Mentimeter, we’re doing this now—bringing marketing and sales together under one enterprise GTM umbrella so growth decisions get made by one team instead of negotiated between two. That’s the shift companies need to make if they actually want the impact from CMOs that they’re asking for.”

Put CMOs in Charge of Market Intelligence 

Meghna Deshraj, Founder and CEO of Bullzeye Growth Partners, says companies should reconsider the fundamental purpose of the CMO role.

“Companies need to stop treating the CMO as the head of promotion and start treating them as the leader responsible for market intelligence,” she says. “Most growth problems are not marketing problems. They are positioning problems, product-market fit problems, customer experience problems, sales alignment problems or executive decision-making problems.”

Deshraj points out that, too often, CMOs aren’t given a lead role in determining their own success. Instead, they’re brought in after the strategy has been set and asked to generate demand for decisions they had no role in shaping.

“The highest-performing CMOs sit at the intersection of customer insight, product strategy, sales and revenue. They help the organization understand what the market wants before the company decides what to build, sell or say,” she asserts. “If companies want CMOs to drive growth, they need to give them a seat at the table where growth decisions are made, not just a budget to communicate them after the fact.”

Match CMO Accountability With Authority

Jessica Hawthorne, CEO of Hawthorne Advertising, says CMOs can only drive measurable growth when they’re empowered with the authority, budget and flexibility to optimize performance.

“Restricting a CMO’s ability to adjust KPIs, customer acquisition targets or marketing investments limits their effectiveness and ultimately hinders business growth,” she says.

The necessary operating principle is straightforward.

“Organizations that align decision-making authority with accountability enable CMOs to deliver stronger, more measurable results,” says Hawthorne.

Help CMOs Connect Human Experiences to Business Outcomes

Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly and KUOG Corporation, says organizations often underestimate the business value of the human factors that shape customer relationships.

“Organizations need to stop treating intangible assets as soft metrics,” he says. “Trust, customer experience, employee experience, loyalty, reputation and organizational confidence increasingly function as growth channels, yet they are often managed in separate silos.”

Gunn observes that many companies expect CMOs to drive growth while limiting their influence over the conditions that create it.

“Growth is rarely constrained by awareness alone. It is often constrained by misalignment between what a company promises, what customers experience and what teams are empowered to deliver,” he says.

Gunn adds that the most effective CMOs increasingly serve as integrators of these human systems, connecting intangible value to business outcomes.

“As AI makes information more accessible and scalable, competitive advantage shifts toward judgment, trust and alignment,” he asserts. “Companies that treat human systems as strategic assets will compound enterprise value over time.”

“A lot of CMOs wait to be invited into those rooms instead of showing up in them. Authority isn’t granted; it’s assumed by whoever acts like they have it and backs it up with results.”

– Lee Salisbury, Founder and CEO of UnitOneNine

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CMOs: Don’t Just Demand Change; Drive It

Lee Salisbury, Founder and CEO of UnitOneNine, says that in many organizations, there’s a mismatch between how the CMO role is designed and what’s expected of the person who fills it.

“Companies hire CMOs like it’s still a comms function and then get frustrated when growth doesn’t show up,” he says. “The title changed faster than the operating model did. CMOs are expected to own revenue without a seat in product, pricing or sales comp decisions, the actual levers of growth. They get blamed for not driving growth while being structurally excluded from what drives it.”

But then Salisbury pushes back on his point, noting that CMOs themselves should proactively work to change those dynamics.

“A lot of CMOs wait to be invited into those rooms instead of showing up in them. Authority isn’t granted; it’s assumed by whoever acts like they have it and backs it up with results,” he says. “What needs to change is structural, but it also needs a CMO who’s willing to change it instead of someone who waits for permission.”

Align Key Business Functions, Including Marketing, on Goals and Outcomes

Kurt Allen, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing and Communications for Notre Dame de Namur University, emphasizes that CMOs must be given shared accountability for business outcomes, not just marketing metrics.

“Too often, growth is treated as marketing’s responsibility, while key levers such as product, sales, customer experience and data remain fragmented across the organization,” he says. “The most effective growth environments align these functions around common goals, customer insights and revenue outcomes.”

In Allen’s experience, marketing creates the greatest impact when the CMO has a seat at the strategic decision-making table and access to the same business intelligence as other executive leaders. 

“When organizations view marketing as an enterprise growth function rather than a communications function, CMOs can connect branding, demand generation, customer experience and retention into a unified strategy that drives measurable business results.”

Allow CMOs to Define Value and Shape Trust—Before the Market Judges It

Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer for ez Home Search, says CMOs have the greatest impact when they are allowed to help the company define value before the market judges it. This includes shaping the perception around an offer, not just promoting the offer after every major decision is made.

“The CMO should be close to product positioning, sales enablement, onboarding and customer success, because those are the places where trust is either built or wasted,” he says. 

Uhlir stresses that this strategy is not simply about expanding marketing’s turf.

“It is about making the business easier to understand, easier to buy and easier to stay with,” he says. “Companies that give CMOs that mandate create momentum because customer belief is managed from the first promise through renewal.”

Give CMOs Ownership of Revenue Conversations, Customer Insights and Market Positioning 

Evan White, Founder of Evan White PR and Fractional CMO of ERIN, says CMOs can’t meet the growth targets expected of them when their authority begins and ends with campaign execution.

“Growth happens when marketing has a seat at the strategy table, not just control over the content calendar,” he asserts.

White says the CMO’s remit should include the conversations and insights that shape how the company competes.

“The biggest change? Give CMOs ownership of revenue conversations, customer insights and market positioning,” he says. “Marketing is often the only function that sees the entire customer journey, from awareness to advocacy. If you want a growth-focused CMO, stop measuring them like a communications department and start empowering them like a business leader. The title isn’t what drives impact. The influence does.”

“Until CMOs have upstream influence, not just responsibility for downstream execution, the gap between expectation and impact will persist, and marketing will be playing catch-up instead of setting the stage.”

– Jayashree Rajan, CMO of Nexla

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Give CMOs a Voice in Key Product, Pricing and GTM Decisions

Jayashree Rajan, CMO of Nexla, urges companies to stop treating CMOs as campaign managers and start treating them as revenue architects.

“In most organizations, marketing is brought in after the product, pricing and go-to-market decisions are already made. Then they are handed a launch deadline and asked to drive growth,” she says. “That’s not a CMO problem; that’s a seat-at-the-table problem.”

Rajan says CMOs need to be in the room when an ideal customer profile is defined, when deals are being structured, when retention strategies are set, and when new products are being introduced.

“Growth shouldn’t be treated as a marketing deliverable—it’s a company deliverable, and everyone is equally responsible,” she stresses. “Until CMOs have upstream influence, not just responsibility for downstream execution, the gap between expectation and impact will persist, and marketing will be playing catch-up instead of setting the stage.”

Key Moves for Unlocking CMO Impact

• Bring CMOs into strategic conversations before key decisions are made. Early involvement in product, packaging, revenue planning and customer experience gives marketing leaders a better chance to influence the outcomes they’re expected to deliver.
• Connect the brand promise to the full customer experience. CMOs can help align what the company says with what customers encounter across sales, onboarding, support, content and other touchpoints.
• Make growth a shared C-suite responsibility. Product, delivery, operations, sales and marketing should work toward common revenue goals and remain accountable throughout the customer journey.
• Present marketing initiatives as investments in business value. CMOs can strengthen their case for resources by showing how proposed work may accelerate growth, improve profitability or increase company value.
• Place marketing alongside the other levers of growth. Organizations should structure marketing to work closely with sales, pricing and product teams rather than expecting it to deliver growth from a separate silo.
• Treat market intelligence as a core CMO responsibility. Customer insights should inform positioning, product strategy and executive decisions before the company determines what to build, sell or communicate.
• Match accountability with decision-making authority. CMOs need sufficient control over KPIs, acquisition targets, budgets and investments if they’re expected to produce measurable results.
• Recognize trust and experience as business assets. CMOs can help connect reputation, loyalty, employee experience and customer experience to growth rather than allowing those factors to remain scattered across departments.
• Expect CMOs to help reshape the role. Companies must update outdated operating models, but CMOs should also demonstrate initiative, enter strategic conversations and support their influence with results.
• Align business functions around shared goals, data and outcomes. Giving marketing access to the same intelligence as other executive teams can help connect brand, demand, customer experience and retention.
• Let CMOs help define value before customers judge it. Marketing leaders should contribute to positioning, sales enablement, onboarding and customer success so trust is managed from the first promise through renewal.
• Expand the CMO’s ownership beyond campaign execution. Revenue discussions, customer insights and market positioning should be part of the role when the company expects marketing to influence enterprise growth.
• Give CMOs upstream influence over product, pricing and go-to-market decisions. Marketing can’t be expected to drive growth effectively when it enters the process only after the most consequential choices have been made.

The Next Era of CMO Leadership

The modern CMO mandate reaches far beyond communications and campaign performance. Companies increasingly expect marketing leaders to contribute to revenue, customer loyalty, market positioning and long-term value, but those expectations must be supported by early strategic involvement, shared goals, access to business intelligence and meaningful authority.

The organizations that close that gap will treat marketing as an enterprise growth function rather than a downstream promotional service. As customer journeys become more connected and AI makes information and execution easier to scale, the CMO’s ability to align teams, interpret the market and build trust may become even more central to sustainable growth.