The Habits Modern CMOs Need to Leave Behind

Episode Transcript

Process improvement and agility are not just team-level behaviors. They require everybody on the team, all the way up to the CMO, to change how they act, think, and lead. So, in this episode, I am talking directly to senior leaders about the old habits that it's time to unlearn. Here are the things that might have got you where you are, but are not going to serve you any longer in the age of agility. It is time to unlearn some things so that you can be a truly agile marketing executive.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning agile theory into real world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of AgileSherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind agile marketing — from building high velocity workflows and slashing waste, to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who've traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. Hit follow wherever you listen, and let's carve the next switchback together.

First, I want to tell you two stories of actual marketing leaders that I have encountered during my time as an agile marketing coach. I'm going to slightly change these up so that they're not totally identifiable, but these really did happen.

The first is the cautionary tale. One of the very first clients I ever had — I flew out to visit these folks on site and the person who hired me wasn't there. This was the VP of Marketing, not present in any of the trainings or coaching sessions that we were having. Just not there, not present at all. And the reason I was there was that this agile transformation was six months in and it was totally off the rails — not working, everyone was super frustrated. The whole thing was just going sideways. And yet the person who was demanding the change was completely MIA.

After the first day that I was on site, she took me out for a drink. She sat me down and said, "All right, you've been here for a day. You've seen a lot. You've talked to a lot of people. What do you think the biggest risk of this not succeeding is?" And I looked her straight in the face and I said, "It's you. You're not driving this. You're not committed to this. You're not demonstrating to your people that this is really important. You've said that it is and you're demanding that they figure it out, but you're not there with them trying to make it work." She nodded and didn't really say anything — and then proceeded to not show up for any of the rest of the sessions for the next two days that I was there. That transformation didn't really stick with that team.

The second story is the good one — how a marketing leader should actually show up when trying to get their team to change the way that they work. This team was just getting started in changing their ways of working and they were visualizing their work for the very first time. We were all in one big room and each team was putting their next pieces of work up on the wall in their first backlogs. Our first step was simply to show the work that was coming up next — we weren't prioritizing, we weren't trying to change anything, we were just showing what was happening right now and putting it in order of what they were likely to do next. The CMO was walking around the room and she was getting increasingly agitated the more that she saw.

I could tell something was off, so I went up to her and quietly asked what was going on. She said, "This is wrong. This is all the wrong work that the teams are about to be doing. The stuff at the top of their to-do lists — it's not the right work." I asked why she thought that was, and she said, "This is all the stuff that I know the business unit leaders are asking them to do, but it's not the strategic marketing priorities that I want them to be doing." I said, "Well, what do you think we could do about that?"

And this is where it got brilliant. She walked around to everybody's backlogs — these were physical sticky notes on the wall — and she grabbed the ones she did not want the teams to be doing and pulled them off the wall. She held them in her hands and said, "I don't want you doing this work. It's not adding value to our marketing priorities. I will go and talk to the people who asked you to do this and I will tell them it's not going to happen until our mission critical work is completed." And she did. The very next day, she went and had all those hard conversations, that work went to the bottom of people's backlogs, and they were able to get the important activities done first.

I tell you these stories to illustrate that there are some really good behaviors that enable teams to change the way they work and allow them to be modern, adaptable, agile marketing teams. And then there are other ways that we behave as leaders that constrain and prevent adaptability in our teams. The way that leaders act, think, and show up can make or break these kinds of changes.

So today we're going to talk about eight things that you may need to unlearn if you really want to be a modern, agile, and adaptive leader. These help, by the way, whether you are about to launch an agile transformation or you don't think this is ever going to happen and you don't care about working in agile ways. This is just how you have to lead in 2025 and beyond. Because whether it's capital-A Agile with things like sprints and backlogs and work in progress limits, or just being adaptable because the world is moving really fast and things are crazy, these ways of thinking and being as a leader are going to serve you well. So do these things, senior marketing leaders — whether you are leading strictly agile teams or just modern, adaptable marketing teams, they're going to serve you well. Your direct reports will thank you.

Okay, so first and foremost: the definition and expectations around CMOs and marketing executives is changing. We are increasingly expected to be technologists, analysts, and creatives. We're no longer just the brand voice or even just the budget holder for the marketing function — we have to up our fluency in technology, analytics, and customer insights. Pulling from CMS Wire, this marketing leadership definition is really shifting. And so if you are not comfortable talking about data or technology, you've got to get there. You can't just be the arts and crafts person. You can't just talk about brand, colors, PR, and where the budget is going. You really have to look across the technological capabilities, the digital capabilities, and of course the AI components. Where is it being applied? Why is it being applied there? How are you going to be increasing efficiency and productivity? Where's the ROI? You've got to speak business. You have to speak technology. All of this is table stakes now for CMOs and marketing executives.

Which leads right into our second unlearning: you have got to unlearn any lingering resistance to new technology. But the flip side to this is that we also have to get over the feeling that adopting a new technology is the answer to everything, or that it's somehow just going to be a flip of a switch — a perfectly smooth or transformative moment that solves everything. If you go back to the previous episode, we talked about how MarTech alone is not the answer, and that we have to also be ready to change our processes and operations to go along with the MarTech we need to be successful as modern marketers.

This also applies to getting AI into our organizations. A BCG and ANA survey of over 200 CMOs from 2024 found that 75% of them were confident about the future impact of GenAI on their organizations, and even at that point, 80% had already deployed GenAI for internal efficiencies. But what we are already seeing — and I hear this from our clients and prospects on a weekly basis — is that those internal deployments are showing them gaps in processes, in data, and in the readiness of their teams to start using AI for external, customer-facing use cases. So you have to embrace the technology, but you also have to be prepared for what it's going to show you and not expect it to be a perfect panacea that solves everything. Be realistic with your expectations and be prepared to evolve everything around the tech, not just plug and play.

The third thing: we've got to unlearn our assumptions about what our customers want. Don't just rely on your internal metrics or past behaviors — instead, go deep and invest in understanding what your customers really, really want. A Gartner survey from 2025 found that 58% of consumers say that companies fail to understand their needs and priorities when pitching products. And honestly, this is inexcusable in the age of data and LLMs that can get us access to so much customer insight. If you're not using SparkToro to understand more about your audience and prospective customers, please go do this right now. This tool is spectacular when combined with LLMs — it can get you so far down the path of understanding what your audience wants, what kind of content and products they would be interested in engaging with. It is inexcusable not to do the legwork to understand what your customers want, and this is desk research level stuff — it doesn't even require you to have an actual conversation. You should be doing that too, of course. There's no substitute for talking to actual customers. So do the GenAI work, save yourself time, and then use that time to talk to more of your customers. Don't assume that you know. Even if you've been marketing to the same customers for years, that familiarity is going to make you too complacent. People's preferences are evolving super fast. This is a big unlearn, especially if you've been in the same industry or customer niche for a long time.

The fourth unlearning is what my first CMO from the opening story definitely, definitely needed: the idea that delegating a major change is the best way to make it happen. You cannot delegate a major change of any kind and expect it to be effective. The minutiae of the day-to-day rollout is probably not your concern — but the effectiveness, impact, longevity, and permanence of that change absolutely should be. You are going to invest a lot of money, time, and resources in a change initiative. If it doesn't work, that is your problem. You are going to be the one held to account for a failed change initiative. So delegating it is not a good idea. We have got to unlearn this as senior leaders. Sure, some of the activities around change management should be delegated, but the buck is going to stop with you.

You need to establish systems, teams, processes, and hard data — KPIs — that are going to allow you to oversee and manage this change over the long term. If it's a major change like an agile transformation, an AI rollout, or a tool implementation like a new work management system, this is a multi-quarter, potentially multi-year process. You have to keep your fingers on the pulse of this effort continually. You cannot lose sight of it. This is also a great opportunity to bring people alongside you, mentor your direct reports, and help them understand what it's like to oversee a long-term initiative — but you yourself have got to be committed to this if you want the change to stick. You cannot delegate change if you want it to really, really happen. You have to sponsor it. Which is also why you can't have seven of these things going on at any given time. You cannot delegate and you cannot run a million of these simultaneously and expect them to work.

Our fifth unlearning: we need to let go of the idea that once we hire people, that's it — that the hiring is done and now everything is just going to be smooth sailing, and the people are here and will do what they're supposed to do. We have to think about people as an ongoing investment. Especially now with GenAI and all these new AI-enabled tools, the things that made people good at their jobs when we hired them — the job descriptions that people applied for — aren't going to apply forever. If they apply now, they won't soon. Our best bet is to think about the people we have as a malleable, adjustable resource that can grow and evolve with our team. We should be hiring people who are excited to grow and evolve, who are open to being upskilled and are not set in their ways.

But this has to be an unlearning on the part of CMOs and senior leadership: the hiring process is not the final step in our relationship with our employees. It's an ongoing, back-and-forth relationship. We have to create an environment where this is a conversation — one that enables people to identify the skills they want, and enables the organization to identify missing skills and find the people who want and have the aptitude for those skills. A 2024 PricewaterhouseCoopers Pulse Survey found that 91% of CMOs said attracting and retaining marketing talent was difficult. Finding good people and keeping them is hard. So allowing them to keep diversifying their skills and making them feel like there's room for growth in a lot of different directions is the best way to keep great people on your team.

That is also the best way to stand out in the age of AI — to have amazing humans on your team. Because everyone can access AI. Not everyone can access brilliant people. So if you have brilliant people, work really, really hard to keep them around, because those things are not easy to replicate.

Closely related to this is our sixth unlearning: we've got to stop thinking of talent as fixed. Talent is always evolving and growing. Our talent pool is as much an evolving thing as our tech stack. We should be thinking about how to up-level it the same way we would our technology — we would never still be using the same tech stack from 1998, and we should not be using the same org structure and skill sets from back then either. It's not 1998. The same skill sets and combinations of people that worked then are not going to cut it now. Which is why, from that same PricewaterhouseCoopers study, 57% of CMOs are planning to invest in talent and upskilling in the next 12 months. This is so much cheaper from a time and investment standpoint than hiring a whole new team. It's far more efficient to upskill and grow the people you already have in-house, assuming you've hired well. Sometimes this is also a good opportunity to swap out a C player for an A player. If you still have someone stuck in a 1998 mindset, this may be a good moment to bring that role into the 21st century. But if that's not the situation, upskilling is almost always the better opportunity.

This brings us to unlearning number seven — and seven and eight are closely related to the tenure and career paths of CMOs. This always gets a lot of coverage when the numbers come out every year, because CMOs have a really short tenure compared to other C-suite executives, and there's always a lot of hand-wringing about why CMOs are churning so fast. Looking at the 2025 numbers from Spencer Stuart, it's about 4.3 years for CMOs at Fortune 500 companies. We can infer from this that the leadership patterns, strategies, or assumptions CMOs are making are not sustaining them in their roles over the long term. So maybe CMOs need to unlearn a lot of things. Maybe we need to stop doing things as senior marketing executives that are ultimately getting us fired — like trying to do a major rebrand or redo the website every time we step into a new role. Because you know what those things take? A whole lot of time and budget. And you know what they don't do? Deliver massive ROI right away.

Maybe instead of these big, slow-moving projects, we should be looking for quick wins and agile experimentation that delivers rapid results, so we can show our value quickly. If you've only got four years and you're going to spend the first nine months on listening tours and website redesigns, that doesn't seem like a good use of time.

However, looking at some of the surrounding data from that same Spencer Stuart study, 65% of Fortune 500 CMOs who leave their roles go to a similar or higher role — they're either getting promoted or moving laterally. So we could conclude that the CMO is still valued, and that their so-called failure may stem more from a misalignment of expectations with the role they left than from any lack of skill.

So maybe the unlearning is less about capacity and more about habits or mindset. There's a lot of nuance here, but I think it's safe to say that CMOs and executive teams are often misaligned — that what other executives expect from CMOs and what CMOs are delivering doesn't line up. Finding ways to bridge that gap through the unlearnings we've discussed — speaking technology, getting more comfortable with data and rapid ROI delivery, getting your people in sync with modern, AI-enabled ways of working — all of these things are about bringing yourself into 2025 ways of leading, rather than being fixated on brand or some of the older, squishier types of marketing that people tend to associate with an earlier era. Obviously, this isn't what gets every CMO into trouble — a lot of CMOs are doing exactly what I'm talking about and still getting removed from their roles. This isn't a perfect solution to everybody's troubles. But oftentimes, these are unlearnings that need to happen. So if any of what I'm saying feels like it might apply to you, and that maybe it's time to do some unlearning and bring yourself into a more modern, evolved, agile way of leading as a senior marketing executive — my team at Agile Sherpas has supported CMOs and their direct reports through some of the most challenging moments you can imagine, and we'd be honored to be your partner as you evolve to meet whatever your current challenges may be.

If you would like to talk about partnering, shoot me an email at andrea.fryrear@agilesherpas.com and let's chat. Until next time, I'm your host Andrea Fryrear. Don't forget — the struggle is real, but so is agile marketing.