Maya Method
The first three points for the CMO to CEO playbook are:
- Become Chef Profits Officer: Think not as CMO, but as CPO. Take ownership for profitable growth.
- Create Profits Flywheel: Focus on the formula for success: (Hi CLV + Lo CAC)n = Profipoly.
- Pioneer Market Innovations: Focus on the unsolved problems in marketing and use “first-in-class” breakthroughs to get results and recognition.
Let’s first listen to Maya (as she spoke in The Profipoly Quest: Maya’s Story):
Historically, marketing has undergone three significant evolutions—branding, adtech, and martech—all with a laser focus on growth. However, the oversight has been a lack of emphasis on profitable growth, often relegating financial health to the realms of the CEO and CFO. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Envision ‘profipoly’ as the fourth wave in marketing, a strategic pivot that aims to make marketing the rainmaker for profits. We will amplify our profit margins by over 1000 basis points. We will do this by growing our revenues by 50% and transitioning from a state of breakeven (profitless) to one of robust profitability (profitable) and, ultimately, to achieving a monopolistic share of profits in our sector (profipoly).
… Remember these words by Fred Reichheld: “There is only one way to grow a business profitably. You make sure your customers are treated so well that they come back for more and bring their friends.”
… As of today, my role as the Chief Marketing Officer…comes to an end. From this moment forward, consider me the Chief Profits Officer.
These are words all CMO needs to tell their respective teams. Marketing should not just be about growth, but profitable growth. This presents a great opportunity for CMOs because there is no one in the organisation who has a laser-like focus on profits. A CEO has too many tasks to worry about, while for a CFO, profits equate to cost-cutting. Marketing is thus the only function which can blend the best of both worlds: growth with profits. Positioning as the “Chief Profits Officer” for the business is the “blue ocean” opportunity for CMOs – there will be no internal competition!
The next step needs to work on creating a profits flywheel. Today’s reality is very different. As I wrote in The Profipoly Quest: “Marketers find themselves trapped between the business objective of rapid growth and the reality of attention recession and funnel frictions with existing customers. The only logical solution: open the spigot even wider for new acquisitions. Result: a vicious cycle of higher CAC, lower CLV, and elusive profits.”
What did Maya do? She distilled the profit killers into three buckets: marketing waste, funnel friction, and poor data. As she explained, “These issues have been eroding our CLV while unnecessarily elevating our Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), directly impacting our bottom line.” CMOs need to unlearn and learn – the way Maya did. New frameworks and vocabulary need to underpin the new martech ideas. The big insight: “To solve CAC, [Maya and her team] needed to think about CLV – this itself was big shift in the frame of reference. Maya then introduced the three breakthroughs: Martech 2.0 Unistack, Channels 2.0, and Progency Partnership.”
Maya added: “The BR (Best and Rest customers) team has embraced the Martech 2.0 Unistack, transforming our engagement methods and redefining personalisation. The TL (Test and Left customers) team, you’ve reimagined Email 2.0 as a reactivation tool, shifting the paradigm from acquisition to meaningful re-engagement. And the NG (Next and Guest customers) team, your strategies to leverage zero-party data and first-touch hotlines have set the stage for a new era of customer interaction.”
Maya’s methodology needs to be replicated by every CMO in their quest to become a profipoly. This is table stakes in the CMO’s own journey to becoming a CEO. These are the results that a CMO needs to deliver over a span of two years:
With this performance, the CMO is ready to ask for more responsibility – complete responsibility for a P&L.
