Why do CMOs and VPs of Marketing have Short Tenures?

For the past few years, I’ve been tracking the tenure of senior marketing executives. It started when I searched for a VP of Marketing for my first startup, and it continues until recently, as I searched for a CMO in a late-stage SaaS company.

When you search LinkedIn for potential candidates, it’s hard to ignore that many CMOs and VP Marketing tenures are two years or less, on average. I expected a much longer tenure for C-suite executives. After all, it takes time for a new executive to be onboard and become productive, and the decision to leave a business also takes time. This means the productive employment period needs to be longer to impact significantly. I’d like to know why the average tenure of a CMO is the lowest of all C-suite titles and how that can be improved.

The web isn’t short on data. Reports from recruiting companies, like Spencer Stuart or Korn Ferry, or annual industry reports like the State of the CMO, support my analysis that the tenure challenge isn’t new. The trend of a decline in tenure started almost ten years ago.

As hiring a senior executive takes time, has a cost, and, most importantly, has an impact on the business, I started looking for reasons. There are obvious reasons for just a wrong hire, or no business culture fit that can lead to a short tenure of any individual at a business. However, given the volume of cases I noticed, this topic is not of any individual or a specific company.

Although I have experience on why senior marketing executives’ tenours were short in businesses I led, I decided to conduct a poll across my LinkedIn network to learn more about the reasons others are seeing. After running the poll for a week, I received the results.

The benefit of running a poll on LinkedIn is that you can find the role of each individual who voted. What I found interesting is the distribution of roles across the answers.

Here are the results with the role of the voters:

1. Absence of a clear strategy (40%) — This was cited by Product managers, Customer Success managers, and even Marketing people.
2. Pressure for immediate results (33%) — This was cited by people from R&D.
3. Sales & Marketing conflict (13%) — This was cited by people from Sales.
4. No alignment with the CEO (13%) — This was cited by CEOs and COOs.

These results are very interesting as each group identified a different reason. Although the absence of a clear strategy and conflict with Sales were the main reasons in the companies I led, these results are very powerful in helping marketing leaders improve.

Is marketing that different than a company’s other functions? Probably not. Each executive has challenges and should be qualified to overcome them and succeed.

Instead of trying to solve the topic on the philosophical side, I shared my key takeaways from the study I had.

Key takeaways for CMOs and VPs of Marketing:

Having and communicating a clear strategy is crucial 🎯

Managing expectations according to the strategy 📊

Collaboration, alignment, and shared KPIs with the leadership team 👥

Each of these takeaways is a topic for a separate post. Each has a width and depth to succeed; however, when I recall marketing executives I worked with throughout my career, these three takeaways could have helped them achieve even more. It may look simple and easy, but in today’s business environment, excellence in execution isn’t easy.

In my previous posts, I wrote about additional topics related to the success of marketing. You can follow them here and here.