#CMO2020 — Q&A with Eastwick’s In-Residence CMO Chris Hummel
This week, our CMO-in-residence Chris Hummel sat down with the team to discuss his new role and share his experiences working in leadership positions at companies such as Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, and Unify.
Chris has a 25-year career in enterprise sales and marketing and is a globally recognized thought leader as well as a widely respected senior executive in the technology industry. He is a true international executive, having lived, worked, and successfully led organizations around the globe, including the US, UK, Germany, Kazakhstan, China, Singapore, among others.
As a CMO, Chris focuses on vision, strategy, and managing complexity. Below are some of his thoughts on the current CMO landscape and how an agency must think about and navigate these three key concepts.
Why did you you join as the in-resident CMO?
I am used to running a million miles a minute. This program will give me the opportunity to sit back, and a structured way to think about what I have done — to write, and to share my experiences.
I also wanted to help some friends to grow the business. Eastwick is company that has helped me through some big projects and has added such big value. And I hope to do the same in my time here and with my role.
What will be your role at Eastwick as CMO?
I will work with small and large companies and work with them on whatever they want to work on, whether that’s building the right products/services/solutions or strategic business development.
The key to looking at the overall picture of marketing is to go into the detail, into the data, and then bounce in between that detail and the bigger picture. From there, I can take an angle that people will be interested in, and Eastwick as their agency can either disagree or piggyback off of it.
Do you believe the CMO is under more stress now than in, say, the past five years?
Definitely. There is now more ambiguity than ever. Marketing is a company’s biggest discretionary budget, and the democratization of the toolset is not helping. The new technology tools are useful, but there is no standardization and no way to keep track.
Also, the definition of marketing has changed. Communications manager? Product marketing? It is much more difficult to transfer knowledge quickly. A company has to go through a discovery process every single time.
Make sure when you start on a new project you ask clarification questions: “What do you mean by PR?” To them it could be anything from risk, thought leadership, to overall visibility. CMOs are trying to figure out how they can add value to a situation. The mission of marketing is always changing, and ambiguity has to be our best friend.
Over the course of your career, how has your opinion of the value of PR changed and evolved, and what are your thoughts on “integrated communication firms”?
I don’t like the term integrated communications — I think it’s lipstick on top of PR. Focus on your value statements, not just the services you offer.
The obvious evolution is from the tactical to the strategic. My earlier view was that PR was just a means of a getting the story out, and risk management on the reputation of the story. What I’ve learned is that perception is far more important than reality. Sad, but it’s the reality. I’m not at all saying, “let’s go lie,” but the essential part is to help companies sharpen their message, and expose what they want to do, their aspirational element.
There is a 2013 Ted Talk called “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”. The idea is to have a person stand in front of a mirror for two minutes and ask them them to try to look more confident and positive, and doing this will physically help them.
There is a neurochemistry to that, and we can do the same thing for companies. We can change it by acting a certain way, to show we care about our customers. That this the role of a communications agency.
How do CMOs stay ahead or on top of the changes?
It’s awful. I almost feel like I need to fire 30 percent of my organization every year. Hard skill sets are lacking — web, social media. But some of it is also just taste. You can’t teach taste. I see it in creative (types) all of the time. How do you get people who have taste? I am looking for EQ skills, not IQ. People who duck when they need to duck, work 25 hours a day when needed. People who can write terse but effective communication, those who have presentation skills.
Here comes the agency — I can’t get the selective skill sets in-house, but agencies churn faster and better than I can. I can’t hire every social media expert, but I get them on a part-time basis. You (as an agency) are a variable cost, not a fixed cost, with more specialized skills and expertise.
There was a recent article detailing “The 6 Personas of the CMOs — Which One Are You?” So… Which One are You?
Which am I? The reality is all of them. Overall, the story had value in the concepts, but didn’t nail the framework. The article was positive, but identifying the personas and how they get there was a little bit childish. Persona is a made-up, artificial construct that is an amalgamation of multiple people; they’re caricatures. This contrasts with a profile, which is a set of capabilities, skills and experiences of a group of people.
Typical CMOs come from ad agencies and communication firms. Recently, businesses are hiring operational CMOs, who treat marketing like a cost center. Very often it is a cost center, but if you treat it this way you are never going to find all those people: the cheerleader, the bastard, the change agent. The boss, reviewer, passive participant — those are all roles that I play every day depending on the context.
How do you handle money conversations with the CMO, like when you go over budget?
You need to get to the value conversation, find out what the budget is. For example, if you are going over, go WAY over. If someone has $100,000 for PR, don’t ask for $150,000 — ask for $500,000. In both situations they will need to go ask for it, whatever that amount is, and you need a larger scope and vision to make that difference.
Say a new CMO is coming in and the concern is they may want to clean house. Is there any way the current PR agency can make him or her more comfortable, more at ease? How would you like an agency to react to you as a new CMO?
If a new CMO is coming in, that stemmed from a problem in the business — whether it was an absence of a CMO or a problem with the last one. Most CMOs that come in aren’t so maniacal that they rip everything out. Most slow things down and look first. If you rip everything out right away and start from scratch, it takes time to truly identify the problems you were brought in to address and fix.
The best thing you could do (as an agency) is to give me some honest advice. How have things been going? Where do you see the problems and what are your solutions?
If, on the other hand, the situations is, it has been a 12-year relationship and we have trouble with visibility, I will not give you a fair shake. I have to make a change.
Remember, even in exiting client business, you have to do things right.
Follow Kelley on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kelleybeans
Follow Eastwick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eastwickcom
For more on the modern CMO
Introducing the CMO-in-Residence (CIR) Program: Eastwick Announces CMO in Residence Program
Chris Hummel’s First CIR Blog: The CMO Identity Crisis
CMO2020 Series: #CMO2020 “Growing Up Fast: How New Agile Practices Can Move Marketing and Innovation Past the Old…
