C-Suite Network™

Menu

Month: February 2021

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development Women In Business

The New Path to the Top: 4 Reasons CMOs Can Be Great CEOs

The road to the top position in a company, the Chief Executive Officer, is shifting from a decade ago.  The types of skills that today’s CEOs need to cultivate in order to excel include: strong communication skills, the ability to collaborate closely in a team, the ability to operate with genuine empathy, and the ability to build high-performing teams.  The skills that will be of foremost importance for today’s CEO are to listen carefully and communicate openly in order to elicit public trust as the face of the company.

We know that as times change, and the marketplace evolves, navigating a successful course requires new leadership skills.  So, when it comes to managing your own career, how do you prepare yourself to move into the top position?  What abilities should executives focus on developing as they choose companies, functions, and jobs?  And, what path should executives follow as they strive to reach the next level?

Those aren’t easy questions. The trends vary by function, geography, and industry – and of course, by company.  But, once a leader reaches the C-suite, technical and functional expertise matters less than softer leadership skills and a strong grasp of business fundamentals.  In other words, the skills that help you climb to the top, won’t suffice once you get there.

To thrive as a CEO, a leader needs to be an astute student of business, but also an exceptional leader, adept at the “softer” leadership skills. Requirements for today’s CEO have shifted with the value being placed on being a team player, a collaborator, a good communicator, and a strategic thinker.  The CEO of today needs to be capable of multitasking continuously, leading in a team-oriented style, successfully coping with stress and pressure, and carefully managing the performance of their team, protecting them from burnout.

Marketing has not typically been a route to the top position in an organization. However, marketing is often the area that is responsible for crafting the company’s brand, communicating their values, creating a sense of identity, and connecting with customers in a tangible, but personalized and authentic way.  And, with the ability to track, measure, and report performance in every aspect of sales and marketing now, marketers are now able to show tangible evidence of their ability to accelerate profitability and growth. And, in the new digital-first works, marketers are expected to be tech-savvy and have a deep understanding of, and connection to, the company’s customer base. That’s a powerful combination in today’s complex business environment.

Today, with the increasing importance of digital and social connection to the customer, CEOs that rose to the top through marketing have not just become a possibility, but an imperative in many companies.  Here are four reasons that a CEO that rose to the top through a marketing career is now a significant competitive advantage:

  • Experience in a position of listening, learning, and engaging – Marketers have developed unique expertise to ensure that all customer touchpoints help the company learn about customer expectations, needs, and preferences to create and communicate a vision and roadmap for meeting their needs – whether it’s products, services or values they can relate to. And, marketers have developed sophisticated practices of ensuring that those customers who have purchased good and services become their advocate and champion, engendering their loyalty.

 

  • Experience with produce innovation that supports sales – Marketers have the ability to provide a pathway for cycles of product innovation that are more and more aligned with customer needs. CMOs are in a perfect position to facilitate this since they sit between sales and product development teams. They also enable sales to execute effectively with key messaging, support materials, lead generation programs, and appointment setting programs that relate to the problems customers are trying to solve.

 

  • Experience with sales enablement and driving revenue through new sales channels – Marketing has now broadened in scope as new consumer channels and touchpoints have emerged, and e-commerce initiatives are now typically falling to marketing. Marketing is now expected to drive revenue through direct and digital channels – often becoming the primary sales channel.  The lines between traditional marketing and sales functions are continuing to blur with social technologies, digital interactivity, and mobility becoming integral to consumer and business connections.  Because marketing and sales must respond seamlessly to new opportunities, marketing leaders now often serve as the CEO’s single point of contact for revenue generation.
  • Experience owning and managing the customer relationship – From start to finish, the customer lifecycle, which is comprised of hundreds of touchpoints across a number of platforms over time, yield a wealth of valuable data. These data-driven insights can, and should, influence overall business strategy, powering strategic business decisions. Marketing leaders also have experience establishing alliances to extend customer lifecycle across all touchpoints, using the data to leverage the resulting insights.

Overall, the ability to promote transparency and manage customer communities and public conversations are increasingly critical, all while leaders manage a workforce that has grown up in the digital age and expects immediate access to information. Technology, and in particular digital channels, will continue to dominate marketing and sales strategy in the future, catering to a customer base that has an ever-increasing desire for speed and easy interaction.  The demand for segmentation capabilities will grow as companies address a more diverse population of customers who expect ever-higher levels of service and increasingly tailored and personalized products and solutions.

For all these reasons and a dozen more, marketers are now able to show tangible evidence of their ability to accelerate profitability and growth and compete for the top position in the company. What path should executives follow as they strive to reach the next level?  Marketing seems like a really good choice.

Categories
Growth Personal Development

Predicting the Future, Embracing Change and Becoming a Positive Disruptor

 

Every business leader wishes he or she could predict the future.  

 

For every success story, we all have a lot more stories of failure. 

  

That’s why noted technology futurist and New York Times best-selling author, Daniel Burrus, says we need to look at the trends. Daniel is not talking about pet rocks and skinny jeans, instead hard and soft trends we all can see.  

 

“All trends are either hard trends based on future facts that will happen. You can’t stop them, or they’re soft trends, not based on future facts. They’re based on assumptions that may or may not happen.” Daniel said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Leadership Discussion.  

 

“I like both because a hard trend, I know that disruption…that change is going to happen. If I know, it’s going to happen beforehand. I can make disruption and change my competitive advantage with low risk.” 

 

He continued, “With a soft trend, you don’t like it. Your business is going down. Sales are going down. Guess what? That’s up to you to change it.” 

Whether we’re talking hard trends or soft trends, Daniel says you want to be a disruptor, not be disrupted.

“We all see disruption as negative. Why? Because we have to do something. We have to manage another crisis,” Daniel said. “I want you to become a positive disruptor. Creating the transformations that need to happen to elevate your relevancy because you’re either going to be more or less relevant. You’re not going to be coasting. You’re either going to be either the disruptor or the disrupted. But you do have a choice when you learn to separate the two.”

Nobody wants to be a Luddite and watch technology or competition eat away at the businesses we’ve built and the skills we’ve developed over time. But let’s face it, change is a constant in life and while it might be tempting to hide from it, we must face it head on. If I’m going to fail, fail fast and move on. It’s normal to establish a routine and get comfortable, but to me, that’s a clear sign that things must change again. That’s how you innovate.

However, there are some thing that even those not as averse to change couldn’t predicted. Factor in once in a lifetime events like the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to adjust.

“(In 2020), everyone on the planet was forced to change. Businesses don’t change over unless they have to because they’re run by humans, and humans don’t like change,” Daniel said. “However, you’re forced to change when you’re forced to go digital.”

Daniel has outlined the 25 technology-driven hard trends he sees on his website. Some seem obvious to most of us, some of them will seem new. They’re all worth reading, no matter your industry.

“A trend by itself is boring until you attach an opportunity to it.” He said.

One of those trends that’s never going away is the idea of ‘X as a service.’ Daniel introduced me to that idea years ago, and it’s accelerated even more since then. X as a service is a phrase Daniel says he coined during a speech in Beijing and describes it like this:

“Anything can be a service, and the opportunity to redefine and reinvent is amazingly powerful,” Daniel explained. “HR could be a service. How about banking? If I want to disrupt, I have to ask myself, ‘what isn’t a virtual service right now?’ Because if it can be, it will be. Why don’t I do it?”

He went on to say, “Look in your industry that you’re already in, already familiar with and ask yourself, how can I redefine, reinvent it using anything can be a service. Innovation can be a service. Pick something, make it a service.”

We all know being a first mover in an industry comes with its fair share of risk, but the rewards can be huge.

“I would like you to be on the blade, but you don’t have to be the part that bleeds. I’d like you to be on the leading part of the blade,” Daniel said.

One of those places where you can be leading, and not bleeding, is office space. After years of making excuses, the pandemic taught companies of all sizes working from home is possible and productive. However, they have invested millions into buildings, equipment, and other essential business tools. Daniel says the future of office work is one of the hottest topics among the CEOs he works with on a regular basis. What will office work look like in a post-pandemic world?

“We are going to go back (to the office) in a different way,” Daniel said. “Instead of  (offices) being a place to house employees. It’s going to be a place to maximize innovation, productivity, and the things that humans do best when they’re together. Otherwise, why are we together? We know how to work remote right now.”

When we do get back into the office, Daniel says business leaders need to think about ways to get their teams to collaborate and communicate better. If they’re not, they’re missing a huge opportunity.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘what does that office look like?’” Daniel said. “There’s going to be billions made on redefining what we do when we go in the office and what do we need in there. It’s going to be huge.”

“So yeah, we’re going back into the office. But if you’re going back to do it how you used to do it, it will fail.”

It’s really got me thinking about how to help my team transition back to the office when the time comes.

I’d like to thank Daniel for his insight and expertise. Listen to our full conversation if you want to hear gems like the three hard trends you should be paying attention to, what it means to be an anticipatory leader, how to be a dynamic planner, and Daniel’s thoughts on the future of several industries post-pandemic.

I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to predict the future, but we’ll have a better idea of how to prepare for it.

If you enjoyed reading this content, consider becoming a member of the C-Suite Network. For less than the cost of a business lunch a month you’ll have access to content and community that will help you become the most strategic person in any room.

Categories
Growth Personal Development

“Tell Me More…” — on LinkedIn

“TELL ME MORE…” — ON LINKEDIN

Dear Executives:

In many of life’s situations, LESS is MORE. Marie Kondo urges us to de-clutter our surfaces and pare down our belongings, so that with LESS stuff, we actually have MORE room and the ability to find the things we want to use. Likewise, silence following a key conversation point is often more effective than continuing to talk because it invites contemplation and puts the onus for responding on the listener. However, on LinkedIn, LESS is never MORE; only MORE is MORE. Every LinkedIn profile has two kinds of readers: LinkedIn bots and humans. Both crave MORE. If you’re not getting any traction on LinkedIn, a likely reason is that you’ve ignored the needs of one or both kinds of profile readers.

Delighting the LinkedIn Bots

LinkedIn is a search engine, and its bots do its bidding. The job of the bots is to match the keyword being searched for with those profiles that have used that keyword the most in their text. The frequency of use of the keyword being searched for, combined with your relationship with the person searching, determines your position in the search results. When your headline is just your current position title, and you have a minuscule (or no) About section, or your Experience section has no detail, you have seriously undercut yourself.

Although bots are efficient, they are not clever. You could excite the LinkedIn bots by simply listing your keywords, one after the other, and repeating the list ad nauseam. (But then your human readers would be disgusted!) Because it is the bots that determine your ranking on a keyword search, satisfying them is important – only profiles that rank on the first two pages of a keyword search will have right-for-them opportunities come to them without effort.

To determine the keywords your profile should feature, think of the search terms you would use to find someone just like you. Work your keywords into your LinkedIn text and skills section naturally. Of course, you cannot write an infinite amount about yourself.  Each section has an associated character count, which changes from time to time. The limit for each section as of this writing is:

Section Maximum
Headline 220 characters
About 2,600 characters, about 4 paragraphs

Experience (for each job listed)

 2,000 characters, about 3 paragraphs
Skills 50 skills

Delighting Your Human Readers

People do business with people they know, like, and trust. The people reading your profile are looking for an engaging story to help them understand your purpose, passions, and principles. They are deciding whether you are someone they’d like to do business with. They want to read prose that flows with meaning. Neither sentences that are awkward because of keyword stuffing nor text that is barely there will do.

To delight human readers and bots alike, take some time to decide what you’d like to communicate about yourself.

What do you want to communicate?

The three questions I ask to help people identify their personal brand are:

  1. What are the three things you want to be known for?
  2. What are your differentiators?
  3. What are your keywords?

When you’ve identified these, you have identified the building blocks of a great LinkedIn profile that channels right-for-you opportunities to your doorstep. To learn more about using these branding questions to craft your LinkedIn profile, see my article: What’s Your Personal Brand and Why Does It Matter?.

 

to order click: https://carolk.yourfeaturedauthor.com/LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive - Second Edition
Promote Your Brand with Authenticity, Tact and Power

If you are a C-Suite executive or senior leader who would like to improve your LinkedIn profile and presence, I can make it easy for you. I have a track record of working effectively with C-Suite executives and senior leaders to create LinkedIn profiles and other executive-branded materials that help them show up as authentically and powerfully online as they do in person. I also mentor clients on LinkedIn etiquette and effective posting strategies to ensure their success. Contact me through my website: www.carolkaemmerer.com or profile: www.linkedin.com/in/carolkaemmerer.

 

Other resources for you and your team:

For a virtual or in-person presentation on personal branding via LinkedIn, contact me. I am a member of the National Speakers Association, a Certified Virtual Presenter, and an Advisor to the C-Suite Network.

My NEW book Second Edition: LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive: Promote Your Brand with Authenticity, Tact and Power through online booksellers. For quantity discount or signed copies, contact me directly.

 To receive my monthly articles in your email inbox, sign up for my monthly emailing here.

 

Categories
Body Language Entrepreneurship Human Resources Negotiations Sales Skills Women In Business

“Body Language – How To Read Bully Signs In A Negotiation” – Negotiation Insight

“When dealing with a bully, understand his source of motivation. From that will come greater insight about how to deal with him.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert (click to Tweet)

 

 

 

 

Click here to get the book!

 

 

“Body Language – How To Read Bully Signs In A Negotiation”

 

People don’t realize they’re always negotiating.

How do you know when someone attempts to bully you? At what point does your sense of being bullied occur? Is it something you experience through someone’s body language, or does it come from a different sensation? Do you have different experiences of being bullied in a negotiation than in other aspects of your life?

The point is, you should know what triggers your perspective of someone attempting to bully you. And you should note when it occurs in different environments. The reason being, you’ll respond differently to someone’s efforts depending on the setting. The following are body language signs to observe when someone is genuinely attempting to bully you and how you can respond by using the right negotiation tactics.

Click here to discover how to identify and deal with bullies!

 

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

 

Listen to Greg’s podcast at https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/greg-williams-the-master-negotiator-and-body-language-expert-podcast/

 

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

 

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Negotiation Insight,” click here https://themasternegotiator.com/greg-williams/