Author Dwight Holcomb wrote the book, The Lean CMO, with the purpose of teaching CMOs how to capture the right audience that will pursue your message because they see what you’re offering them as it’s tailored to their specific needs. He states that this is the “new model” of doing business as opposed to the “old” way where CMOs put too much emphasis on metrics with no real return as a result of their ad spend. He refers to that as “finding the ideal customer profile.”

Holcomb says that a common mistake marketers make is the need they feel to be everything for every client, when instead, they should hyperfocus on certain things they do right. He adds that CEOs and other executive leaders don’t always have the bandwidth to execute on all the items they need to do, but more often than not, the ideas are there. There’s just no bandwidth to implement them. He stresses that executives use a team of functional specialists to perform a number of tasks – whether it’s public relations, content writing, or social media, allowing them to focus on high-level strategy. This is what he calls, “the lean CMO blueprint.”