On overcommunicating

Some of you may have noticed that my blog went silent for a few weeks.  I was on a special 30th anniversary trip with my wonderful husband, and I just returned.  As with any time away from work, I had a chance to reflect on the way things are, and the way they ought to be.   

While I was away, I received a request from a client to share position specs about CMO and senior marketing jobs.  She is reorganizing her marketing structure.  On Monday, I gathered about 6 or 7 new ones that have come across my doorstep, and I forwarded them to her.  My client should be glad she has some good examples from which to build her own position specs, right?  WRONG.

Candidly, I am really disappointed at what I saw.  And concerned for the professional service firms that are hiring for these senior level functions.  They are all heavily focused on the communication aspect of marketing.  (Promote us! Build our positive visibility!  Grow awareness of how cool we are!  Create and tout our brand identity!) 

Not one of these job descriptions (from very prominent global firms, by the way) were asking their would-be CMOs to do anything about:

• Defining and identifying the most strategically important prospects / clients (i.e., segmenting the market, targeting the “right” clients, and prioritizing which clients or industries to pursue or to avoid).
• Acquiring the most strategically important prospects / clients (i.e., establishing a firm’s attractiveness, credibility and thought leadership with the “right” clients and successfully winning new engagements with those targeted prospects / clients).
• Retaining the most strategically important clients (i.e., fostering increasingly significant client / firm relationships, and successfully keeping current engagements with targeted clients).
• Increasing the firm’s amount of revenues with its most strategically important current clients (i.e., known as cross-selling in some sectors, this means increasing each current client’s use of the firm’s entire service portfolio and the firm’s penetration into that client’s available “share of wallet”).

I wanted to yell at the firms who generated these job descriptions.  "IF THESE ARE NOT THE FUNCTIONS OF A CRACKERJACK CMO, THEN WHO THE &^%$#8 IS GOING TO LEAD YOUR FIRM TOWARD SUCCESS AT THESE CRITICAL MARKETING STRATEGIES?"  Are these firms blind to the shifts underway in the marketplace?  Do they not see that successful marketing  means more than awareness building and positioning and branding?  These communication and image-oriented functions aren't bad, but they are entirely too limited for a professional firm that means to seriously compete. 

Why would any really seasoned marketer pursue these jobs?

And why aren't PSF leaders asking themselves more critical questions about who tomorrow's clients really should be, about how they will keep them and about how they will grow their business with them?  These are the kind of initiatives that they should be asking their professional marketers to lead. 

Okay, I know I have new energy from my vacation, but these appear to be significant issues.  Do help me relieve my elevated blood pressure:  if your firm has recently increased the strategic focus of its marketing function (beyond communication, that is) and has a position description to prove it, send it my way and I'll feature it on this blog (cleaned up if you'd like).  If you as a marketer have recently shifted the focus of your own role toward more of these client-focused goals, let me hear from you!