Or: How Marketing's Top Job Became the Corporate Equivalent of a Participation Trophy

The Uncomfortable Truth About Marketing's C-Suite

Let's start with the elephant in the room: The average CMO tenure outside the Fortune 5000 is about 20 months.

Twenty. Months.

That's barely enough time to learn where the good coffee is, let alone transform a marketing organization. If we're being honest (and we always are on Revenue Marketing Raw), this statistic screams "Houston, we have a problem."

But here's the real question: Is the problem that we don't need CMOs anymore, or that we're doing the job completely wrong?

The Jack-of-All-Trades Disaster

The Modern CMO Job Description (Actual):

  • Be a brand visionary 
  • Drive revenue like a sales leader 
  • Manage a tech stack that would make IT jealous 
  • Please the CEO, CFO, CRO, and whoever else has opinions 
  • Oh, and make everyone happy while hitting impossible numbers 

What Actually Happens: Master of none, stressed out of their minds, and gone in less than two years.

The problem isn't that CMOs are inherently bad at their jobs. It's that we've created a role that's humanly impossible to excel at. When you're trying to please every audience, you end up pleasing no one—especially not the board asking "What's our marketing ROI?" while you're stuck explaining why brand awareness metrics matter.

The Skills Gap That Nobody Talks About

Here's what's really wild: Many CMOs can't answer basic finance questions about their own department.

We're not talking about complex financial modeling here. We're talking about:

  • What's our actual customer acquisition cost?
  • How do we calculate marketing's contribution to pipeline?
  • What's the real ROI on that $50K trade show?

Meanwhile, every other C-level executive can rattle off their numbers in their sleep. The CRO lives and dies by revenue targets. The CFO knows every line item. But marketing? "Well, brand awareness is up 23%..."

Newsflash: The CFO doesn't care about your brand awareness when they're cutting budgets.

The Great Marketing Budget Reality Check

Remember when marketing budgets were 12-13% of revenue for tech companies? Those were the days, weren't they?

Then reality hit: Budgets came crashing down to 7-8.5% of revenue. And guess what? Companies are making it work just fine.

Translation: All that "extra" money was going to:

  • ✅ Too much overlapping tech
  • ✅ Agencies doing basic work internally
  • ✅ Personnel in the wrong areas
  • ✅ Projects that sounded important but drove zero revenue

The lean marketing teams we see now? They're leaner, meaner, more focused, and actually getting shit done. Funny how that works.

The "Can't Say No" Epidemic

Actual conversation from last week:

Us: "How much of what you're doing do you think is inefficient?"

CMO: "More than 35%."

Us: "Cool, so you could afford to lose one week a quarter for strategic planning?"

CMO: "What?! The world would stop moving!"

This is the marketing equivalent of being too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe.

Pro tip from successful CMOs: Treat your marketing org like a services business for one month. Track all time, track all requests. You'll quickly discover you're getting 2x the work requests for your actual capacity. Something's gotta give, and it shouldn't be your sanity.

Technology: The Double-Edged Sword

Twenty years ago, CMOs never talked about technology. Now they can rattle off 30-50 different systems in their martech stack.

The good news: Technology can do incredible things. The bad news: You now need to be a tech visionary on top of everything else. The reality: Most CMOs are drowning in tech they don't fully understand, managing platforms that don't talk to each other, trying to prove ROI on tools they're not sure they need.

Add AI to the mix, and suddenly you're expected to be a futurist too. Because why not?

The Rise of the Fractional CMO (And What It Means)

We're seeing smart organizations—especially in the $200M to $1B range—saying "You know what? We need some of what a CMO does, but maybe not full-time."

Enter the fractional CMO: Strategic thinking without the overhead. Results without the politics. Focus without the "can you also handle this random project?" requests.

What this tells us: Organizations still value marketing leadership—they just want it to be more targeted and accountable.

The Outsourcing Reality Nobody Wants to Discuss

Uncomfortable truth: You can get incredible marketing talent in the Philippines or other countries at 1/4 to 1/5 the cost of US talent.

More uncomfortable truth: With tools like Canva, AI content generation, and streamlined workflows, much of what we used to pay $150K salaries for can now be done efficiently and affordably elsewhere.

The most uncomfortable truth: This forces the remaining marketing team to focus on actually strategic work instead of production tasks.

Yes, there are risks with outsourcing. Yes, you need to be a good manager regardless of where your talent is located. But when you're being pressured to do more with less, ignoring global talent arbitrage is just sticking your head in the sand.

The Internal Marketing Problem

Plot twist: The best CMOs spend as much time marketing the value of marketing internally as they do on external campaigns.

Most marketing departments are like that person at a party who's really interesting but never talks about themselves. Everyone else in the company has no idea what marketing actually does or why it matters.

Simple fixes that most CMOs don't do:

  • Share your campaign calendar with sales (takes 2 minutes)
  • Send weekly updates about what's happening in marketing
  • Translate marketing metrics into business language the CFO understands
  • Stop assuming everyone understands why your work matters

The Billionaire Mindset (No, Really)

Recent study on billionaires found one common trait across all of them, regardless of background: They all carved out quiet time every week just to think.

Not to react. Not to put out fires. Not to attend another "quick sync." Just to think strategically.

If billionaires managing massive empires can find time to think, so can you.

The hamster wheel is a choice, not a requirement.

So... Do We Still Need CMOs?

Short answer: Yes, but only if they get their act together.

Longer answer: We need marketing leaders who can:

  • ✅ Pick their battles instead of wearing "all the hats"
  • ✅ Speak finance fluently, not just marketing-speak
  • ✅ Say no to the wrong requests to say yes to the right strategy
  • ✅ Build lean, efficient teams focused on measurable outcomes
  • ✅ Take time to actually think instead of just react

The CMOs who thrive in 2025: They're the ones who stop trying to please everyone and start focusing on driving measurable business value. They negotiate clear expectations upfront. They build efficient teams. They make tough decisions.

The CMOs who don't: Well, there's always that 20-month average to consider.

The Bottom Line

We're not anti-CMO. We're anti-inefficiency, anti-chaos, and anti-"let's just throw more budget at the problem."

The marketing organizations that are winning right now: Focused, strategic, measurable, and led by someone who understands that their job is to drive business results, not check every possible marketing box.

Want to be a CMO who lasts longer than 20 months? Start by figuring out what marketing's best and highest use is in your organization. Then have the backbone to say no to everything else.

Stop the madness. Pick your battles. Drive results.

That's how you make the CMO role indispensable.

Want more brutally honest takes on marketing leadership? Catch Revenue Marketing Raw every Wednesday morning, where we say the quiet parts out loud.

Watch all episodes at www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-raw