Who’s Running Marketing in 2024?
When Matt and I embarked on our research for The Resource Rethink, one of the first questions that I wanted to answer was: Who is leading marketing teams in B2B software companies? I had predicted that the number of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in our selected cohort probably wouldn’t be much more than 30%. After all, they are a pretty expensive hire for small-to-medium-sized software companies.
But when the figures revealed that only 14% of the companies had a CMO in the marketing leadership post, I was shocked and curious in equal doses.
Was this the sign of a dying role? Was the CMO no longer a dream job for the next generation of ambitious marketers to come? Was the value of seasoned marketing leadership dwindling? The next step was to look at who else was running marketing.
A cross-functional
marketing team
Where the CMO was once the ringmaster of the marketing circus, increasingly, our research found that talent in the marketing leadership function is diversifying. The times of marketing being a department of marketers is no more. Instead, marketing departments have a stronghold on customer perception, product steering, and an ear to the ground regarding market priorities. And so do the people and roles within it.
New roles are taking the reins of the marketing departments that don’t necessarily ‘sit’ in marketing traditionally.
Let’s illustrate by taking a look at the structure of a traditional marketing team.
Traditional Marketing Team Structure
The traditional in-house marketing team is focused on areas of specialisation. There is a role for every flavour of marketing, from Content to Product to Social Media. Granted, this is a very human resource-intensive and expensive model, but one must tip a hat to its tidiness and clarity of expectations. So, what’s changed in the marketing department?
B2B Software Marketing Team Structure
Today’s marketing teams in the software industry are not necessarily owned by a CMO, and instead may fall under the fringe responsibilities of a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Commercial Officer, whilst bearing a close relationship with the head of the pack, the CEO. It’s also common for marketing to fall under the remit of a Chief Sales Officer; however, with an increase in product-led strategy in B2B software, increasingly marketing is more aligned to product and revenue-focused streams in the business.
Where in the ‘traditional’ marketing team, responsibilities are departmental, for example, the split of social media, website, and content into sub-specialty areas, in software, this is more commonly bundled under the umbrella of content marketing, which also increasingly includes Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In fact, SEO appears as one of the last grand bastions of specialist roles in the modern SaaS marketing team. A note for new players: Google certifications are free to attain and worth their weight in gold if you are thinking about upskilling.
Growth &
demand
One thing that we are seeing is the words growth and demand tacked onto the responsibility of the marketing manager. Marketing Manager as a standalone position remains a great catch-all title for the responsibilities of marketing. However, adding these terms indicates a shift in focus for software vendors.
Growth and demand are both words that say clearly: your job is to ensure everyone else in the company is busy and we are, well, in demand. The best way to achieve this? Growth. And to grow, one must acquire customers and keep existing users engaged. This is an interesting pivot because it brings marketing closer to the product, customer success, and commercial teams than ever before.
Where traditionally, a key priority and focus of marketing was to entice and build awareness, modern software marketing requires individuals to hold the knowledge required to engage, educate, and even close on business opportunities. This is a steep incline in the responsibilities of marketing teams in the software field – and I can’t help but ask, are the demands fair? That’s another article altogether.
Marketing leadership in B2B software companies is undergoing a significant re-imagination. With only 14% of companies surveyed having a Chief Marketing Officer, it's evident that traditional roles are evolving. Marketing is no longer confined to a single department but is increasingly becoming cross-functional, with responsibilities spanning product, revenue, and customer engagement.
As software companies embrace new strategies and technologies, marketing teams must adapt to meet evolving demands. The traditional model of specialised departments is giving way to more integrated approaches, where growth and demand are critical. This shift brings marketing closer to the heart of the business, necessitating a broader skill set and deeper collaboration across teams.