Redefining Marketing Metrics: Beyond Likes to Real Impact

Foreign. Joined by someone who's not only worn the CMO hat for many years, but now wears many of them. Steven Manifold is the fractional CMO strategist and product builder with a front row seat to the rapid shifts in marketing. In this episode, we talk about why the rules of B2B marketing have changed, and not just because of AI. From the shrinking tenure of CMOs to the surge in vanilla content, Stephen lays out what really is going on behind the curtain and why originality, planning and actual value are becoming the rarest currencies in marketing. You'll hear how short termism is killing momentum, why marketers need to ditch vanity metrics and speak the language of the boardroom, and what it really takes to stay employable in the AI era. If you're a marketer wondering how to stay relevant, respected and strategic, this episode is your survival guide. Stephen, welcome to CMO Unplugged. Great. Thanks, Chris, for having me. Delighted to be here. Great. We haven't got much time together, but there's quite a lot of ground to cover. And as you know, we're talking about particularly the concept of the CMO marketing role being under siege and we're going to get to the nitty gritty of that in just a short while. But let's just quickly introduce yourself, perhaps by starting with some thoughts around how you got into this. I mean, I'm presuming you didn't say, I want to be a CMO when I grow up. So tell us, what did you want to be and how did you end up here? Yeah, not quite. Although not far away, actually, Chris, I grew up in Yorkshire and I was surrounded. Half my friends were farmers or sons and daughters of farmers. So actually I left school thinking I want to work in an office and have a soup. That was pretty much my level and that's what I managed to do after I left university. But, yeah, I kind of fell into marketing, I guess, in the first place, year or so of that career and haven't looked back. Excellent. Well, I don't. I've known you for quite a few years and I know you to be a very natural communicator. So this is what, where we tend to end up in this kind of position, isn't it? So. But the world is changing enormously and this is one of the reasons why I really wanted you on the show. Just to talk about that is the, well, the, the CMO role. Is this, is this broken or have the rules changed? I mean, you're right on the front line. So Maybe if you can tell us a bit more about your current experience. Yeah, I think the rules are definitely changing. So I just come off the back of a five year stint as a CMO for a global tech company based out of the UK. Since then, so the last 12 months I've been consulting as a fractional CMO, had the pleasure mostly of working with US and Canadian companies, but had the benefit of dropping in and out of some different organizations. And things are definitely changing. I mean, what I kind of walked into five, six years ago feel was quite different and there's so many other things that are happening around business at the moment. Can you elaborate on that? I mean, I think that when you walked into this world, what was it like then five years ago? And can you try and encapsulate that quite briefly? How is it different? Five, six years ago things were quite well known in terms of what was expected of marketing. I think people looked at marketing as the, I guess rightly as the kind of get rich slow scheme. So they had a head of sales that was kind of driving quarterly revenue and they had someone else in a marketing role to look further ahead in the business and, and guide that not just in terms of demand creation, but also where's the product going, where's the pricing going, where's the positioning of the entire organization going? Over the last five, six years things have just got a lot shorter in terms of time span, a lot shorter in terms of attention span. And so people are looking for immediacy, which I don't think was there five, six years ago. So that luxury of time and strategy and thinking I think is getting under pressure quite a lot. And actually if I think about what's happening right now in terms of what's happening with AI and everything else, CMOs I think always like to have this idea of a big button on their desk they could press and things would speed up and they'd get results quicker. Now that's kind of coming to fruition a little bit with some of the technology and it feels like that in itself is fueling more immediacy. So the time horizon have just come so close to the marketeer that it feels very different to what it was five, six years ago. And if it is just the time horizon that's coming forward, how can you explain, I mean, something. I don't know if you've been reading the reports, but the shelf life of a CMO has actually got contracted. It's got shorter in the last few years in particular and probably the last year quite Rapidly, to the extent that it is probably the shortest on the C suite. And that never really used to be the case. I think it was more at the sales end, which seemed like a distant place, part of the relationship. Why do you think this tenure is shortening so much? I think there's two reasons for that. I think the short termism that we've just talked about is one part. I think the other part is marketeers, I think have always struggled to talk the right language of business, especially to CEOs and other members of the C suite. I had a conversation just last week with a former colleague, great marketeer, really well respected marketeer. And he was talking about how they're planning in their current organization and he was saying they don't have financial measures, they don't have any sense of what revenue is meant to be coming from their marketing. It's all engagement and followers and short term metrics that gets them focused on the job at hand, but actually makes it incredibly difficult to tie back the investment the company is making in marketing to the revenue in the business. And so I think marketeers speaking the right language to CEOs I think is really important. And I think we've lost a bit of that. I think we've been focused on some of the wrong types of, of measures and the wrong types of metrics and lost sight of the fact it's about revenue. At the end of the day, that's what marketing is really about. Yeah. And with the advent of so much change going on, you're absolutely right. It's not about likes or engagement anymore. It should be about. But hasn't it always been that way though? I'm just trying to understand why the shift. Is AI causing much change, would you argue? I think it is. I mean, it is disruptive for sure. So there's a new tension there in terms of the amount of work you can get done as a marketing team getting much higher, which is great. Right. On the surface it looks like a good step forward, but actually at the expense, I think, of quality. So teams are churning out lots of mediocre content. Right. As one example, I think that's in this rush to see results and this rush to measure as much as possible. And actually AI is one of those tools that can help you start to measure and attribute things a lot more closely. What do you mean by mediocre content? Can you just elaborate? Is this because we can all spot raw AI content or. I mean, what is the issue deep down there? Well, I mean, so you know, just that it's at a very technical level. The content you're generating using a large language model is by definition not original. Right. I mean, it's creating words in a certain order that may not have been put in those order previously, but it's based on a body of known work. And so it's cutting out some of that originality of thought, that creativity, that creative process. So from a technology point of view is a challenge, but I think also as organizations try to, as I say, accelerate and get more done, there's a huge tempting pull to do that. And actually I see content that is clearly written by AI, that there's so much of it by the same people. You think, well, you can't even possibly have the time to read it yourself. Why would I read it? If you're not reading it, you're not even creating it, but you're probably not even reading it either. There's no interest there. There's no human element there that's going to grab your attention. So that's what I see in terms of the content side of AI at the minute. And it's a shame because I think. Yeah. Are you saying there's a growing acceptance of mediocrity? Because I think we could see this on certain platforms, like LinkedIn, for example. There's a lot of fodder out there. That's the only way I would describe it, that some of it may not even have been read. It was generated by the machine. Yeah. And, you know, again, there's a technical explanation for some of this as well, which is, you know, organizations and people are trying to create content that is understood and read by the machines so that they can then serve that up to somebody else later down the line as part of a prompt. And I saw something just recently saying, hey, you know, the website of the future is going to be basically an FAQ that's, that's very text based, very precise, very, you know, detailed. You know, you know, why would anyone need a website? Because people would get the information they need via a chat agent. You know, it's just, you know, really makes me quite sad as a marketeer to think that's potentially where we're heading. But also it misses the point that at some point a human has to understand and read that content and make sense of it and enjoy it. Right. And be entertained by it, educated by it, inspired by it. And that potentially is going to be lost, I think. I mean, ultimately this is surely going to be driven by the customer, isn't it? I mean, the world that we inhabit is very much you and I and we're in the B2B space. And surely in the end, if it's not going to work, it's not going to work and we will adapt and change to what the customers expect from us. Would you not agree? I do agree and I think actually it's still quite early. Right. In terms of the adoption of this type of technology. And I think what we'll see is better use of the technology in terms of building up that quality. That will be a point of differentiation for some organizations. So anybody can use AI to create content. Actually it takes quite a bit of skill to create meaningful, interesting content that people want to consume. And so I do think people are going to start to find new and interesting ways of using that technology. What tools are you referring to there? I mean, do you use any yourself? Any that you would say? Actually this gets closer to the mark. So I've used a variety of different chat engines like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and all these other different tools. I've used them for different tasks. I think they're largely, in my opinion, largely the same. Right. In terms of quality, a lot depends on how you set them up and prompt them obviously. But that's great for creating text based content. Increasing your images are getting a bit better I would say as well. And video, you know, we've seen some of that as well. I think that's getting better. I also use, there's two of the ways that I use AI personally. One is as an agent. So I've got a few agents set up that do, you know, manual repetitive tasks. So things like reading a bunch of emails in my inbox and summarizing the important things and telling you what I need to do about it, I think that's got great potential. The biggest challenge with that I find at the moment is reliability. It's like employing someone and saying, hey, read my inbox and tell me what's interesting to me. And they do it for a few days really well. But if you're not on top of it and training them and educating them and teaching them, after a while they kind of forget what you've told them and they start to make stuff up and they start to miss things that are important. They tell you things that aren't important. And so it's until we can get to a reliable, consistent model. The agentic AI stuff I think is again potentially useful but not quite there yet. And I use AI for things like coding as part of my own business. And again it's not perfect, but actually what I'm finding or how I'm finding I'm using it is it's kind of like learning with a buddy. You know, you're kind of sat there learning together and you say, hang on a second, that doesn't work. And they go, oh no, you're right, it doesn't work. Try this and try something else. And that works. And you know, they don't have all the answers, but you're actually, it's a kind of an interactive way of learning something new. I mean, has this changed the way that you're working? Because, you know, because I know you, you know, as you say, you had that tenure of six, five or six years in one company, which seems like much longer than the industry average by the anyway. But now as a fractional cmo, is that going to stay the way for you? Do you think that's going to. You coming in with your specific skills and then moving on to the next company is going to be the new norm for you? You know, I've given quite a lot of thought about that in the last year. I think, I do think there is going to be a shift in terms of talent. I think we're already seeing lots of single person operators that have a really quite specific set of skills or knowledge and you can tap in and out of that pretty quickly and pretty easily and they can add value to your business. And I've used, you know, a few different people to do that. Right. So from people that are experts in coding or people that are experts in content or whatever, I'm kind of drawing on some of that in my own business. And it means I don't have to recruit people, I don't have to have a team of people around me to get that done. I can, I can drop it and out and scale up and down, you know, as I need to for the, for the business, I do think we're going to see that pool of talent grow. I'm a little bit concerned that, yeah, and I think these people are great. They have high energy, they've got very specific skills. But many don't have that corporate background. They haven't spent five years, 10 years working in a steady company where they've learned the rest of the scene. So they've got a part of the picture, but they're missing some of the others. So I do think they're going to be useful resources and people to draw on. But I worry that perhaps they're not as rounded as you would get. If you Build your own team. And my last role as a cmo, the first job was to build a team. So I kind of thought deeply about what sort of personality is, what kind of experience, and what kind of makeup I wanted for that team. I think people today are probably thinking, well, I can get half of that outsourced from experts, which is great, but I think you still need some of that institutional memory, that corporate experience for people that work inside a business and really, truly understand what it's trying to achieve and how to get things done. So what advice would you give to say, let's just take a CMO who's been in the role now for three or four years, and this seems to be the average tenure right now. What advice would you give them for staying ahead of the game because one level, their job is at risk, is it not? It is. I think, as I say, I would think about it as being piecemeal at the moment. So filling the gap and making sure, if you're engaging with a person that has really deep expertise in AI or whatever the topic is, that you need the expertise in being able to soak that into the organization as well. Right. So it's not just a contractual transactional exchange of I pay you, give me some information or some assets. It's how do I learn from that and kind of build the internal skills? I think that's one important point. I think the other, as I say we've mentioned before, is keeping it focused on what the value is to the business. You talk about the tenure. When I started my role, I was well aware of the. I think it was four years was the average 10 year. I remember making it to four years and thinking, I've done it. You know, that was my own little personal celebration because I thought, okay, I've outlasted the average. That's pretty good, right? And so that was a moment of personal pride. But they are short. And actually, I learned a lot in those early days that, you know, you have to. You have to have conversations that relate the value of marketing back to the business. Right. So it's so understood. I had some really awkward conversations with the board at the very start where, you know, you get into a rabbit warren of, you know, attribution and, you know, last touch, first touch. And if you're having those sorts of conversations with a board, you're lost. You know, that, that. That's not going to work. When you're able to have a conversation with a board member that says, hey, for every dollar you give me marketing investment, I give you $5 back to the bottom line. That's a great place to be. Because who doesn't want to give you an extra dollar? Right. That's exactly the kind of conversation you should have. And so that, you know, being able to articulate the value of marketing in those terms will help you, I think, say longer than the average tenure, which I think is probably down to three and a half years by now, if not. Sure, Yeah, I think it's. I think it's heading rapidly in that direction. But it is interesting because the world is shifting so much and we can see one CMO who came onto the show the other day put it rather bluntly in the boardroom, that conversation where the expectation on The CMO is 20% more for 20% less. And that's pretty brutal, is it not? It is. And actually, you know, it's not difficult to cut 20%. Right. And again, I've had these conversations with boards in the past. I can cut 20%, I can even deliver 120% off the back of that for six months. But then we're in trouble, right? Because actually what, what that cut does is it kills momentum. Right. And I think, you know, a lot of boards, a lot of people that don't work in marketing don't understand marketing is a game of consistency, repetitiveness. You know, they think about it as being shiny new, exciting things. But actually the value of marketing is just drumming home the message to the right people, the right way, the right time, consistently, and doing that over a period of time, if you start to take your foot off the gas, it's really hard to build that momentum back up. So I've had those conversations. Yeah, I can save you some money today. We're going to find it really tough in six months, but the expense of short term decision making on the long term aim, which, let's be honest, marketing is a long game, but your basis, it. What I'm hearing is that it's becoming a short game and that the expense of that to an organization is, well, surely a lack of competitiveness ultimately, is it not? Yeah, I think so. And actually, you know, I've thought about this quite a bit in terms of the CRO role. We had a CRO at our last company, you know, and there's an implication there to say one person is responsible for revenue and the other isn't. Right. And I don't think that was true. Actually. The way I think about it is you have a short term CRO and a long term CRO, right. You have somebody that cares about revenue today, you have somebody that cares about revenue tomorrow. That's a much more enlightened way to think about your business. And I think if you can articulate that to a CEO or to a C suite to say I'm here for long term revenue, that person's here for short term revenue, then the choice becomes really obvious. When they say, well, let's cut your budget, you say, great, that's fine. You're cutting short. Yeah. You're cutting long term revenue. Right. Just so everybody's clear in the room. That makes sense. That makes good sense. Framing like that, I think it helps have that type of conversation. Yeah. What other headwinds should they be worried about? We were talking about technology and the pressure on budgets. Is there anything else there on the horizon that CMOs are worried about? Yeah, I think the IMF came out with a report earlier this week. So it feels not quite recession like, but edging on the border of that productivity is not great, certainly in the UK recently and I think maybe a little bit better in the us but it does feel like there's a dot com like bust coming at some point. Most commentators seem to recognize that these days that in itself causes people to hunker down and focus on where they're getting value and where they're not and being pretty strict with how they spend money. I think as well there's a, you know, post Covid, there was a huge kind of employment boom and so I again I was there, I tried to recruit people to my team and found it almost impossible to get good people. And when I got them it was, thank God you're here. Right? This is really hard to get quality people. And then fast forward 18 months and all of a sudden it's, you know, the kind of market is awash with candidates and not enough vacancies. And the risk, I think in that the headwind for CMOs is you get people that are, are kind of out of the game for 12 months, 18 months, two years, their skills get a little bit less sharp, the experience gets a little bit less relevant. And so that is a headwind I think I'd be concerned about. And again, thinking short term you would do well to look at some of those people and say, look, I don't have a full time role but I could use that experience for a month, I could use that experience for two months. Come and help me on a fractional basis as an example, but just come and help me achieve something can keep those skills sharp. So that's a risk I think in terms of talent going forward. Good, Excellent. Okay, so what I'm hearing, basically there is three big things I think the CMO is taking away from this and certainly what I'm taking away is keep learning. You'll fall behind very, very quickly if you don't focus on new metrics. It's not just about the standard engagement metrics, it's bottom line metrics. So it's recognizing there's a different dashboard there to generate and also embrace AI, I think is what I'm hearing. But don't just go with raw AI. Use it as a tool and add your human touch to it. Those are the three pieces of advice I'm taking away from this. Is there anything I've missed? No, I'd agree with those. I think, yeah. On the AI piece, think about how you can use it as a point to differentiation. If you're just using it to churn out the same stuff everybody else is. Okay. There's not as much value in that. Yeah. So I think, yeah, those are the key things. Again, I think finding ways to articulate the value of marketing is still really important. It's always been the challenge for marketing to be able to do that, you know, and actually having some time outside of marketing is not a bad thing for marketers to do. I mean, it's really interesting. I've spent years, you know, responsible for things like sales enablement. And actually, until I left my last role and started working for myself, it occurred to me I'd never sold anything in my life. Right. Yeah. And so all of a sudden I had to sell my business, had to sell my services. And the first time you get a, you know, five figure deal from a client and they sign the dotted line and they send the purchase order, it's euphoria. It's such a great feeling. And it's not until you do it and you realize how hard it is to do it and more importantly, how hard it is to repeat it and do it again and again and again. Have you created your own tool? I think you talked about you've been developing your own product or solution. Yeah, exactly. And so one of my passions is around planning and strategy. You know, I, I get worried partly because of the short termism that we've talked about, partly because of the emerging tech landscape. Makes it feel like there's so many shortcuts that you could take advantage of. I worry that marketeers are losing that skill of good, honest strategy and planning, making some choices, deciding where to focus, where not to focus, that's not to say the alternatives are bad. It's just to say they're not the right alternative for you as your business. So making some choices, building out solid plans, executing them, tracking them, understanding them, you know, so that's been a passion of mine for a while. And so I, as I found myself with some more time in between clients, I started playing with some no code tools. Built a platform actually for me to use with my clients to say, hey, I've got a tool here, but I can capture the plans and track them and it save a bunch of time. Right. I'm not filling in spreadsheets, I'm not creating PowerPoints or explaining what's going on. It's just, it's right there in the tool. And I'm getting to the point now. Validate, validating that with potential clients as well and getting some feedback and seeing if it's more widely appropriate to others. Excellent. Okay. Okay. Well if anyone wants to get in contact with you or to know more about that planning and strategy tool, how can they get hold of you? Stephen? Yeah. So you can either head to B2B planner with no E so P L-A-N-R.com so B2BPlanner.com or look me up on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to connect. And yeah, what I'm finding again, the other thing I found actually in the last 12 months is it's very easy in a corporate role when you're busy and you're heads down to neglect your network. I'm fortunate. I've got a good network and people have been very generous with their time and their experience. Get out there, talk to people, meet people, have those conversations and interactions. Definitely worth having. It does. As a single person business, it's important to do that. But I've learned the hard way, actually I thought I've been doing that for the last 15, 20 years. It would have been so much easier. Exactly. Okay, well, we do learn from change, don't we? And thank you so much for coming onto the show. Everyone knows how to get in contact with you now. Appreciate your time and great to see you, Steve. Thanks a lot for your time today. Yeah, thanks Chris. Always a pleasure and yeah, really excited to be part of this podcast. So thanks. So that's a wrap on this episode of CMO Unplugged. Huge thanks to Steve for being so brilliant and thank you too for listening. Please do me the favor of hitting the subscribe button to help make the algorithm happy, not to mention myself. And hey, if there's a CMO or marketing wizard or wildcard you want on the show, drop me a line and we'll invite them on. Thank you for listening.