Redefining the CMO Pipeline with Jennifer Renaud

0:28Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. Now CEO and board director of Cool Health Botanics, a dynamic pet wellness brand where she drives corporate and portfolio strategy, operational expansion and investor alignment. She is known for building enterprise value through growth strategy, brand revitalization and cross sector innovation. With a 30-year career spanning enterprise technology, medical devices, building products, and CPG, Jen brings deep experience in reshaping organizations to outperform expectations, especially during moments of complexity, disruption, or scale-up. And one last thing, Jen, we go way, way back, as you know, to our days at Oracle, specifically Oracle Marketing Cloud.

1:16And I am proud to call her my friend, my mentor, and confound. And I am so thrilled you're here today. Welcome. Thank you, Steve. I can't believe I'm finally here. It's taken us a little while. It has. Well, you know, your demands are too much. I had a, you're diva, you know, I'm kidding. I know. But I want to make sure people. There's always something going on. Yeah. So we just had to wait for the right time. This was it. Exactly, exactly. But you are a dear, dear friend. And I just, I love you dearly. And I can't wait for everybody to hear your brilliance. And without that, let's just jump into it.

1:51So let's go. First thing, CMO role. It's no longer a functional job, right? It's a leadership pipeline. And I love how you put this when we were talking off air. Today's CMOs aren't just campaign builders. They're cross-functional leaders, customer advocates. And you've only believed this. That's why CMO is one of the strongest and most under-recognized pipelines to the CEO seat. Yes. So first question, why are CMOs overlooked as CEO successors? And what can be done to change that? I think there are probably two key points that make the CMO overlooked. Number one, we've done our own selves a disservice for a very long time over focusing on the promotion P of the four P's and not all four P's.

2:38Whether or not the team reports to us or not, we need to be super influential on that entire mix. And whether it's your product portfolio, how you price it for value, how you communicate that value, how you make it easy for people to buy. But if you own that customer experience on that customer journey as a CMO, you have to be far more influential in that entire portion of the journey. And you can't be focused and metric only the promotion piece. And if you do, I mean, I can tell you, like, if I had a dollar for every time somebody said I have this product, will you market it for me? And what they mean to say is, will you promote it for me?

3:18And when you haven't been involved in all of that, you don't understand it. And in some cases, it's just plain wrong. That just makes you the chief magic officer, not the chief marketing officer. I think there's a piece on that side that's really important. I think the other thing is everybody thinks marketing people are creatives. And I might be a creative problem solver. I am not a creative in the sense that I create art. You know, I can't draw a picture to save my life. I can't paint anything. but I can create a story. I can use words. I can creatively problem solve. And I think that's where most marketers that are making it to the CMO role are really sit, but the board and the CEO and the peer set still believe that you're a creative person.

4:05You know, I had one more person say to me, here, here's a story. Will you make this PowerPoint pretty? And no, that is not, that's not right at value. That's not the enterprise value I add. Yeah. No. No, no. I can vouch for that, by the way. I mean, I'm not bad. After 10 years of working at Microsoft, I'm like kind of good at PowerPoint. You and I both know what limitations. Yes, that would be one of mine. Exactly. So, okay, so how do you see the modern CMO role preparing marketers to step into that enterprise leadership, including the CEO? Yeah, well, I think the thing that's really interesting is there are a lot of transferable skills from marketing from that domain that prepare you for a CEO role.

4:51And whether it's something like the importance of customer insight, which is phenomenally huge. I mean, even if you're a board sitting in the room with the management team, if you focus far too much on the financial metrics, you miss the activities that could be taking place that would help you grow the business in a meaningful way, potentially pivot in tough times and respond to what's happening in the market in different ways. The levers aren't always cut, save more money, which, by the way, is usually cut the marketing budget. Let's just be really clear. You know, I think another really important thing from a marketer perspective that prepares us for a CEO role is decision making.

5:33We have to make them all day long with imperfect data. Like there is no perfect data in the realm of marketing. I mean, everything we have is some level of imperfect. And yet we have courage and conviction to make decisions and make moves that really matter for the entire enterprise and do things to create enterprise value. And when we're focused on what is driving enterprise value and not just, you know, increasing the number of clicks, we get to the kind of decision making that really happens in the C-suite. You know, I think the other thing is we sell ourselves short. I sell myself short all the time on this.

6:10I always refer to my ability to do math as marketing math. But the reality is we do have a lot of financial fluency and literacy that goes unnoticed. While we all may not own a P &L, we own a budget that we have to change every single day. I don't think I had a budget that stayed static more than 24 hours. We were having a discussion all the time on whether or not it was we needed to shave a few more dollars out because we wanted to hit an EBITDA or EPS number and make that contribution to the business. Or whether we were spending something, spending dollars on something that we said this might not be the thing to spend dollars on.

6:50So, you know, I think if we can get ourselves, you know, in the financial fluency conversation to kind of shift from marketing metrics to enterprise value, it definitely leaves us kind of in the right place. I would, yeah, go ahead. No, I was just going to say that without question, I'm nodding. You can't see me, obviously, in agreement, but it's a good segue into what I wanted to talk about next about the imperfectness. I just made that word up. Thank you. I don't look it up. It's not imperfect. Thank you. I think it was a word. and I'm going to try it and scramble next time. There you go. Good luck with that.

7:25I love this. The way you described these is marketing builds the most transferable leadership muscle, which is decision-making in ambiguity. Yeah. That has so many tentacles and things that I want to get into, but I'd love that you added on saying that that skill that you've, that leadership muscle becomes more valuable when you move into the CEO role where the stakes are bigger. Yeah. But the playbook is just as unclear. Right. Elaborate. Yeah. The playbook. I mean, I would say it's just as you're right. It's equally as unclear, meaning you're set with market dynamics that you have to make a decision on.

8:03CEOs right now, I mean, myself, others are dealing with crazy stuff like what's happening with the tariff situation that changes nearly hourly? What's happening with general market dynamics? What's happening with the availability of capital? That changes hourly. And then how do you make decisions that are thoughtful and not in a panic, but also timely? The most important thing that you can do is make a decision and move forward with the imperfectness for which it might be. And be comfortable with, you might have to change it. And that's just how it goes. But I think being comfortable in that discomfort, you know, that line is probably the most important part of being able to do this job.

8:51I think from my marketing year, my marketing time, like 30 years of my career, they're all marketing. That was the one thing I had to get most comfortable with. I didn't know all of the data. I didn't have all the answers and I had to take action and I had to do it timely so that it wasn't a foregone conclusion. Like that, I think is the worst thing that can happen is you wait to make that decision and the decision, the decision gets made for you. That to me is the worst case scenario. Yeah, that's terrible because it's not an optimal choice. It's what's left. For multiple reasons. And think about the effect it has on your team.

9:28Yeah. Like who is this person leading us if they can't even make a decision. Right. And they're paralyzed. Right. I mean, they're absolutely paralyzed. And then when you do make a decision, then they've got to spool up and get started. If they're accustomed to participating in it, which I think is really helpful, like as you're making decisions, you should be soliciting feedback from across the organization in many different ways and then play through scenarios. I think scenario planning is a lost art or underrated, like lay out the scenarios of what's possible and then figure out which path you want to follow.

10:03Yeah. And then adjust accordingly. I know that sounds simplistic, but it's really that that's the point. But it is. Yeah, it is that simplistic and yet not done nearly enough. Correct. Just isn't. Yeah. For a multitude of reasons. So the team building. So I'm curious, like, how do you build confidence in your team to make those bold decisions when, you know, it's the imperfectness of the data is incomplete or unclear. It's honesty and transparency. I think you have to be able to say how much information do we have and based on what we have, what decisions could we make? What are alternatives to our choices here?

10:41Let people participate. I think that's the most important part is allowing people to participate. My whole team, I mean, I'm a small team. We're less than 10 people, right? We all participate in our big decisions. I want everybody's thoughts because if we don't solicit even from the person who's got the most entry-level job, who's probably just sitting in the data all day long, probably knows more about the predictability of what is going to happen based on the fact that this person just sits in the data all day long. And I want that person sitting in the room when we are having a discussion. I want that person to speak up.

11:17Now, a lot of times the entry-level people aren't usually as willing to speak up, so you have to work hard to help them do it or give them a safe space to do it. But when they feel comfortable and confident in it, which is the most important thing you can do in building your culture, then you're going to get to the best result. And when people believe in it, even if they disagreed with it, if they were able to participate in that decision and have transparency in it, they'll get behind it. Without question. And I can speak from personal experience with Jen. She empowers everybody and wants everybody's opinion.

11:46And I think every leader should do the same. Anyway, you said something not long ago about financial fluency and being table stakes for CMOs. And it's absolutely true. But I'd love that you added on to when we're talking about it's not becoming, you're not looking to become a CFO. No. But it's about connecting the action you're doing to the impact on the enterprise. Right. Absolutely. I can use a great example at my last company, which I, it was a really great aha moment for both the CFO and me as we were working through growth opportunities. And we started walking through product by product. And we had a set of products that if we could shift the mix from one low-level product to this mid-value product, you know, if you have good, better, best, most people were buying our good, could we shift them to best?

12:33If we shifted them to best, what was the impact to the business? What was like millions of dollars to the top line and millions of dollars to the bottom line? It was a big deal. If we, for every 1.1 % of mixed shift. So we sat for a little while and said, how much do you think we should spend to drive mixed shift? Could that happen? So I'm going to use just, I'll just say in the law of these numbers, let's say this one point of mixed shift drew 10 million to the top line and 5 million EBITDA. How much were we willing to spend to get that 5 million of EBITDA? And we sat here for a little while and we said, is it a million dollars,$500 ,000?

13:12What do we think it should be? And we came back and we said, we should spend a million dollars. Okay, that seems like a great idea because$1 million spent to get five EBITDA and 10 at the top line is probably a pretty good value. By the way, that math is not, if anybody starts complaining about what the math looks like, it's all dependent on your profitability and all sorts of other metrics that go into this. But for us, it was going to make a difference. So we go back to the team and say, if we have$1 million, where do we put it? And how do we allocate the dollars so that we could drive that one point of mix shift?

13:42We did not spend a million dollars and we drove that one point of mix shift. So then we went back and said, if it was two, could you get two points? Well, we weren't entirely sure that we could drive that much. So we said, let's just spend this much and see what happens. Well, we were going from one to one and a half. I mean, this is a huge difference for the business. Think about it this way. If I had driven like five points of mix shift, basically covered the cost of the marketing department. it. So how do we make the decisions in a thoughtful way? Because what we do, I think, as marketers a lot is kind of like, here's the whole bread basket.

14:18You know, there's everything we've got in the market basket. We're just going to run a lot of activities and see what happens. But getting hyper-focused with the CFO around what that needed to be, then we could make the right moves. What created in that financial fluency is shared language that I could have with the CFO around the impact of marketing and his ability to participate in the conversation around what the budget should be. How much should we spend to go get it? Because it's not going to happen by just dreaming it. So what dollars do we spend to go get it? And once you're able to do that, you're now into a financial fluency conversation that looks very different.

14:58I think for us, and I missed this for a long time in my career, but now really being able to understand what happens on the top line activity, what's really happening in our cost of goods sold, where we're on or off on our SG &A, how it drives EBITDA, and what other financial impact we have in a business that kind of leads to our final step of our income statement. What things do I need to know and how can I influence it? And I think learning that makes a huge difference. And being able to talk that language makes all the difference. Exactly. Hey, I'm curious, now that you're in the CEO seat, how long have you been in now to see, by the way?

15:3611 months today. Oh, a year, right? Yeah. Does your point of view, do you look at marketing any different? Oh my gosh. I was hoping you would ask me this question because this is probably one of the funniest experiences of my life. So I start, I'm in week one and I'm looking at the marketing and what they're reporting and what the results are. And I said, this is awful. And I canceled everything. I took marketing to zero. That's zero with a Z, by the way, again. So I called my former CEO and I was like, hey, I just want to tell you what I did with my first job. I see like my first day in CEO, I canceled 100 % of the marketing budget, but there was no way to show meaningful enterprise value because the marketing did not align to the growth strategy.

16:30It was just a lot of random activities. And when we said, let's cancel the random activities, reset our strategy, decide where we want to focus and put the dollars behind it, then it will make sense. So that's what we did. Now the dollars are behind it. We're spending 40 % less than we were and driving top line growth. So when you're thoughtful and aligned to what your strategy is, and you're focused on what you need to do, you can have a huge impact. So for me, I still think it's hilarious that my very first action was cut the whole budget, hired the CMO. I started over. I did, by the way, hire a CMO.

17:14I actually hired a chief growth officer because I wanted sales and marketing to be obsessed aligned because in a retail environment, they have to be, you cannot be running this separately and, and it's working well. Okay. If I have to ask this because you've told this story to me many times, but I think my listeners would love it, especially since you just talked about sales and marketing. I don't know if you know where I'm going, but the now infamous Mark Hurd, God rest his soul, former CEO of Oracle. And you know what story now I'm talking about. So I'll just let you take it from here in terms of the time that Mark heard, talk to you, famous, famous CEO.

17:52If you don't know who he is, look him up, H-U-R-D. He's since passed away, but tell the story, please. I assume you're going to do the story where the sales team and the marketing team, me, got invited into a meeting with Mark Hurd to discuss what was happening with our revenue. Yep. Yes. And the sales team said, marketing sucks. They absolutely suck. They don't know what they're doing. They couldn't market us out of a bag with flashlight and a map. Like, they just can't do it. They just were really brutal. And Mark said to me, looks at me, he's like, is this true? And I said, well, if perception is reality, then yes.

18:28If they think that the problem that they're having is marketing, then yes, it's marketing and we need to do something differently. He says, I think we should just take the budget to zero. And I said, seems like a good idea. This is Oracle now. This is, this is not a startup. No. And so we did that. And one quarter later, we go back and the sales team says marketing did absolutely nothing to help us. For what she said, I remember that we canceled. We totally cut their budget. I was like, well, we did totally cut the budget. Not that we weren't doing things as a team. You were there, you know, we were working very hard on what our plan was going to be when we were back, because we knew we'd be back.

19:07And of course we were because it didn't get better. In fact, it got worse. So that led to a fully different conversation with the sales team. You know, how do we actually engage with each other in a meaningful way to drive growth? And it changed everything. It was a huge lesson for me. I think about that one a lot, which is why here, canceling the budget, I sat there for a moment thinking about what the risk was and thought it can't possibly get any worse than it is right now. So let's check the risk. And revenue fell back a teeny tiny bit, but not a lot. And for the dollars we saved, it was phenomenal.

19:49And that's when we said, okay, now we have to rethink what we're doing. And it also speaks to and validates your decision to have a chief growth officer because you want that sales and alignment across the board. Yeah. I want him waking up and thinking about it all day long. How do I get these two to work together in the way that they need to work together to drive the result we're looking for? And now he can pull either lever at any time without having to consult anyone but himself, although he does call me. But he can make those decisions, and he's empowered to make those decisions, and there isn't conflict within that.

20:22And we don't have time for conflict in it right now. We're too small a team to have conflict. So how do we solve it? Lean and mean, and you've got to rock and roll. Yeah. risk. So glad you brought this up because it's the next thing I wanted to talk about. And you wrote something to me and I want to read this verbatim and I want to break it down because it's just so compelling. You said risk isn't the enemy, it's the job. Marketing leaders are more comfortable with risk than they get credit for. However, the CEO's role is to frame risk, not avoid it. And the key is knowing when you're mitigating it and when you're consciously accepting it to drive growth.

20:59A lot to unpack there. And I want to start with, I love that you say risk is in the enemy. It's the job. To me, when I read that, I'm like, that's part of the job description. Yes, it is. It is. It is eyes wide open and understanding the difference between reacting and leading into it. And I think that's really important part of risk. I don't think I I appreciated thinking about risk nearly as much as I did until I went into Masonite. And we had a risk leader, enterprise risk manager who was phenomenal, a woman named Katie Schellabacher. And I learned so much from her about identifying risk and then determining whether or not we should accept it or mitigate it.

21:48Should we do something about it or should we just know that it exists? I spend more time starting with that framework. Is it something I should accept or not? What's the cost of accepting it? What's the cost of mitigating it? Just had one, you know, an issue recently where we had to have that discussion and, you know, walked out of it and said, this is a risk I'm going to accept. It has a time limit to it. And this is when the time will end. And then that risk no longer exists. Mitigating something that has a time limit didn't make any sense. It was going to cost us a lot of money to do something that I said, I think let's roll with this one and accept it.

22:29Teaching a team how to talk about risk that way, because everybody thinks they should mitigate 100 % of the risk that exists. And you can't operate a business that way. You can't. I mean, you would spend all your time and money trying to solve things you can't solve, nor should you leave them. You should just, eyes wide open, know that it's there. And you might have to deal with it, but you may never have to deal with it. So how do you think about it that way? I think that is, I learned a lot about it from marketing in general, because we just took risk all the time. It's back to that imperfectness of data.

23:03If you're leading in imperfectness, there's some level of risk of everything that you're doing. And so how do you go do it? There is a positive side of risk, I guess I'm gonna look at it this way, that says sometimes you just have to take bold moves. And that's what makes the difference. So I was thinking about a problem the other day, and I'm laying in bed, and I'm thinking to myself, this is one of those moments where we might have to make a really bold and radical move. And what does a bold and radical move look like? What would we do that would be bold and radical? And then go back to the team, and I'm like, this is what I'm thinking about in bold and radical.

23:35What do you think bold and radical is? And we came back, and we made some decisions this week. We're like, that's bold and radical. Let's go do that. Let's go do that. And, you know, when you lay out what's the worst case scenario? Well, the worst case scenario is maybe we lose a little bit of revenue. Best case scenario is we grow by another 20%. Well, it seems like we should try this. Yeah. So I think being able to think about it in a meaningful way is what really matters. And we do it as CMOs all the time. And yet we don't articulate it. This is where our storytelling on the things that we do really blows.

24:12Yeah. I mean, the wordsmith. Thank you, Jennifer Vinot. But I love it. But it goes back to something that I read earlier that you wrote. And it's a perception thing where you said marketing leaders are more comfortable with risk taking than they get credit for. That's interesting to me. That's like, it's a perception thing then, right? Right. It's a total perception thing. We're more comfortable in it, but we don't articulate it in an enterprise value way. We don't articulate it in a way that our audience can hear it. And it's like, I mean, it's a total like cobbler's shoe kind of thing. Like most marketers are really good storytellers.

24:54And yet when we have to tell our own story, we're not good. We just don't tell the story. But why? Is it as simple as the cobbler's kids? Probably. Right? I mean, probably it is that way. I mean, there is a way to tell the story relative to the enterprise value that we have to work on. Yeah. And I think as a community, it's something we have to continue to do. If I go to another CMO event in my life where we talk about the promotion side of the business and the woe is me moment, I will lose my mind. So change the narrative. That's what we do. I would have taken a step further to say, and you're uniquely qualified to speak on this, is marketers will get more comfortable, right, in telling their story when they have the right CEO behind them.

25:46Yes, they will. They will. And when they've built the right partnerships across the organization. Correct. Do you have a good relationship with your CFO? Do you understand how the CFO needs to tell the story to the street? I mean, I spent two years of my career at Masonite really working on how we would articulate the story to the street and how we would get the proof points that we need to prove that our strategy worked. And that meant going back to my team and saying, here's the kinds of proof points that make sense for the street. If we want companies to invest in us, you know, we want investors to invest.

26:20We need to give them reasons to believe. Same thing as you would do with your product. You know, it's the exact same thing. So if you're going after your reasons to believe, what does that look like? What do we need to do to do that? Now, is it entirely activities that marketers need to do? No, you actually have to work across the entire company to make a lot of these proof points happen. So how do you do that so you can actually help your finance team and your investor relations team do their job? I mean, they go into these, you know, every quarter one, you know, needing to tell the story and, you know, not getting the support that they need from the marketer.