The role of the CMO has changed. It’s no longer just about campaigns and ad spend. Today’s marketing leader is expected to drive growth. But in many companies, marketing still plays a supporting role instead of leading from the front. That disconnect holds back performance in growth, market positioning, and customer engagement.
McKinsey research shows that companies where CMOs are tightly aligned with the CEO, CFO, and head of sales consistently outperform their peers. What makes the difference? Shared planning, shared metrics, and shared accountability.
1. CMOs Belong at the Strategy Table
Too often, growth efforts get siloed. In healthcare, product teams launch innovations without matching go-to-market plans. In aviation, route expansion decisions don’t always align with customer acquisition strategies. In tech, R&D builds products that marketing struggles to position.
When CMOs are involved early, marketing insights shape product, pricing, and distribution from day one. This leads to faster, more effective launches. In financial services, for example, bringing CMOs into early product planning helps balance customer needs, compliance, and brand positioning speeding time to market and driving adoption.
2. Growth Metrics Everyone Owns
One big reason CMOs get sidelined? The organization tracks different metrics. Marketing gets judged on awareness. Sales focuses on revenue. Ops looks at efficiency. Without a shared scoreboard, teams pull in different directions.
The fix: unified metrics like customer lifetime value, segment-level market share, and revenue from new products. In B2B, measuring both lead quality and deal outcomes helps bridge marketing’s pipeline role with sales execution.
This matters most in long-cycle industries like enterprise tech or medical devices where deals can take months. Shared KPIs like deal velocity or average deal size help both marketing and sales stay aligned.
3. Execution Requires Cross-Functional Accountability
Even the best strategy fails without execution. That’s why high-performing companies create formal systems for collaboration. Regular joint reviews across marketing, sales, finance, and ops help teams adjust quickly when the market shifts.
In industries like aviation or logistics, where fuel costs or geopolitical changes can hit fast, cross-functional agility becomes a real advantage.
In practice, this might look like integrated campaign teams with reps from every function, empowered to act. In healthcare, launching a diagnostics product might involve marketing (to educate), ops (to deliver), and sales (to onboard clients) working as one team. Without this, even well-planned efforts can fall flat.
4. The Modern CMO Looks a Lot Like a Chief Growth Officer
Today’s CMO needs more than creative chops. They need to know analytics, digital platforms, customer experience, and change management. They connect the dots between what the market wants and how the business delivers.
This is especially true in sectors undergoing digital transformation. In finance, CMOs are leading personalization strategies that tie AI recommendations into client journeys. In aviation, they’re using data to shape pricing and loyalty. In tech, they’re running account-based marketing programs that blend content, sales outreach, and automation.
5. Growth Isn’t a Solo Effort
When CMOs aren’t fully integrated into strategic and operational decisions, companies miss opportunities. Marketing can’t drive growth if it’s brought in too late or evaluated on outdated metrics.
Here’s what companies should do:
- Bring CMOs into strategic planning with the CEO, CFO, and CSO
- Create shared growth metrics that link marketing actions to business impact
- Build governance models that support real collaboration across functions
- Invest in modernizing the marketing skill set—data, digital, CX, and change leadership
This Isn’t a Return—It’s a Redefinition
The CMO’s comeback isn’t about reclaiming past influence. It’s about reshaping the role to meet today’s challenges leading growth across strategy, operations, and culture.
McKinsey’s data backs it up: growth is a team effort, and CMOs are key players. Companies that align the full C-suite around shared goals, with marketing at the core, build the clarity and speed needed to compete and win.
How Millennia Quest Helps
We work with CMOs and sales leaders to close the gap between strategy and execution. We help translate customer insights into sales-ready plans, align marketing and sales teams around outcomes, and embed systems that deliver consistent customer experiences from first touch to renewal.
If you’re ready to elevate marketing’s role in driving growth, we’ll help you build the framework, skills, and momentum to make it happen.
Let’s start the conversation.
Source: Adapted from “The CMO’s Comeback” by McKinsey & Company.
