Throughout the rampant pace of digital transformation we have witnessed these last few years, the CMO role has shifted inside many of the world’s leading organizations. Some have marginalized the role, while others have upleveled the function and its responsibility to not only grow the brand but help direct and run the business as well. Perhaps this is why over the past two years, approximately thirty leading CMOs have become CEOs of major organizations. With all of these changes, the more sophisticated CMO is emerging as a new species in the wild that will likely proliferate as more businesses adapt and rightsize their organizational structures.
As a result of all of these shifts, I wanted to speak to someone who embodies this emerging breed of senior marketing leader. Emily Fink, is the new CMO of Sedgwick, one of the world’s largest claims management providers. She is a former CMO, CDO, CXO and Division President at Liberty Mutual who also has years of experience leading marketing at companies such as Colgate Palmolive and Pfizer. Following is a recap of our conversation:
Billee Howard: Great to have you back, Emily. Tell me about your new role at Sedgwick and why you are so intrigued by the opportunity?
Emily Fink: Sedgwick is an exceptionally run company with a longstanding track record of revenue and profit growth. It is a category leader in most of the verticals in which it competes, and its client retention rate is 98%. It is highly acquisitive, having acquired and integrated 35 companies in the past 5 years, and the verticals are recession proof. What’s not to like?
As I was looking at opportunities, I saw a number of the companies I was exploring had the CMO no longer in the actual C Suite. I believe to be most effective as a CMO, you really have to understand the company priorities and have the ear of the leadership team. You must do this while being the voice of the customer to a company’s leaders simultaneously. Companies who don’t do this often risk deprioritizing customer centricity. For my own learning also, it was also important to me to have a seat at the table to understand how capital is raised and deployed, how acquisitions are made, and how the board operates. You don’t get this several levels down in an organization, and this is what I wanted to learn and to contribute to.
I also really wanted to build a global brand. Sedgwick is a large company with about 35,000 employees in 80 countries. It has relationships with most of the Fortune 1000, an expanding middle market business, and local, state and Federal government contracts. Yet, it’s not currently a well-known name. I played a major role in building the Liberty Mutual brand through the introduction of the jingle and the brand mascots Limu and Doug, and I believe I can do something equally impactful on the B2B side here at Sedgwick, with such a powerful business model to work with.
Howard: A lot of what you are excited about suggests a thematic I have been following for the last 2 years which is many leading CMOs have become CEOs. I believe the number is at about 30 now. What are your thoughts on this trend and why it’s happening?
Fink: Many of the marketers who make it to the CMO level are top school MBAs, often former bankers or consultants, and think and speak in structured, strategic, and forward-looking ways. They have spent years listening to customers, helping with product development, influencing tech investments, staying close to retailers or clients, and managing through metrics to optimize revenue and profitability. It’s no longer a purely creative discipline—it’s evolved to be more strategic and measurable, skills which benefit CEOs as well.
With the rise of digital media, media analytics, and online purchasing, marketers are analysts and finance people as much as they are creative types. In addition, many CMOs either also oversee UX and Product Owners having absorbed the CDO role, or sit adjacent to it. I would say the same about the Customer Experience roles—meaning CMOs have either done the roles, absorbed the roles, or sat very close to them. Marketers have had to learn not just to be marketing experts, but also be good at finance, technology, product and operations to be successful in their roles. Marketing is a more quantitative discipline than it has been in the past, so it’s attracting and promoting a fundamentally different person—one more aligned with the skills of a CEO.
Howard: What are the critical skillsets required for a successful CMO today and how are smart organizations architecting the CMO role differently now in order to set the organization up for its best chance at success?
Fink: To be a successful CMO, it helps to be able to articulate a vision for the future around how customer expectations will evolve and how the company can evolve in lockstep to meet and anticipate those changing expectations. Along with that, and I think this is where a lot of companies falter, CMOs need to decide what initiatives will cease along the way in order to aggressively fund and champion new products and services to support the new vision. I am a believer in the “best way to predict the future is to create it” philosophy of Steve Jobs. Also, as Jobs did so well, it is critical to be able to paint a simple and compelling vision for the future and bring the organization along with that. When you do that, people will follow. They’ll understand the bumps in the road, and they’ll help to build with you.
The marketing role is also evolving in a way that requires you to understand technology and finance to be successful. You have to justify spending and tie it to growth, and you have to help shape digital experiences for all constituents since they’re now so core to the value propositions of most businesses. Sitting at the nexus of these places is amazing preparation for general management roles.
Howard: When we spoke, we laughed about the Wanamaker problem example still often being used by marketers, meaning people still being unsure about which 50% of their marketing dollars are working. Can you share your POV on why Wanamaker should be obsolete at this juncture?
Fink: Organizations aren’t handing over millions or billions of dollars without being able to assess whether they are driving growth, so as media budgets have expanded, media analytics have expanded along with them.
The rise of digital media as well as media analytics makes it easier to tie dollars spent directly to purchases. More and more purchases are being made online post Covid. Whether it’s insurance on Geico or Progressive.com or toothpaste on Amazon, or even groceries. New audiences who didn’t buy as frequently online before Covid, now prefer those experiences. The returns infrastructure that has spun up to accommodate things that don’t work out-from shoes that don’t fit, to overripe strawberries from online grocery purchasing, has also helped fuel this trend. Being able to track from digital advertising all the way through purchasing is a game changer in determining how to spend and optimize marketing dollars.