Three CMOs of multibillion-dollar tech companies share the secrets to success they wish all CEOs knew

– Marketing moves. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of moderating a conversation between three high-level, repeat CMOs at March Capital’s annual Montgomery Summit in Los Angeles. In between discussion of the right time for a startup to hire a true CMO, the latest uses of AI in marketing, and go-to-market strategies, another topic kept surfacing: what CMOs wish their CEOs knew.

Marketing can be a mystery to founders and CEOs—especially in tech. Sometimes, they hire a top-dollar marketer and don’t know what to do with them. “For many CEOs, it’s a black box—and it costs money,” says Johanna Flower, who was the first CMO for CrowdStrike, growing the now $4 billion-in-revenue cybersecurity business through its 2019 IPO.

The way to set a CMO up for success is to let them into the core of the business, argues Jennifer Johnson, a four-time CMO who succeeded Flower as CrowdStrike’s marketing chief. “One of the mistakes I see founders making is that they hire a marketing person and then they don’t spend enough time with them. They don’t let the marketing person truly understand the vision, where we’re going as a company, where can we be successful, what are we disrupting,” she says. “The marketer needs to know that in order to really facilitate creating the right market positioning.”

For a new CMO, defining that positioning is often their first task. That involves sitting with the CEO and teasing out of them the company’s story and value, the way to win the battle for customers’ minds. “What problem are you ultimately solving?” asks Johnson. Not why your product is faster, cheaper, or better—but what problem can you, specifically, fix.

Too many startups change that story multiple times—or don’t take the time to refine it until they’re years in. “Drafting your S1 is not the time to figure out your positioning,” says Denise Persson, the CMO of Snowflake, the $3.6 billion-in-revenue cloud-based data platform. Marketers can’t do that alone, however. “It’s actually the entire company and the entire leadership team’s role to help the CMO get that story right,” says Johnson.

Another myth these CMOs hope to bust? The concept of “healthy tension” between sales and marketing. “It’s a very, very stupid idea,” says Johnson. “You start having that misalignment, and then someone will be fired—usually the marketer,” she says. “As a founder or CEO, you need to facilitate that alignment.”

Then, and only then, will that CMO hire pay off.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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