New Research Suggests 76% of CMOs Should Be Fired

According to new research from the CMO Council a surprising 76% of senior marketers believe they are not realizing the full revenue potential of their current customers. In addition, only 46.5% say they have good insights into retention rates, customer profitability and lifetime value.

What does that tell me? That tells me that of the 650 senior marketers surveyed for this study, 76% of them should consider a career change. I mean, seriously, these are not just average marketers, these are guys that have the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) title.

To be fair, 64% of them are evaluating their marketing spend to increase yield and accountability and 60% are embracing new strategies to better engage their customer base.

But, now get this, 40% of CMOs plan to reduce head-count, overhead, or budgets in order to make up for their own incompetence–OK, so I added the "make up for their incompetence" part.

Final word–and wake-up call–goes to Donovan Neale-May executive director for the CMO Council:

"It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” noted Neale-May. “Marketing must assert its role as the owner of both customer experience and information and apply this to devising growth strategies that leverage better knowledge of customer opportunity and potential.”

If you’re willing to give up your deets, you can get a free copy of the 16-page executive summary here.