Ep #133: Underdogs: If you haven't ever managed someone, listen to this

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m talking to you, the underdog, the person who hasn’t had the big CMO title. If that’s you, I want to tell you how you can make it as a fractional CMO.

00:00:09 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. 

00:00:41 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms. 

00:01:06 Casey: Hey, it’s Casey. Welcome back. Let’s talk about you, someone who doesn’t have this big grandiose title of CMO. Maybe you’ve been picked over other people in the department that you’ve worked at. They got picked to have that director role or that CMO role. Maybe that happened to you. Or maybe you just never had the opportunity to get it. Like you’ve been in an agency or you’ve been working on your own. You just have never held the title. It just was never like on your path. 

00:01:37 Casey: Maybe you’ve been working at an agency, you own an agency, you’re a consultant, whatever. But like whatever it was, it was never in the cards for you to be CMO. Maybe you’re slighted, you feel slighted from it. Maybe it’s just never happened and it’s fine, whatever, right? But here you are, thinking, hey, maybe I want to be a fractional CMO, but how can I be a fractional CMO without having had the title? 

00:02:01 Casey: Maybe you don’t have a lot of experience managing people. That’s a big one, right? When I think of a successful CMO or fractional CMO, they have to manage teams. Maybe you don’t have that experience. So my question is like, are you still a good candidate to be a fractional CMO? And I wager that you probably are. And I want to tell you why, because I think this is something that you might not have thought of before.

00:02:24 Casey: So you know how marketing works. I think that’s the thing that sets you apart. You know fundamentally how marketing works. You get copywriting, right? You get persuasion. One of the things I love to get is like the hate mail when people are like, why do you think copywriters are the best marketers? I think copywriters understand the fundamentals of marketing. And I think a lot of marketers, I did that with quotes, these people don’t understand the fundamentals of marketing. If you understand persuasion and pain and desire and how marketing helps people get what they want, you have a deeper understanding than most people do today.

00:03:04 Casey: Your bookshelf might be full of Schwartz and Halbert and Bencivenga and Drucker and Bly and these kind of greats of like modern management. You’ve got Ogilvy, right? Like these mad men, an era of education and marketing that was predicated on understanding how people use… like how they make buying decisions. Maybe you fundamentally understand that. Maybe you’re the person that’s got pulled in time and time again to like do a project, spin the thing up. Like you could close your eyes and like, deploy a DigitalOcean droplet, install WordPress, build a high converting landing page with Gravity Forms, tie it to the CRM, [inaudible], get your email campaign set up, and build out the ad campaign yourself and deploy it all and have it be front end profitable. You’ve done it time and time again, you could do it again, you’re that person. 

00:03:54 Casey: Yet, you’ve never had the title. You’ve never had the prestige, you’ve never been invited to the boardroom, the executive leadership call, you’ve never experienced that. You’ve never ridden on the private jet, you’ve never, you know, kind of put on a tie to go to work, or, you know, a dress or whatever. Like, you just haven’t been that person. How do you make it as a Fractional CMO?

00:04:18 Casey: I think of AI right now. And there’s a guy who I’ve been following relatively recently, and he had a great video that came out today. And his video was about how he instructed something. Here’s how to build something with AI tools. This is going to tie them together. And he gave you… he subscribed to a sub stack, and he says, here’s how to build it. So I subscribe to a sub stack to get the better understanding. And as I see all of his requirements on how to build it, I’m like, I’m not going to do it that way. I’m going to do it my own way.

00:04:48 Casey: I’m no developer, I’m no expert at this stuff. Yet when I sat down to do it, he says, you know, use Slack and Notion and Zapier. And I was like, I’d rather not. I’ll use Slack, but then I’m gonna use N8N instead of Zapier. And then instead of Notion, you know, maybe I’ll use Obsidian. So I’m kind of building my own based on his structure. Okay, why am I telling you this? Because he shares in his latest video that that’s what other people did too. They like, understood the fundamentals of how to apply the idea. And then they iterated and created their own. 

00:05:20 Casey: It’s like once you understand how it works, the implementation of it today may change based on the tool that is available that the client has whatever. You go prospect for a client and they talk to you and they’re like, yeah, we use HubSpot. Do you know HubSpot? And you’re like, no. I don’t fundamentally know HubSpot all that well. I grew up on Salesforce. Good thing about Salesforce is I learned kind of how it all works. I know about opportunity stages. I know what the lead object is and how it carries over to an opportunity. And like, I understand the fundamentals so I can apply that everywhere. 

00:05:53 Casey: You do too. You know the fundamentals. You may not know them as fundamentals. You might think of them as use case specific. Like, oh, when I deploy on WordPress, I understand that I have to do these things. But like, if you just took a little bit of time, you would realize that you actually understand the fundamentals. And there’s some connective tissue that you’re lacking, but it’s not hard for you to get, especially if you ever have a problem and you go for a walk and you talk to your AI of choice, and it’s going to help you kind of cover those gaps. You’re going to be able to use your intuition, your experience, your knowledge, your expertise to solve the problem for the client, to do whatever is required. 

0:06:29 Casey: And that’s what I think makes you special and different. So there’s a lot of CMOs that got to be CMOs for whatever reason. They’ve been there the longest. A number of them are deserving. Don’t get me wrong. But you also know the Peter principle, right? People getting pushed up, promoted to a role just beyond their capabilities, right? They’re like, not capable at the role. They’re the wrong person for the role. You’ve seen that happen time and time again. I’ve worked for executives or alongside executives that were trash, right? They just like weren’t good. Good people. But like when it came to being leaders and doing their job, they just weren’t good at it. They were just promoted unnecessarily. 

00:07:06 Casey: So you have this opportunity to take the core understanding and apply it in such a way that builds a sense of appreciation for what you can do. And you can go win clients and do that. Your first client might not be a $15,000 a month fractional CMO gig. Might not be, right? That might not be your first go. But I bet it could be a $3,000 client. And maybe you work more than I think you should for three grand. Maybe instead of working two or three… sorry, let’s say like six hours a month, maybe you’re working more like six hours a week to get started. Okay. But you’re proving to yourself and you’re closing the gap on this knowledge that you’re lacking. 

00:07:49 Casey: You think it might be bigger than it is. And arguably, it might be bigger, it might be a really big chasm to cross. But I think that like you just getting in and doing the work is the thing that crosses it. You see these… you see it in everything. You see a marketer who becomes a CMO and a big project happens and they have to figure it out and they stay up late and they do it. They win, right? You see this like… where people have to be innovative, they just have to level up. 

00:08:18 Casey: They didn’t come with the experience, like the experience was gotten when they got the experience. You too can do that. You too can step into a place where you say, I lack some of the experience, yet I’m gonna get my confidence from my intention, not from my experience. My commitment is to do what’s right for the client and to fight and to serve them and to deliver this outcome. And that kind of mentality is what’s required for you to elevate to the next level. 

00:08:44 Casey: You see, most people that are in like the employee seat, they don’t do this stuff. They don’t think, how do I build systems? How do I like create this thing that’s kind of bigger than me? How do I get the team to rally around it? How do I solve these big problems? How do I delegate everything except the things that I’m really great at and ultimately leadership, right? I just want to hold on to just leadership and strategy.

00:09:08 Casey: You can do that. You can choose to do that. You can choose to do that right now if you’re working in an agency. You can be the person, the man, the woman, the whomever to identify these big problems to solve and start moving towards that and start passing things around and maybe horse trading a bit to get more of the strategy work on your plate, et cetera, et cetera. Build that sense of confidence. You can do that the slow way, which I think is a very effective path. Moving forward, no matter how slow, is still forward momentum. There’s a benefit to that.

00:09:37 Casey: And then also just leaping into it. Just go out and sell that first client. You’re probably going to sell a client who’s less astute early on. That’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve never done it before and you’re going to charge them a high price for it, obviously this person isn’t the most astute buyer, right? They don’t understand the market well. They think marketing is a big black box, whatever. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that, but like you’re going to likely come up with problems with them that a non astute buyer has, which is like, Oh, I didn’t know that’s how marketing works. Wait, leads don’t mean sales, right? You’re going to have those problems. 

00:10:17 Casey: So the more astute the buyer, the more astute the client is, the more educated experience they are in marketing, the better the fit is probably going to be once you land that client. However, that doesn’t preclude you from going to a client who’s just like, Hey, I took over my parents business and I need a CMO and want to get to the next level. I just got a round of investment. I want to go hard. We don’t know how to do it. It’s a product based company. We need marketing. So we’re going to hire a marketer. Like they don’t understand that stuff. So therefore you have this gap that you can step into.

00:10:50 Casey: Think of it this way too. Back when I was a professor at Tulane University, I had… like every year I had a student who was the number one student in the class. They were like the best. Right? And like, why were they the best? They worked harder than everybody else. Maybe they had a natural gift. They were a quick learner. I think a lot of them just were grinders. just were just grinding at night. They just worked hard. They like rewatch the lecture, they recorded it, or they sent me emails and asked questions, right? They were just like working harder. Most of them weren’t gifted. They were just harder workers. 

00:11:24 Casey: Okay, so every class, every section I taught, I always had one person who was like the best. And I always had one person who wasn’t the best, right? And then what about everyone else? Like all of the class minus the best person effectively. Are those people precluded from getting a job? Are they banned from getting a job? Obviously not, right? So if they want to be successful, they can’t say, man, I’m not the best, so I can’t be successful. They have to figure it out. Like it’s a mentality. 

00:11:56 Casey: The people who are the best sometimes can ride that for a while. Oftentimes they can ride it because they are actually hard workers and they apply themselves so they can kind of get ahead. But I want to say like, if you’re not that person, if you don’t have the experience, if someone is outpacing you with experience, with time under pressure, they’ve worked on more campaigns, deeper campaigns, worked with private equity, which feels like a black box to you, or they’ve worked in the financial sector in a way that like you want to get into, but they’ve never done and you feel like there’s no entry or whatever. You can still do it. 

00:12:26 Casey: Like you can still just walk in those doors and ask questions. You can still reach out to people on LinkedIn and be like, yo, you’re in a role that I like would love to be in the next five years. Can I bend your ear for 20 minutes and you just tell me your story? I’m not going to sell you anything. I just want to hear from you because you seem like the kind of person who’s got what I want. People would love to share that information with you. They want to share about the industry with you. 

00:12:48 Casey: So if you’re the person who doesn’t have the big title, for whatever reason, someone got hired over you, you were never in a place where you were on the path to get it, whatever it was, and you’re just finding yourself like, I want to be a CMO, but I don’t have the CMO title. I don’t have the VP marketing. Hell, I don’t even have a marketing director title. It doesn’t matter. 

00:13:07 Casey: You know, am I going to tell you that you can go work with a client and you’ve never manage people and you can go become the CMO of a company that pays you top dollar and you manage 15 people overnight? No, like that’s not your first step, right? Probably not your first step. Your first step is go work with a client, develop a marketing strategy, in that marketing strategy, define that they need a marketing technician and then get that technician hired and then train that technician on the work they should do or put him in the right direction. When I say train, I mean, provide Udemy courses, show them YouTube videos, give them a big idea, help them understand what they’re doing, kind of coach them a bit, answer their questions, ChatGPT alongside them, whatever. 

00:13:45 Casey: Okay, do that. Do that for six months and go with your second client concurrent and do it with them too. And now you’ve managed people. Is there a difference between managing two teams with one person at each, then like one team that has five people? A little different, sure, but I don’t think it’s fundamentally different. It’s like your attunement. It’s like how you show up and support them. That’s it. So it’s just like, you’re going to move forward.

00:14:10 Casey: The people that are going to suffer in this new world order where AI takes more of our jobs, the people that are going to suffer are the ones that aren’t moving forward. And there’s like a pace at which AI is coming for us, which I think is real. But you can outpace them. You can outpace the robots just by solving bigger problems and being the human interface and understanding fundamentally how marketing works. So you’re not starting from a place of impossibility. You know, this isn’t me trying to get into the NBA. That is truly an impossible outcome. Right? I don’t like basketball. I’m too old probably to join any team. I don’t know if anyone my age has ever joined a team, right? Like that’s never happened. Maybe it has. I don’t know. Some sports person might say otherwise. 

00:14:57 Casey: But like for you to be a CMO, it is a thing where you can spin your experience in such a way that makes you desirable. And where you have blind spots, you don’t share them immediately. You’re not lying to the client. You just don’t tell them all of your, you know, all the things that aren’t great in your life. It’s not like when you start dating someone, you don’t tell them all the terrible stuff you’ve ever done. It might come out over the course of your relationship, right? But it doesn’t happen in the first year. 

00:15:24 Casey: That’s where I want you to be. Like just show up, go serve a client, get your confidence from your intention. Show up and support the client. Hire someone, hire another person on the client’s dime. You oversee them. That’s you, Fractional CMO, managing people. Boom, now you have the title. Now you have the, you know, check mark under have managed people before. And that opens you up. I mean, those are probably the two biggest things. 

00:15:47 Casey: The third big thing is just time in an industry. If you want to get into an industry you’ve never been into to be hired by an astute buyer, that’s going to take time to be hired by a non-astute buyer. That could happen at any time. Either one’s fine. If you want to get into a market, like nothing stops you from winning clients outside of just you, outside of your ability to represent yourself effectively. So I’m rooting for you. I think that it is a great time to be a fractional CMO. I think it’s a better time every day. The world wants it. I read that like 30 to 40% of C-suite roles will be fractional by 2030. In the next four years, we’re going to see 30% or more of all Chief X officer roles be fractional. Why wouldn’t you want to spend your time right now getting ahead of everybody else? You’d be crazy if you don’t. 

00:16:42 Casey: I’m actually hosting a webinar. It’s coming up soon. Go to cmox.co/webinar. Just go up and sign up for it. We’ll get a little bit of FaceTime. We’ll get to hang out. You’ll be able to ask me questions directly. And I’ll see if I can help you get in position to win your first or next client as a fractional CMO. All right, this is going to be a big year for you. I’m counting on you. I’m rooting for you. I’ll see you soon. Bye. 

00:17:02 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.