I am STOKED for you to meet today’s guest.
A category creator, member of Forbes Communications Council, and Chief Marketing Officer of impact.com, meet Cristy Garcia.
With over 10 years of experience in Marketing leadership roles, she had some SUPER interesting advice for anyone looking to climb the ladder.
Here’s what she had to say in her own liiiiiightly edited words.
1) The Milestones To Hit To Become A CMO:
“It’s different for every CMO, but for me it was very important to be a generalist and learn all facets of Marketing disciplines.
A lot of companies have small Marketing teams and if you’re on one of those teams, you can be hired to do one thing, but end up writing all the content, planning all the events, working in product Marketing, positioning, competitive messaging, EVERYTHING under the sun (we see all of our one person Marketing teams <3).
The good part about being a generalist is you get to know a little bit of everything.
That lends itself really well to management of a team because having done a little bit of each role is helpful in knowing what good looks like and finding the right people to fill those roles (people will take you places money can’t!!).
Being a generalist is huge, but the other thing is making sure you don’t stay in the same company unless you’re sure you’re going to grow.
If you feel stuck in a role, you’ve been there for a few years, you’re not getting the mentorship or seeing the growth, don’t stay. (Don’t compromise when it comes to your career.)
If anyone’s looking at their own career path right now and wondering about things that they can do, one thing that benefited me early on was learning how to advocate for myself.
There’s a fine line between confidence and cockiness, advocating for yourself means showing the value of what you do to the business.
You really have to understand what your executive team cares about at the end of the day. Once you learn how to speak that language and learn how to advocate for yourself, you’ll move up rather quickly.
2) Tangential Skills To Master:
Mastering your craft is only half the step of moving up the ladder.
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You have to run an internal PR campaign for yourself, the team, and the work that you’re doing for the second half of the equation.
But before all that sit down with your CFO, even as a junior member of the Marketing team and understand what’s important to them, how they think about Marketing, how they decide how budgets are set, (and what the expectations are for return on investment).
I can tell you that every company I’ve been at I’ve tried to befriend the CFO, not just because you need an ally in finance, but because once you understand the business and what they’re looking for, the way you work changes.
You can be more efficient, you’re more aligned.
Now if you can’t get a meeting with the CFO, let your manager know you want to be on a project where you can get some visibility for the work that you’re doing.
That’s how you get ahead AND learn how to speak the business language instead of the Marketing language.
3) Failure To Do This, Means Failure To Grow:
Marketers need to experiment and fail safely. I don’t know a single successful Marketer that has done the same thing for 20 years (IDK one EITHER).
You have to be iterating, innovating, testing new tech, methods, and strategies.
If you’re afraid to try something new because there’s consequences or repercussions for that, you’re never going to meet your full potential. You’ll never be a CMO candidate.
What I like to say on my team is it’s a soft landing, like it’s okay if you take a swing and it doesn’t land. It’s NOT OKAY if you aren’t trying new things.
Marketing is just one of these skills that is just constantly changing so you have to change with it.
If you’re not experimenting, testing, and failing you need to start doing that now or else you’re stalling your growth.
4) How To Advocate For Yourself:
The way to advocate for yourself is when you’re presenting something, speak the language of the person that you’re presenting it to.
You’re not going to tell your CEO you spent $50,000 and generated 20 MQLs. That’s not the CEO’s language. That’s what you would tell to a Marketer or to your manager.
What you should say instead is, “Given the budget we had, we were able to convert X number of users and here’s the impact it had on revenue.”
Meet them where they are as executives.
Another route to advocating for yourself is putting yourself into a project that can help the executive team meet their goals, that’s how you REALLY boost your perception internally.
(It is different for everyone and every company, so it’s very hard to be specific, but I do know that working alongside leaders helps you grow.)
When you do that, it also gives executives perspective as to the talent within you.
But you just have to be very careful about when you advocate for yourself, that you’re speaking the right language, and to avoid the tiny vanity metrics that we might think are important.
5) What To Do If You’re Ambitious:
If you’re ambitious, be honest, say you intend to grow within the organization, express your goals to become the next vice president (or whatever leadership position it may be).
Be aggressive and ambitious, that will take you far. A lot of people are content or afraid to step outside their lane, especially within organizations that feel really rigid (BE BOLD).
BUT IT NEVER HURTS to tell an executive or someone that you’re reporting into that you have broader goals.
Most of the time people will try to help you, especially if you’re in a good organization.
I have people on my team that I respect so much because they come to me and say they want to be a VP one day and ask “What do I need to learn?”
Even if you have a specialty or are a generalist now, find other areas that you don’t know as well and become experts in them. Dig your heels in really deep, find the hole that needs to be filled, and once you do you’ll grow your career.
One last thing, your expectations need to be realistic in regards to the timelines of climbing the ranks to a CMO.
Just because you tell somebody that being a CMO is what you want, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen within your time frame or even at all (I love the honesty).”