So What? Feb 2022 CMO Survey Reactions

Well, howdy ho, happy Thursday. Welcome everyone to So Well the Marketing Analytics at Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. This week we're talking about the CMO survey. If you're not aware, the CMO survey has been around since uh 2006.

Uh Chris, do you want to sort of go into sort of what the methodology is? Uh who presents it. Yeah, so it's presented by uh Duke University's School of Business. Uh and in coordination, I want to say with, I believe it's Deloitte Consulting and the American Marketing Association. What they do is it's pretty simple.

They survey CMOs, about 300 of them, uh, twice a year, February and August of each year, on a series of questions, um, some of which are repeating uh every survey, some of which repeating every other survey, a few uh you know unique ones here and there, and then present the results uh in a very, very, very large PowerPoint deck. Um John, do you ever look at the CMO survey? Oh the yes. Well, it's yes, but it's it's always such a disappointment because pretty much the big takeaways I get every year is that you know, two out of three CMOs have no idea what they're doing with their data, and because of that, their tenure is gonna be 18 months or less. Like that those big takeaways have not changed.

And maybe they have though. Maybe I have not seen this year, so maybe we're in for a treat. Well, you're in the right place, John, because that's what we're doing today. Um, you know, I always look forward to this survey because I feel like there's a lot of really interesting insights. And I always try to look at it from the lens of how can I make these insights actionable for what we do at Trust Insights?

How can I leverage this information and do something with it? So that's one of the things that we want to do today is not only just if you if you're not aware of what the CMO survey is, introduce you to it. You can find it at CMO survey.org. And then also just what some of the highlights uh are of it. Um and so as Chris mentioned, it's literally asking CMOs these certain set of questions.

And you know, there are some repeating, there are some that aren't. Um so you know, I won't bother going through all of this. You know, if you want to see this, this is available in the report itself. The report itself is free. Uh you can download it.

Um, but you can see how many survey survey participants there were, the industry sectors, though all that good stuff, number of employees, sales revenue, and then they break it down into all of these different uh topic areas, and that's where it starts to get really interesting. And so that's where you as a marketer who's interpreting the data can say, what can I do with this information? I know Chris, when we do uh public speaking engagements, we often use the CMO survey as a point of reference to give context as to why we're talking about the thing. Now you've been doing that longer than I have. What makes you use the CMO survey as a point of reference in your talks?

It summarizes the problem statement. I mean, that really is is what the information is good at. If you are uh in charge of marketing, or you're frankly, you're just in the marketing field in general. When we look at the different topics uh in here, we can sort of get a sense of where the industry is, uh, where your industry is up because it I think it's broken down to like 12 or 13 different industries. And generally speaking, uh to what John was saying, the news is never really good.

Uh the news ever says like 90% of CMOs now use data to make decisions. It's usually like you know, 20%. And so anytime that you are trying to position change in your organization, um this is one of those handy reports, along with the CEO survey from Price Waterhouse, uh, that's typically shows we're not as an industry doing as much as we could be. We're not unlocking as much value as we could be. And in some cases, things actually go backwards.

Uh there was some stuff in, for example, in the social media section where the we've taken steps backwards in terms of data integration and stuff. So there's there's no shortage of ways to use the data to highlight, you know, the state of the industry and and I would I hesitate to say best practices because when you look at some of the data, like that's the best practice that I I think we're just gonna just start drinking. Uh but it it lets you say here's where we are compared to the industry average and the areas where you could step, you could make some some uh advances and get ahead of the pe your peers. So I think the social section is a really good place to start because it's one of those sections that resonates with a large audience. Everybody, every company is doing some kind of social media.

Um interesting that they start with mobile spending. Um you have mobile marketing. But I think that this is interesting. You know, one of the things that we note is that, you know, we've been in the pandemic for the past two years. And that's a whole section of the report itself.

And so in this particular slide, social media spend increased slightly over the past year, but it's inspected to increase at a much faster pace. And so if you just look at that snapshot, you can see that in June of 2020, the spend it uh in terms of social media seems to have peaked and then dropped off significantly. Um and so then that's where you start to dig in for your individual organization. Why is that? Are you seeing the same trend?

Is your social media spend up, but is it also working? So, Chris, what do you do with this kind of data? Well, so here's one of the bones I have to pick um about this data. And you can see this on the previous slide too. When we ask CMOs, uh sorry, uh one more slide up.

Um, when we ask CMOs to project forward, they're routinely completely incorrect about what's going to happen. Like, what what do you plan to spend in the next 12 months and five years is what you see on those last two projections there. If you look at the historical trend, and you don't need to be a statistician to do this. Take a ruler or a pencil or any straight object and align it to the the points that are on the graph, you can pretty much see that. Well, no, the these future predictions are delusional.

Um it was you know, the the actual spend is probably going to either level out or is going to be, you know, a slight increase. And so I get that people use this data in particular to say, like we need to spend more on mobile. Everyone said, you know, in the industry says we're gonna be spending 28.3% on mobile in five years. It hasn't panned out, right? Yeah, and that has been, if you go back and download the previous versions of this uh report for the last five years, every report says you're gonna spend, you know, twice as much in in five years.

And yeah, we're not. We never have. So from that aspect, I would say be very cautious with the predictions. This is not a reflection of the CMO survey. This is a reflection of what the individual CMOs stuck a finger in the air and decide which which way the wind was blowing and and made projections that I mean, I could say something very rude, I want, but they're just not correct.

So I would say for those predictions, be very, very cautious of them. In the meantime, though, what you do see is the impact of macroeconomic uh and and bigger context issues on marketing, right? To your point, the pandemic's pretty easy to spot in in this lovely chart here. The pr the pandemic's pretty easy to spot in general. Um what's happening right now with the the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that's gonna show up in here.

It may not be this survey, but it I guarantee you it will be in the next one as long as the macroeconomic changes with supply chain issues magnify the you know what happens, particularly on B2C product. Uh it's it will be a substantial drag in some spec spots and be an opportunity in others. So this survey is is really good. I would strongly suggest pairing it with macroeconomic data as well from like the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, so that you get a a holistic picture of why CMOs might be saying some of these things.

You just reminded me of a very vivid memory of when I used to sit in steering committees and uh the CTO would be asked, you know, when is that project going to be done? When will your developers be done? And she would sit there and go. Uh I think the wind is telling me two months. And she was obviously being sarcastic because there's just certain things that you don't know, and it really is just a guess.

And that was her way of saying like there's too many factors. It's a guess. And I think, you know, you're right, Chris. This is one of the things that I also find a little bit challenging with the data in a survey like this, not in the methodology, but in the responses of, you know, it's just a guess. And the survey itself doesn't reflect what's actually happening.

It's reflecting the opinions of these people. And it's a very it is a small sample. It's 320 people out of how many CMOs, you know, in the United States in the world. You know, so I guess I'm starting to sound like John a little bit. There is some value to this though.

If you see something where the CMOs are in agreement that it's gonna dry up and go in the toilet in the next three months, that's the kind of stuff where you're like, okay, this is gonna be a tough sales quarter, you know. If everybody believes they're not gonna be buying any of this over the next year, well, that's what's gonna be happening as far as getting people into the pipe and getting to talk about possible. Now, if you're selling mobile solutions, yeah, you're gonna take a copy of this and email it to everybody on your list so you can talk to them about it next week. And are you ready for this huge uptick? But yeah, it's uh maybe not reality.

Um, you know, so I find slides like this one. Most marketers do not use outside agencies for their social media activities. I always find as a service agency this kind of uh data point interesting because as an agency that offers services, we don't necessarily do social media, but we can use this as an action point. So if we were an agency who offered social media services, I would look at this and go, huh? More more companies don't want to use outside agencies, they don't want to outsource the social media.

Well, that then means they're bringing it in-house. That then means they need training on it. That then means they probably need some training materials. Why wouldn't we, the experts, be the one to provide those training materials? So maybe they're not asking us to do the thing, but there may still be an opportunity to train them to do the thing.

The other thing, and this is just nitpicking a little bit, but you'll notice on the uh X axis, February of 2021 is missing. Right? So this question didn't get asked in the 21 survey. And so uh you'd probably want to maybe redraw this and stretch it out a little bit to account for that missing year. In general, though, again, slap a long slap a ruler on your screen right now, gently.

Please don't break your screen. I'm not paying for it. Um this this trend is going up from you know in the the 16s and 17s into the 20s, right? So this the use of outside agencies is slowly increasing over time. So the question, I guess, to you and it as a marketer is where are outside agencies in your consideration, right?

And why? Why would you use an outside agency for social media? Particularly because we know, especially for organic social media, the return on investment is not so good. Well, and I find, you know, to your point earlier, Chris, where you can very clearly see where the pandemic started. So when this question was asked, and when it was being reported on was February of 2020, that is still considered pre-pandemic.

And so at that time, CMOs were saying, Yeah, I have every intention of outsourcing social media. And then the pandemic hit. And so you can imagine if you know August and February of 2021 were reflected here that the number would have kept going down because we know from our experience that budgets were cut. People tightened their belts. People said we can't afford to outsource these things right now because there's too much upheaval everywhere else.

So we need to cut costs. And that is a lot of the reason why marketers were not using outside agencies for social media. They were trying to figure out how they could do these things internally and save some money. And so, you know, I think that moving into 2022, we're still seeing a lot of that reflected, you know, I'll put in quotations post-pandemic, because we're not out of it completely. And now we have other things that are asking for our attention for our funds, for our resources, and outsourcing it just isn't a priority for a lot of companies.

They still want to save that money for other things. So this one slides like this, I always to John's point, the news isn't great. However, again, sort of looking at it as okay, how can we make this actionable? Is there an opportunity? Um so it says this one says, you know, decade after decade, marketers still struggle to integrate customer data across channels.

Um, you know, so from a person who runs an agency who does this kind of work, it's frustrating because we, the three of us, collectively feel like it's not that hard. It's really not that difficult to do that if you set it up correctly. However, as the owner of the business, I can say, great, there's an opportunity for us to provide that service and train people on what that looks like. So therefore, marketers still struggling to integrate customer data across channels is great for us because that's job security for the services that we provide. Mind the four-year gap between the last two responses as well.

Here's the funny thing. When you look at this timeline and you think back to the way marketing has been going, this is ironic, right? When did CDP suddenly become sort of the the hot thing? 2016, right? It was when you first started really hearing about them, started really hearing the you know, the drumbeat of CDPs around 2018.

And in that time, we've gone backwards, right? We've gone from uh, you know, sort of an average of 3.8 down to uh uh 3.4. So this technology, this this platform that everyone's talking about is supposed to help us integrate customer data across channels, now been in the marketplace and mature for five, six years, we've gotten worse. Right? So the question is, what what are you spending that 50 grand a month on your CDP for if you're you've actually gotten worse since these things rolled out uh at integrating your data?

What is going on? Uh and that that is pretty clearly indicating that the technology, the platform wasn't the problem, right? It was either a people problem or a process problem internally at your organization. It wasn't a technology problem, because if it had been, this chart would be saying 4.4. Like you'd have you have put in a new platform and your your woes would have been solved.

This is not the case. I I can see the wheels spinning in John's head of the new sales pitch of don't spend that 50k a month on a CDP, spend it with us, we'll do it for you. Yeah, right. Make it happen. It's just interesting how I, you know, it I'm sure it's not correcting for the fact that the situation always continually gets worse, right?

I mean, 30 years ago you just had your one, you know, stack of folders, and now you we have 20 different databases, and with each additional tool you add, that's another database that needs to be, you know, correctly integrated. So yeah, I think the problem is getting uglier at the same time. It's it's odd too how it's just kind of a flat, you know, it is a slight downward trend, but like there's no huge gaps in it. Like nobody comes in next year and be like, yes, we solved it. You know, it's just it's like always this aching pain.

So, but with that, um CMOs are reporting that marketers improve their ability to effectively link social media to their overarching marketing strategy. So to me, this is not saying that they've done a better job of integrating their social media data into the overall results. It's just saying that they've done a better job of integrating social media into the plan that they want to execute against. So they're considering social media as a channel that's part of their strategy for the year. I would agree with that.

Again, mind that four-year gap between uh the last two responses, but it is this does make sense. When you look organizationally, social media used to be its own thing, right? Used to be uh you have a a head of social media, a global head of social media, and now the social media function has been thoroughly rolled into digital marketing, right? It's it's not uh the current shiny object anymore. Um it's kind of like SEO.

SEO used to be its own thing, have its own department, and now it's just part of digital marketing as well. So in some ways this is a good thing because it means that the uh the the shiny object syndrome is worn off and now social media is just another part of your marketing mix. Yeah, if you're gonna spend two million on a Super Bowl ad, you might want to do a couple tweets, you know. Well, and I think that that I mean, we know again, from our own experience working with clients, is that a lot of these digital channels are still very siloed when really they all work together in collaboration to make one cohesive campaign for any given piece of content. Um you know, but that's probably a different episode that we've done before.

Um and now to one of our favorite topics. Um although marketers still predict growth in the influencer space that are not nearly as bullish as they used to be. No, Chris, you like to do reporting on influencer trends. What do you make of this? First of all, I don't like the way this graph is laid out.

But I get what they're trying to do. So what are they trying to do? Yeah, no, because I when I look at this, this to me is the definition of bullish. So what's going on here? The the when they asked this question with these three same three responses two years ago in June 2020, the gray line is what people answered.

When they asked it in this survey, the red line is what they asked asked. So you can see right now, today, um CMOs spend 5.6% of their marketing budget on influencer marketing. When they asked this question two years ago, it was 7.5%, right? So this is again, this is just not not great charting. Um overall, across all three answers, you're seeing you know a couple of percentage points, uh, absolute percentage points decline in influencer marketing spend.

Right? People are saying we're spending less on influencers. We plan to spend less on influencers. It's still going up, but it's going up less. And I think a lot of uh a big chunk of that has to do with the fact that people don't spend enough, and this is completely self-serving.

People don't spend enough money on measuring stuff and developing a measurement plan for the influencer marketing. They just hand uh you know uh a TikTok influencer 100,000, say make a video about us and hope that it does well, and there's absolutely no empirical quantitative proof that what they did has an impact. And the irony is I was on a PR podcast yesterday. It is absolutely possible to measure that right now, today. You have to just be willing to invest a lot more than the zero dollars you're currently uh investing on it uh to get that answer.

You can do uplift modeling and mix modeling and propensity score modeling and all these things to take into account what an influencer has done for you uh versus you know all the other campaigns that you have in marketing. Uh we just did a uh course for Agora Pulse on social media ROI. Proving this stuff is not rocket surgery, it is it just requires investment. And so CMOs, in the absence of having good measurement, are just pulling back, right? They're doing exactly what any wooden rational would do, which is say, well, I have no idea what I'm spending my money on, and no idea what I'm getting my money on uh for my money here, so I'm just gonna spend less of it.

I agree. Go ahead, John. Well, I was just gonna say, so then in 2022, when they said one year ago they spent four percent, back in 2020, oh, there's a multiple year gap there. So that's yeah, I was gonna say, because right, wouldn't six or seven point five percent be what they had committed to? And then they said actually it was only four.

But so there was a two-year gap in that. Yeah, there's a two-year gap, but you're you're right in that it it it doesn't necessarily make a lot of logical sense unless the pandemic really took a baseball bat to the knees of influencers, which I struggle to believe given how everybody had to do a digital transformation with substantial rapidity, uh, unless they spent big that first summer of the pandemic, and then like, oh, well, we just spent a half our marketing budget on a TikTok video, and we have no idea what we did, so they pulled back. I mean again, without those that, you know, with this really is just two data points, two you know, one snapshot from each year. So we don't have that third data point to determine whether it's actually a trend or not. You know, uh when I think about companies spending money in the influencer space, obviously influencers are still a big part of marketing strategies, but the way that I look at it personally is that influencer marketing is so saturated.

Everybody and their sister and their brother and their dog wants to be an influencer because it's seen as you know, easy money. All I have to do is, you know, hold up this thing and all of my followers will buy it. And so I think the other layer to that, Chris, with the measurement is actually finding the right influencers. You know, you have to know where is my audience? You have to know what is my audience interested in.

You have to know who are the talking heads that my audience would actually listen to. And that's a whole other research project ahead of just picking out, you know, John Wall, the famous TikTok dancer who dances with his dog. You know, I mean, that might happen, but to your point, you don't know how effective that is if you don't also have that measurement strategy in place. And so I feel like finding and finding and measuring influencers is a whole separate specialty. It is.

Stay tuned next week for our paper on how to identify TikTok influencers, which we'll be uh debuting uh as part of uh social media marketing world. We'll be talking all about it. And so with that, and so that sort of goes sort of the full circle of companies have done a better job of integrating social media into their planning. However, social media as a marketing channel, the c the contributions experience a slight decline, but remain above historic average. You know, that historic average, you know, 3.4 to 3.6, like it's not a big, I wouldn't say that remains above.

I would say it sort of remains flat. Like they had a peak in June of 2020, which was two, three months into the pandemic. Everybody was at home, everybody was trying to figure out what the heck do I do with my life. So everybody's on social media all day long. And now we're exhausted from it.

Now nobody wants to look at social media. I certainly don't. And so it drops off again. And so you can see that cyclicality with it, where it aligns very much with what month we were in of the pandemic. You know, last February it dropped off because everybody was tired of it.

And then, you know, summer hit of 2021, everybody went out again, and then COVID numbers spiked. So everybody's stuck at home again in late August. So everybody's back on social media. And so you can see that pattern playing out in this graph. That's the way I look at this.

And it's still in the toilet. I mean, I think about if four is the average, right? In terms of uh the the scale here, on a scale of one to seven, four is the middle ground. In the last six years, social media has barely been above average in its contributions to marketing performance, right? That's getting in two months or in two periods out of uh six years.

That's not great, right? And again, this has everything to do with measurement. This has everything to do with the inability to measure social media effectively. Companies, what 15 when did Friendster come out? Friendster was really one of the first networks.

Now it came out in 2003. So we're talking almost 20 years now of social media. And we as an industry are still appallingly bad at measuring it. And this is the result. Well, people don't get into marketing to do math gross.

Well, I have bad news for them. Well, and it's crazy the churn too. Like there's this graveyard of the previous 12 social networks. You know, over the over that 20 years, we've had churn like I d I just don't get the same action on my MySpace page that I used to get. You gotta write some new songs, John.

Oh, that's right. It's all music now. Sorry. All music now. Um, so we've beat up on social media for quite a bit.

Um, what other sections, you know, I think we could cover marketing performance, the marketing and climate change, marketing spending. I mean, is there anything that either of you guys really feel like beating up on? I mean, I think you can always do reasonably well taking a peek into into marketing spend, right? Where is marketing putting its dollars? What are we what is it we are spending our money on?

And you know, when you look through the survey, uh, again, there's some spurious stuff in here, but for the most part, we uh if you go to s um page fifty-three, by what percentage you expect your digital marketing budget to change in the next 12 months. Right. This, I think, is interesting. Every survey response period, the CMOs have answered. We expect an increase of around 15 ish percent.

Like survey after survey after survey. If that were actually true, marketing's budget would be like a but a billion dollars, right? Because a 15% annual growth every year. Right. Again, this this falls into the category of what are you guys smoking?

Well, that goes into I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and she was expressing frustration that there was a lack of understanding of what the marketing team was doing, as that the marketing team was generating the leads that the sales team was taking credit for. So the more money is getting pumped into the sales team and less money is being pumped into the marketing team, and then people complain when the number of qualified leads goes down. And so, you know, when I see this, I think people are optimistic, but yet they still struggle to understand. I mean, we were just on a conversation with one of our clients about you know understanding just general website traffic. There's a lack of understanding of what marketing brings to the table.

And until that's really understood in an organization, this budget is really just another okay. And if you want to know how badly this is this, how bad this is, go to slide 47, which is the actuals. So here, 14, 15 projected actuals, 5%, right? Zero, uh, minus 3%. So clearly, the budgeting process and the ability for CMOs to understand what is likely to happen with their budget, their accuracy is roughly zero, right?

I mean, you may as well flip a coin at this point, uh, because it would be it would be just as good. At no point in their actuals does it even cli come close to what they forecast would be the actual budget. So uh, I mean, a couple of things to take away from that. Number one, if your boss is saying, Oh, yeah, we're gonna put that in the budget for next year, no, they're not. Um, you know, get it in writing, get it signed, get it notarized.

Exactly. For someone like John, you know, when you know when the the prospect says, Oh, yeah, well, it's budgeted for next year, no, it's not if it's not right now, it's it's not happening. Um because what and you know, we again we see this, we've been asked to help with budgets and forecasts for clients. Uh, and every single time you put together what is needed, and then the client comes back with what got approved, and it's usually about a half of half to a third of what is actually needed, and then you know, we go back to the earlier slides about you know what how is marketing's performance? Well, marketing's performance is not great because you put you know, you like you needed a full gas tank, and you put a third of a tank in, and you're wondering why you didn't get to where you were going.

I can't imagine why. Well, this graph actually looks way better than I thought it would, though. Well, I can give you a real example of this. I used to work at a company where you know, I was there during um the economy crash in 2008, and so they started cutting jobs and all these things, and so the company, the senior leadership team decided, well, let's just cut the marketing team. That'll save us a lot of money because then we won't have to spend any money on marketing.

Well, they did that and fast forward a couple of months, sitting around the table going, huh? Why is nobody buying our stuff? And it just I remember sitting there thinking, Are you kidding me? Did you not know how this works? And so again, it sort of goes back to the lack of understanding of what the marketing team brings to the table.

Now, there's also responsibility with the marketing team to demonstrate that through data and reporting and results. And as we've seen throughout this survey, marketing teams are still struggling to demonstrate what that looks like, especially when it comes to a full customer journey of where their specific stuff fits in. Like we drive awareness while we need leads. Well, awareness is part of that journey. So you need awareness in order to get the leads.

And so it's that whole conversation just gets lost, and people say, Well, did you convert anything? No. Okay, you're out. And it's interesting because that creates the conditions that you now see on slide 72. Slide 72, we are now in talking about marketing jobs.

What percentage of your marketing organization voluntarily departed over the last year, but left their own accord? They weren't laid off, they weren't fired. Right? So essentially 11% of marketing just out. They yeeted themselves out the window.

Maybe they went to another marketing uh job at a different position, maybe they didn't. Um but I again, this is one of those things where I find the actuals with with uh in reality with what people project to be totally out of sync. The previous slide, when uh people asked, what do you expect to increase for your hires? You expect to increase by 10.5%. With who?

With what people do you plan on hiring? Right? They've all quit and they're not coming back. And the this goes back to there's such a disconnect between what people think is happening in marketing versus the reality on the ground, whether it's budgets, whether it's uh training, whether it's uh effectiveness and you know, poor measurement that this is the consequence, and you can see that when you look at um slide 74. Slide 74 talks about uh investment in your people, right?

Investment and training. Uh four percent of marketing budgets are devoted to training and development from a pre-COVID high. So as the pandemic has worn on, we're investing less in people, and we're kind of wondering, you know, senior marketers are clearly wondering why are we losing 11% of our staff voluntarily? Gee, I wonder why. And to that point, I'm glad you brought this up because it is such a contradiction.

Companies want to build new marketing capabilities by training or hiring current employees, but yet employees are leaving, and then companies aren't only investing, you know, four percent of the budget into training, so it does not compute. None of that math adds up, you know. So if 60% of companies want to train in-house staff on four percent of their budget, and 10% of the company is leaving, how do how does that happen? And we saw in earlier slides, they don't want to outsource those services. So, who's doing the work?

It's like a story problem from hell. There's one intern that's really unhappy. Really, really tired, just wants to go home. Exactly. But you know, Katie, we uh we you know, we've been looking at our own data for this and in terms of just like what's showing up in our in our Search Console instance, and because companies are at this lovely four percent number here in terms of what they're willing to actually invest, people are having to go out and seek out training on their own.

You know, the number of things that we see people searching for courses or classes on, uh frankly took us both by surprise. It did, you know, it's in some ways it's a little disheartening the number of people who are looking for just any resources. Just tell me how to do the thing, because I've now I'm the email marketer and I've now been asked to write social media ads. It's two different skill sets. Um, you know, anybody can write copy.

People who are actually trained in it can write good copy. I can write ad copy, but it's terrible. But if I'm the only person available to do it, that's what you're gonna get. And then I can't complain if the ads aren't doing anything, you know, because I'm not that person. And so the first thing I'm gonna look for is how to write good ad copy.

And so as we start seeing those searches, that's an indicator to us that we need to have that kind of content ready and available for people because that's what they need. They need that instruction, they need that how-to because as we're seeing as the theme through this, companies are not investing enough in the employees to do the job. They've cut budgets, they haven't aligned teams. We know that they're struggling to hire people to do the thing, and the pipe the people that they do hire need training. So that all becomes the perfect storm of what training exists out there.

You want to talk a little bit about the client that you were doing help helping them hire for recently and some of the what your perspectives are on what you saw for candidates available. Yeah, absolutely. Um it's a tough competitive market. It's sort of the sort of the same thing with when they say it's a buyer's market of you know, the person buying a house, like they're the one in control. It's a candidate's market right now.

The candidates are in control because companies are scrambling to find anyone. And so I was helping a client um hire a marketing operations manager, a bit of a jack of all trades, someone who kind of knows a little bit about everything, uh, so that they can help sort of manage the overall plan. And what I was seeing was people who were overqualified, so they'd been like a VP for you know X number of years, which the first question is, okay, then why are you looking at this kind of position? And are you willing to take a significant pay cut? But then on the other hand, you have people who've literally never done marketing before and thought it might be fun to try to switch careers.

And so the amount of training that would go into that is significant, and there's not someone who could hit the ground running. And so we've definitely been through quite a few interviews with candidates who are they're not the right fit. You know, it's the really the best way to say it. They're not the right fit, but at some point, the company has to make a decision. Can we invest in this person and train them to make them the right fit, or are we gonna hold out for that unicorn, which is what everybody's trying to do right now.

And again, that goes to you know, if we think back to our slides, companies aren't willing to invest in training and development, so you've got to hire the perfect candidate out of the gate. And the perfect candidate out of the gate is either going to be obscenely expensive uh or is just doesn't exist, right? So the solution there seems to me uh be willing to increase the amount you invest across the board in training and development, and then you can hire somebody who is a little bit less qualified and bring them up to speed, right? Plus, you get the advantage of that person's doing work during that time and when they're getting up to speed, and they might, depending on how good your training and development is, they might you might retain them better because they have something of that you know, sort of an informal social debt to you to say, like, yeah, thanks for for turning me from an analyst into a manager. I remember one of the things that we used to hear a lot uh at our old team uh was that one of the reasons why people stuck around, even though the pay was less good than other uh agencies at the time at the company we were working at, was that people felt like they never stopped learning, like they're they were always being challenged, they were always growing their skills, and they knew that sticking around on our team made them more valuable employees when they made the next move.

And it's really funny when you look around at the people who used to be on the team, they oh now they're all directors and stuff uh fairly young because they've got the right skills. Um, I just want to pull up one last slide because this one makes me chuckle. I got a kick out of this one, and so it is uh this slide, it is marketing and finance leaders are more aligned now than they were a year ago. And so the reason why it makes me chuckle is because it goes back to the there's a lack of understanding of more of what marketing does, therefore, the budget that they're trying to get, they're never gonna get, and so finance is like so. Tell me what it is that you do here, and so it seems very micromanagey versus we're gonna partner to get you the money that you want, and so you know, it's how well aligned are marketing and finance leaders in your company on goals, strategies, tools, and data.

And so it's finance swooping in saying, why do you need a $50,000 a year piece of software? What does that do for you that a spreadsheet can't do? Or why do you need six different people doing the job that, like, you know, my niece runs a TikTok account. Why do you need six people running social media? And so that's you know, that may not have been the intention, but that's when I look at this, I'm like, well, yeah, it's of course finance wants to know what marketing is doing because they probably want to know where all that money is going.

It's true, and when you think about this, this question is worded curiously, in the sense that how well aligned you are could very well be finance has beaten you bloody, and and now you are you are entirely subservient to them. And again, if you think about what's happened in the last year with uh supply chain issues, with hiring, with uh everything going on in the world. It's not a surprise that marketing would be more aligned with finance, aka finance tighten the purse strings. Because in a period of time when efficiency matters as much as effectiveness, you've got to be more efficient. And that means that you've got to figure out ways to squeeze more out of the resources you have.

And I think that's really what's reflected here is that marketing has had to go, all right. Well, we gotta make the best with uh what we've got, because we don't have the the resources to do as much as we want. Even if you have the budget, if you don't have the people to do it, right? And you and you're not paying an outside agency to do it, then you've gotta to get focused and get prioritized. I just want to point out the uh on each of the slides, you might have this little insights box, and this one says, unsurprisingly, the most well-aligned companies are those with fewer than 50 employees because a smaller workforce allows for more efficient cross-functional communication.

I saw that and I was like, well, no shit. I don't know. To me, that was like, yeah, I know where every dollar goes because we're a three-person company, and the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to keep track of all of those things. And so if you're an enterprise-sized company, it's really hard to know where all of that marketing money goes. Like, we have clients who will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in one month on marketing, but couldn't tell you what happened.

And that's what that's what I got from when I saw this slide of like, yeah, finance was probably like we're aligned now. We're gonna meet every day, and you're gonna tell me where that money is going. Exactly. Alignment. Right.

John, you and I have an alignment meeting it too. Yeah, you you've got a little bit. You'd hope that at least in the orgs where finance and marketing are led by the same person, that those are in full alignment. It's just not gonna happen. Yeah.

All right. So, Katie, where do we land with all this now that we've had a chance to take the grand tour? So where we land with all this is that the CMO survey is a really good resource to use as a guideline for what might be happening in the space in terms of investment into specific digital channels, the use of data. Uh there's some sections in here about companies that are using artificial intelligence. And so if you're in those spaces, it's a good data point to pay attention to to say, am I ahead of the times?

Am I behind the times? Should I be spending more to keep up? Should I be investing in myself to make sure that I'm not falling behind all of these trends that are happening? And then for companies like ours that offer a lot of the services that solve the problems that are reflected in here, it becomes a really good talking point of, you know, in the latest CMO survey, we saw that companies wanted to invest in training. Well, guess what?

Trust Insights has those training resources if you're one of those companies that wants to invest in training. And so reading through this and looking for the opportunities to say, hey, we can solve those problems, but also just as a general information of where the heads of CMOs are at. So Chris, to your point, it doesn't reflect what's happening. These are just the opinions of CMOs. But it's always sort of that good barometer of like, are the trends going up?

Are the trends going down? Does it reflect your reality? And then double checking that information with other data sources to say, uh, that doesn't quite seem right. It doesn't align with what my data is telling me. So it's not your Bible.

It's not the this is the only thing you can look at, but it's a great starting place to understand what's happening in a specific space. All right. And I think I only think I would add to that is that CMOs are spectacularly bad at predicting what's likely to happen. Any final words, John? No, no, I think you nailed it on that, but that is it's a an abundance of optimism, which may or may not be met with a you know a bus coming on to hit it.

Alright, so I think we'll uh head out of here on that cheerful note. Take care, folks. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

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