When I stepped back into a CMO role, I assumed I’d be walking into a room full of people who quietly didn’t rate marketing. That wasn’t the problem I found.
The real problem was inefficiency. Activity that had been running for a while, that nobody had asked hard enough whether it was still the right activity. That’s a more useful thing to find than scepticism, in my experience, and it’s also easier to miss, because it doesn’t announce itself the way disrespect does.
I’ve since noticed the exact same pattern running consulting engagements, and I think that’s the more useful way to write about it, because most people reading this aren’t stepping into a CMO chair. They’re starting a new job somewhere, or walking into a client’s business for a six-week engagement, outnumbered by people who’ve been there for years and know things you don’t yet.
I walked in ready for the wrong fight
It’s tempting, walking into a new senior role, to assume you need to win an argument about whether marketing matters. Most of the time that argument’s already been won, or nobody’s actually having it.
What’s usually happening instead is quieter. Things are running because they’ve always run. Decisions are being made on inertia. Nobody senior has stopped to ask whether the activity is actually pointed at what the business needs right now.
Mistake that for disrespect and you come in ready to fight a battle nobody’s fighting. You also miss the actual opening, which is showing people a sharper version of the thing they already believed in.
The same thing shows up with clients
Consulting has the same trap, just with a shorter clock. A client brings you in because something’s not working, and there’s a pull to arrive with opinions on day one, partly because that’s what they’re paying for and partly because it feels like the fastest way to earn the room.
But I’ve sat in enough of these to know the first two weeks aren’t for opinions. They’re for finding out what’s running on habit. A retainer nobody’s questioned in 18 months. A weekly report three people read and nobody acts on. A channel mix set by whoever built it originally, still running the same way years later.
None of that is anyone being incompetent. It’s just nobody’s job to ask, and until you turn up, nobody has.
The client isn’t paying you to prove marketing matters. They already believe that, or you wouldn’t be in the room. They’re paying you to show them exactly where it’s pointed, and what it’s not doing.
The move that actually worked
The concrete move that shifted how people saw me, in the CMO role and in consulting, wasn’t a big campaign or a bold pitch. It was going back to first principles. What are the actual goals here this year, and does every piece of marketing activity clearly connect to one of them.
Some of it did. A meaningful amount didn’t. It was running because it had always run, defended by habit rather than evidence.
Being honest about what wasn’t earning its place did more for credibility in the first ninety days than any campaign could have. As a consultant, the same audit usually takes a fraction of that, because you’ve got fewer places to look and a shorter mandate. But the mechanism’s identical: redefine the goals explicitly against what the business actually cares about, and say plainly what you’re stopping because it doesn’t connect.
That’s a commercial mindset, not a marketing pitch. Not “trust me, this matters,” but “here’s exactly how this spend connects to what you already care about, and here’s what we’re not doing anymore because it doesn’t.”
Where this doesn’t work: if you do the audit and keep the findings to yourself, or soften them into something vague enough not to upset anyone, you’ve done the useful bit and skipped the bit that actually builds trust.
Where I got it wrong
I’d been lucky enough to have runs on the board coming into that CMO role, which bought some benefit of the doubt. But being too cut-throat early, cutting or changing things fast based on what I was told was happening rather than what I could see myself, has bitten me before. It bit me again here.
You make a call based on the picture you’ve been handed, before you’ve actually seen the reality for yourself. Three months later, once you can see it properly, it’s sometimes not the call you’d have made.
Consulting makes this worse, not better, because the clock’s shorter and there’s more pressure to show early wins. I’ve watched consultants (myself included, more than once) recommend killing a channel in week one based on a dashboard, only to find in week four that the dashboard was tracking the wrong thing entirely.
Decisiveness reads as credibility early on. It’s only credibility if the decision holds up once you’ve actually seen what’s going on yourself, not just what you were told.
What I’d tell someone starting this week
Don’t walk in assuming you need to win an argument that’s probably already settled. Go looking for the inertia instead, the activity running on habit rather than evidence, and connect it plainly to what the business actually needs. That’s the concrete move. Not “build relationships,” an actual redefinition of what success looks like, stated clearly enough that people can see the thinking behind it.
If you’re consulting, the same applies, just compressed. Spend the first stretch of the engagement finding out what’s running on habit before you spend a single dollar of the client’s trust on an opinion.
And on anything that isn’t genuinely urgent, give yourself the time to see it directly before you decide. Being fast and being right aren’t the same skill. In the early weeks, whether that’s ninety days in a new role or the first fortnight of a client engagement, being right is the one that actually builds the credibility you’re there to earn.
Dom O'Brien
CMO at MATE and author of The Startup Marketing Playbook. Fifteen years building lean marketing teams that punch above their weight.
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