Doing More with Less, Building CFO Trust, and Maximizing Marketing’s Impact with Lisa Cole and Domenic Colasante of 2X

EPISODE SUMMARY
When budgets shrink and executive scrutiny increases, CMOs must rethink how they allocate resources to maximize impact. Scott speaks with 2X’s CMO Lisa Cole and CEO Domenic Colasante about how leaders can prioritize high-value initiatives and shift from tactical execution to strategic leadership. They discuss why budget constraints can actually be a superpower, how to align marketing with business goals, and why financial acumen is key to CMO success. Plus, they share practical tips on leveraging AI, improving cross-functional collaboration, and making marketing a true business driver. If you’re looking to optimize your 2025 marketing strategy, this episode is packed with insights to help you scale smarter.

GUEST BIOS
Lisa Cole is 2X’s CMO and AI Advisor. On top of accelerating 2X’s marketing, The Revenue RAMP author is responsible for helping 2X customers transform their marketing functions into scalable growth engines and introducing AI-driven solutions for greater impact. Drawing from over 24 years of experience—holding key marketing leadership positions at Huron and FARO Technologies—Lisa demonstrates a proven ability to build and lead high-performing teams, leverage AI and automation to enhance marketing strategies and drive operational excellence to accelerate speed-to-market, growth, and create competitive differentiation—profitably.

Domenic Colasante is Co-Founder and CEO of 2X, and a thought leader on marketing organizational models and operating model transformation. He previously served as CMO of WGroup, an IT management consulting firm that grew over 30% per year under his tenure, and has held demand creation, marketing ops, analytics, and ABM leadership roles at Siemens and SAP.

TRANSCRIPT
Scott Todaro (00:01)
All right, welcome to the next edition of the next CMO podcast. It’s always tough to say the and the again. But what I will say is that it’s always fun to go through these sessions. And so today we have an action packed agenda, just like we do every week. But this is going to be a fantastic topic because I think marketers have really gotten into this rut of feeling like they need more funding and more people in order to do their job effectively. And you’ve heard me talk about this time and time again, that as your team,

gets bigger, you start to lose a lot of efficiency in how your marketing operation runs, how you work with sales, how you work with other groups inside the organization. Today, we have two people that believe in that same concept and they’re going to go through graphic detail on how to really create the, create the efficiency that you need in your organization in order to do marketing properly. So for the two people we have on the screen here, they’re absolutely going to give you.

a good rundown, not only on how to apply different technologies, also how to apply your budget more effectively, and even outsource some of the functions that today you feel like you need to hire somebody in order to get done. So to run through their backgrounds, because these people are just dripping with experience. We’re lucky to have them on the podcast. have Don Colasco, I’m to have to edit this out, Colasante.

Easy for me to say. All right. We have Dom Colasante. He’s a current CEO of 2X and he’s been in B2B marketing for quite a while. He’s also been a CMO before. He was also Ian Wise entrepreneur of the year. So not only does he know how to do the marketing, he knows how to build a business to help other marketers with not only their efficiency and building out operations to become more efficient in their process. We also have Lisa Cole.

on the line here and she spent her first 16 years in marketing at different agencies and doing different functions. But she was a three time head of marketing at Huron, Faro and Selbright. She also is an award winner just like Dom is. She has earned the Serious Decisions 2018 ROI Award, also has earned Demand Gen Reports 2018 B2B Innovator Award.

and earned the Forrester 2022 ROI award. So award winning, marketing leaders here we have on the phone. And so they’re to give you a lot of detail. So without any further ado, I’m going to jump into, some of the questions that we want to ask you. And, know, please feel free to, to give as much detail as you want, because I think this is the type of topic that I think marketers can really get on board with, especially in light of the, the information that we just saw come up with the CMO report.

Lisa Cole (02:44)
Thank

Scott Todaro (02:55)
from Forrest from Gartner that basically said that budgets are going to be shrinking. I think we saw the number drop from 9 % of revenue down to 7 % of revenue. And that’s a little frightening, I think, for a lot of marketers that have their number, their revenue number increase while their budget is dropping. So without further ado, I’ll just throw it out to you guys. How should marketers be reframing their budget constraints in light of this flat and no growth budget?

Lisa Cole (03:25)
Well, Dom, I’d love to jump in first. This is certainly as an experience, budget constraints in my mind, I think, can become the CMO superpower, one of our secret superpowers, in that they get to, they enable us to actually redefine marketing’s role in the business. It also affords us, it gives us the tools that we need to drive alignment amongst our peer set and focusing on high impact initiatives.

It also enables us to really get our team focused on doing what matters and doing that better. So to me, think budget constraints offer a lot of opportunities for the right leaders.

Dom Colasante (04:11)
And I’ve seen, having made the CMO to CEO transition, the unifying piece between both of those jobs is the importance of prioritization. And while a budget can strain, and at some point, you probably have a math problem of being able to continue to reduce budgets, not only they’re reducing, as you indicated, Scott, they’ve not been healthy for some time.

And so that creates an issue that we have to navigate through as marketing leaders, but it forces us to think about what’s important and make choices and look at the many things we could do, what should we do? And how do we make sure we make some bets that are very focused and likely to perform versus putting a 1% bet on a hundred different things? And so in some ways I think it’s good, but I think it requires, as Lisa indicated, thinking transformationally because you can’t just, you know,

Scott Todaro (04:58)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Cole (04:58)
Yeah.

Dom Colasante (05:08)
drop another 5 % out and get another 10 % impact again and again and again with incremental changes.

Lisa Cole (05:08)
you

Right.

One of the, just to kind of add to that, right? When you think about what marketers, marketing leaders deal with on a day-to-day basis and, know, prioritization, it’s also a chance to reset expectations with their peers, right? Marketing, I don’t know about you, but I could certainly offer that every organization I’ve worked with or worked for, when I started, marketing was always seen as the order-taking function.

was always there to fulfill every team’s request, whether they were dealing with relentless orders from the product house or even the sales house, sometimes HR and IT, budget limitations. You when you’re in that boardroom or when you’re with your peers and you’re shaping your annual operating plan, it becomes very apparent that marketing is either this flat budget or shrinking budget. They’re also aware that the expectations are increasing, more aggressive. You can actually use that to kind of reset.

shine the light on the sheer volume of orders that are being received, these requests that are being received, and finally get alignment around if these are not tied to business priorities or if these won’t have any sort of influence in the company’s ability to achieve its financial objectives, perhaps maybe we should stop doing those things. Or if you can’t get out of doing those things altogether, sometimes you can use it to establish service level agreements that kind of allow for limiting those.

or throttling them in some way. So I think it’s both prioritization but also resetting expectations.

Scott Todaro (06:48)
That’s an excellent point. You guys have really nailed that one. You know, just to build off of that, you know what I’ve seen over and over again, you probably have seen these statistics out there that CEOs and Dom, you have a unique perspective on this. Only 24 % of them trust their CMO, right? And so you know that dynamic and we have both the CEO and CMO on the call. And hopefully this isn’t creating any awkward moments here. But but what I will say is that.

There is that friction because people can’t see the ROI because there’s so much money going in. It’s sometimes the largest discretionary spend at the company. And they just don’t see the return coming out the other side. There’s that lack of trust. So how can a CMO realign investments for maximum impact? I think Lisa, you wanted to take this.

Lisa Cole (07:42)
Sorry, my mic just went out, apologise.

Scott Todaro (07:44)
okay, no problem.

We’ll edit that out. So the question was, how can the CMO realign investments for maximum impact?

Lisa Cole (07:52)
I think the very first thing that they can and should do is establish a very strong crosswalk between the business goals and priorities for the year and connecting the dots with what marketing can do to support those business goals and objectives, outline those strategic initiatives, and then be able to articulate the work that they would do in that body and how it will influence those, achievement of those goals.

Once you do that, the rest of the things that are on your plate, you can then bring forward and have an honest conversation about whether or not you should stop, start, or reduce those other things. But the first is the crosswalk. And that’s not always easy, right? If an organization’s objective is to increase NRR, for example, not every marketer may have a strong enough command of what are the things that marketing can do to influence that.

And then from there, they might struggle with explaining how some of these broader initiatives, a campaign or program might be able to support that. But that’s where they’ve got to start. It’s that crosswalk, the translation piece.

Scott Todaro (09:03)
Yeah, it’s interesting. know, we hear again and again that CMOs are struggling from imposter syndrome. You’re talking about helping them basically cross the street. And so, you know, how do they make that transition? I mean, if they’re really already on their heels, because we know a lot of CMOs when they take their job, usually they’re taking over for the CMO that was just fired. And that other CMO was fired because they couldn’t create enough lead generation.

because the head of sales put them in a bad situation. And nonetheless, they’re gone. New person comes in and they expect the new CMO literally to come with a bunch of leads in their pocket. They’re looking at the situation where you’re telling them, hey, you should cut your budget. And they’re like frightened because they’re picking up the mess from the previous regime. Are there any tips and tricks that you have for these leaders in order to present a new way forward? mean, I think

Lisa Cole (09:42)
Right?

Scott Todaro (10:00)
your process and the way you approach it, probably would resonate fairly well with the CFO, but how do you get the CEO and the head of sales on board, you know, to really look at what the return on investment is going to be as opposed to where the heck are my leads.

Lisa Cole (10:15)
Well, I might be Dom’s CMO now. I was a former customer twice, and I know he and his team have helped me with that process. And by the way, every single marketing role I’ve had, with exception of the 2X CMO role, I stepped into the shoes of someone who was expected to transform, redo, reimagine, whatever it was that they implemented. But Dom, I’ve

I think this is a great example of the kind of advice that you’ve been providing clients knowing I’ve been one of them. What are your thoughts?

Dom Colasante (10:49)
Yeah.

And I think it’s as a CEO perspective on what we want to hear from a new marketing leader and really how we start to form a relationship of trust, which is where you solve that problem. We want to see that the marketing leader is incredibly interested in the growth strategy of the company. marketing is second. First, you’re a C level executive.

Lisa Cole (11:10)
And it does.

Dom Colasante (11:18)
So do you understand the primary drivers that are important to the board, to the CEO, to the CFO, generally at some form of valuation improvement, and how are we gonna get there? And what are the levers we need to pull? And sure, more revenue is a lever, but as Lisa indicated earlier, sometimes net revenue retention might be more important than more revenue. Sometimes profitability might be more important than more revenue. And I think, know, marketing and the marketing leader, the CMO,

Lisa Cole (11:42)
you

Dom Colasante (11:47)
working on understanding those problems, those opportunities, is a real way to feel comfortable as you’re ramping up that this person’s curious, interested, spending the time to learn what to do and not showing up on day one saying, it’s gonna be a new website, a new logo, and a new brand. We don’t wanna hear that. We also don’t wanna hear, originally, out of the gate, ask for more headcount or ask for more money. I think it’s an element of

Lisa Cole (12:06)
Yeah.

Scott Todaro (12:07)
you

Dom Colasante (12:16)
you know, how do we figure out what the business needs to be great at? The CEO, the board, the CFO likely know that. How do we figure out what marketing needs to be great at? The marketer needs to figure that out. And then how do we make movement on those initiatives that sort of build some confidence and trust that you’re a financially astute corporate executive? And like there’s always some element of way somewhere, putting that on the table and showing that like I’m gonna make

hard decisions to improve efficiency as the first thing you do might also completely change the dynamic. Then when you might need to spend more money in some other areas or you might need to shift some things in investments, but demonstrating that you’re an executive more than a marketer is really what the business needs to stay.

Lisa Cole (12:57)
Thank you.

Scott Todaro (13:03)
That’s such an excellent point, Dom. And I know you guys work with a lot of CMOs. What would you say on a percentage basis their financial acumen is? mean, just say like what percentage of the CMOs you work with really understand even baseline accounting, what’s the difference between accrual and cash-based accounting, let alone how to get efficiency or even calculate ROI.

Dom Colasante (13:27)
Well, we offer transformational solutions. I think we probably have a skewed view of the market of the CMOs that work for us or the ones that want to be on stage doing something different than no one has done before. That index is heavier into those that know how to run marketing as a business. I would say in our world, it’s probably 60%. I would say our A plus on understanding the business, I think, is marketing as a profession. I would say probably 20 to 30%.

And some of that I think is on the business. I put a lot of that on the CFO. Our CFO at 2X, I think great CFOs, see that their job is to elevate the financial acumen of the leadership team. It’s very seldom, even if someone has an MBA and they’ve been a CEO before, they may not know your terms, your what metrics drive what things in your business.

And I think it’s important, and it’s not just marketing, it’s CRO, it’s COO, it’s the Chief People Officer. They equally have sort of a need to learn the core business metrics. And I think there’s a lot of financial acumen to be built. I think when you have that, one, when you acknowledge you don’t have it and try to go get it, and then two, when you actually have it, there’s a force to be reckoned with in making decisions in the marketing function.

Scott Todaro (14:34)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Cole (14:37)
I’m sorry.

Scott Todaro (14:44)
Yeah, I agree.

Lisa Cole (14:44)
I do think the CMO

plays a role there, right? The CMO should, at minimum, work to establish a relationship with the CFO, even if the CFO is not proactively offering that education and reaching out and asking, well, what are the metrics that matter? What are the financial realities of the company? Tell me a little bit about your experience with marketers before. How do they tend to show up to you? Anything I should avoid doing, you know, those kinds of things, right? Anyways.

So I think we play some role in it, but I would agree the best experiences I’ve had in the past that the CFO went out of their way to make sure I understood and had a command of the company’s financial measures, what we’re trying to achieve.

Scott Todaro (15:29)
You know.

These are such great points you’re making, you know, it’s and it’s funny because I think a lot of CMOS are actually afraid of the CFO. I think they’re afraid of the CFO because they’ll shut off the spigot on them. You know, when the budgets come, they’re like, yeah, we’re to just cut 50 percent out of discretionary spend and we’re going to call it a day. Right. And then they’re like, well, I can’t make my numbers if I don’t have the money. And I think what you’ll talk about is some ways to actually do that, which I think will be enormously helpful for our audience.

But you know, the funny thing is like just the initial discussion, like if you understand how a CFO gets their bonus, right? And you go and you talk to them and you say, hey, what I’m going to try to do is help with profitability. So what we’re going to do is going to try to get the best RY we possibly can. Can you tell me about our margin rate and how, you know, how can I work with you to calculate it? The first day I did that, the CFO, first of all, they did dramatic. It was like a really funny, they fell out of their chair like, I’ve never heard that before.

But then the next thing that happened is that they partnered with me. And then we were in the meetings talking to the CEO, instead of them beating on me, they were actually, they had my back because I was showing the ROI every single quarter. And it was just amazing to see that transition. So Dom, I know this is a question that you wanted to take. So how can CMOs create operational leverage with strategic outsourcing?

Lisa Cole (16:34)
you

Dom Colasante (16:51)
Yeah, well, so first, as you go through the analysis of what marketing needs to be great at and then what organizational capabilities you need, you’ll likely learn that there are things you need to be able to do that you can’t do today. And look, there are a lot of operating models, a lot of different ways to get those things. We happen to be in the business of providing subscription services and helping to provide an alternative to labor, house labor and headcount and even agency services.

Lisa Cole (16:59)
Thank you.

Dom Colasante (17:20)
I think it comes from marketers have had a fairly bad experience with outside labor. We’ve not spent a lot of time consuming labor from the global market where we have in our personal lives or customer service experiences. We’ve not experienced a great outcome from an English proficiency standpoint where we feel sort of loss of control.

Lisa Cole (17:31)
Not.

Dom Colasante (17:48)
or we feel just understanding of the subject matter might be an issue. so marketers have not typically looked at outsourcing, managed services, other models as a way to create leverage in the business. Every other function in the organization has. IT has, finance and accounting has, HR has, procurement has, manufacturing, operations, are all using sort of different operating models to reduce the cost of run work and get more done for less. It’s a very common model.

Lisa Cole (17:50)
yourself.

Thanks.

Dom Colasante (18:17)
but marketers have had some concerns there, legitimate ones. I think what’s interesting to appreciate is in the last couple of years, we’ve learned that marketing can happen in a digital world. We don’t have to be in the same room with a whiteboard. People engaging digitally can create amazing experiences for our clients, create amazing new strategies, can build really high quality work. The challenge now is coming up with, or if that’s the case,

how do we think about of all the work and marketing that we have to do, what work should we be doing and not doing? And oftentimes you talk to marketers and they’ve got a hundred things on their list. They’re all wearing like, you know, all these different hats. And one of my favorite exercises is to think about, like if all the work in the marketing department, I think it falls into one of two buckets. One bucket is strategic.

Lisa Cole (19:02)
Okay.

Dom Colasante (19:17)
core competency work that only you can do. And you must become the best in the world and uniquely capable of doing it. I think a lot of things that focus on strategy, areas of product, areas of how marketing and sales work together and prioritize what’s important and what’s not, the way you generate your customer experience, those are all like really unique and special different things that you need to become awesome at. But then there’s like

Lisa Cole (19:26)
Thank

Dom Colasante (19:46)
a whole bunch of other work you do that is the carrying and feeding of the engine. It’s the run work, it’s the execution work, it’s the operations work. I’d postulate that’s about 50 to 60 % of work in most marketing departments are that. That work is where you want efficiency, you want flexibility, you want scale, you want cost savings, you want more best practice capability. When you think about work in those two dimensions, it gives you a viewpoint of

likely a huge amount of routine execution, run work, perfect fit for shared services, perfect fit to consider outsourcing on. There are some amazing firms that have been born in the last couple of years that didn’t exist before that have markets like Southeast Asia where there’s English proficiency, best in the world, that understand the art and science of marketing together, that really understand the expertise required in a marketing lane.

And those can be really great partners for that work. But it starts with defining those two areas and then looking at, you know, how do I lean more into the strategy and core competency things with better talent, more senior expertise, and more time to innovate and dream? And then how do I get cost efficiency and scale on the execution ones? That total picture generally results in less expense, which means you can fit into a lower budget, but it also generally results in a lot more time.

To be able to support those things, you need to be great at.

Scott Todaro (21:14)
I that’s

Lisa Cole (21:14)
You know, it’s really

interesting the way you bifurcated that if you were to survey the marketers and those organizations and ask them, you know, of all the things you really genuinely enjoy doing and all the things that if you waved a magic wand tomorrow, you wouldn’t necessarily have to do yourself the repetitive day-to-day tasks. They would oftentimes tell you, these are the things I like less. Which is super interesting. And if they were given an opportunity to actually

one of the quotes, soul sucking experience once was used to describe a series of repetitive tasks it would take to provision an email and get it out the door. And that’s what’s fascinating, right? And if they were given an opportunity to focus on higher value, higher impact tasks throughout their day, and a little bit more space to think strategically, develop new messaging and positioning, come up with different offer strategies, test different CTAs, they would

likely feel more impactful and feel more valued to the business. But we never really have those candid conversations of tell me the things that you wish you didn’t have to do in a day. But fascinating.

Scott Todaro (22:28)
Lisa, this is an excellent point. And the one thing that, that I’d get concerned with, you know, having run teams myself is you’ll find that a lot of the teams they’re so, delivery focused that they literally don’t focus on like messaging. They focus on setting up the email and getting all this stuff. And then they’re like, I forgot to do a subject line.

Well, I mean, that’s the most important thing of the email, right? Because you can’t if you can’t get them to open, it’s not going to do anything. What are you writing? How are you going to connect with them? Who’s your target audience? What do they want? How do you reach them? And like I’ve seen a lot of marketing skills as people have gotten too reliant on technology actually start to slide where everybody’s a technologist. They know what buttons to press, but they’re not really marketers. They’re not thinking about the buyer at all times, understanding what they want and needs are and writing the right thing. So.

Talk to me about efficiency because you guys, you specialize in this, you talk about AI, you talk about automation. I love that whole concept because you can get rid of some of the tactical things, but these marketers have got to be ready to take that transition to start doing some of the strategic things. And my concern is that there are some people that are so tactically focused in the organization, they may not be able to make the leap to being more strategic. They may want to, they just don’t know how to do it. So how do you…

How do you eliminate a lot of the aggravation and tactical things that people have to do, the repetitive day in and day out, while also getting them up the line so they can contribute at a higher level to the business?

Lisa Cole (24:01)
I think if you take, Dom, do you wanna?

Dom Colasante (24:01)
I’ll

start on that one and then you jump in Lisa. So I think I saw this when I was a CMO in Quick Story. There was a lot of perspective years ago that giving a marketer strategy and execution at the same time was good because they would only build programs that the business needed, right? Because they had an account for their work to some sales function or some portfolio and all the work would have meaning. There wouldn’t be things built off in a vacuum that were needed.

The real problem that created was when you have to do strategy and execution work at the same time, I found that my team members doing that, their ideas got a lot smaller. They only dreamed as big as they themselves could execute. They couldn’t speak a big idea out loud because then they have to code do it. So they ended up thinking, you know, more operationally in their ideas so that they can handle the strategy.

But then when they had to execute the strategy, they get busy, right? I got a lot of things to do. I gotta get things out the door. Your example of, got 75 emails I gotta send this month. So I gotta get them done. Are you really gonna follow best practice process for every single one? Are you really gonna test every single one? Are you really gonna think about, by the way, email by itself, completely wasteful tactic.

How do we integrate it into a program? How do we have nurture? How do we think about multi-channel? How do we think about support? Like, are you really gonna do all of those elements? No, you gotta like check the box, because the operational stuff is where you’ll get tripped up on your stakeholders. If the operation isn’t happening, that’s the gravitational force of where you spend your time. And so you end up cutting corners. You end up, you know, surviving, right? And so when you have to do both, strategy gets smaller and execution gets less good. When you split them, you can lean different,

skills, capabilities, people into different lanes where they play to their strengths. Some people are incredibly strategic and capable and thoughtful. Some people like to be in the operations, you know, following the 35 point checklist and doing it, you know, in a very repeatable way. I think right now the organizations are over-indexed on the operational execution. That limits our ability to help the business. But I think, look, it’s a global world in the operational execution. A lot of companies, you know, we’re paying

you know, huge salaries to team members in the US to do execution work on a platform they probably aren’t certified in. They probably don’t fully have the appreciation for all that it can do. And by thinking about is there a better way for me to get that work done? Maybe that means some of those people transition. Maybe it means some of that work can get integrated into different ways and have the thought of it, like as a shared service group, be able to support many different business units at once rather than.

you know, separate silos where it all operates. I think there’s definitely some transformation to occur there that will drive efficiency and cost savings. But it’s about thinking about the marketer in the middle and how do you give them, you know, the best job they could have so that they lean in and, you know, deliver amazing things for you. And I think as a CMO, it’s on us to figure out, you know, how do we set up that condition for our team?

Scott Todaro (27:15)
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. you know, the, one thing that I will say that it’s interesting, cause you were talking about the team and the efficiency and being so busy and not being able to really see the forest through the trees on this. think a lot of this actually comes down to a point that you brought up when we were discussing this around planning. Right. And we’re right now in 2025 planning season. And I can’t tell you how many CMOs I work with that I coach that they don’t, they don’t have a plan.

Lisa Cole (27:36)
Thank

Scott Todaro (27:43)
Like they’ll develop the five or 10 slides they need to get through the executive team meeting in December to prepare for next year. And they’ll show those five to 10 slides to their team. They’ll go up in a Google drive, never be seen again. There’s no efficiency built into the model because people don’t fully understand the plan. They don’t build their operations to actually execute the strategic elements of the plan. What are you guys seeing? know, what, you know, now that we’re in planning season, are there practical steps that you guys see for 2025?

that a lot of these marketers can take to be a more efficient but efficient in terms of the strategies that you’re going to deploy over the course of the year.

Lisa Cole (28:23)
Well, I think the very first thing that marketing leaders have to recognize is that they do need to fully flesh out the plans, right? The teams need a little bit more guidance and direction of these are the highest level strategic initiatives that we will have and here are the goals and good luck. So the very first thing is going through that planning exercise and getting it to a point where the team would acknowledge that it’s executable, right?

that feels directionally sound, at least for the next one to two quarters. If you do not know what’s going to go out and market in the next one to two quarters, you don’t really have a plan. And your team is just going to continue to operate under these random acts of marketing, trying to get as much stuff out into the market to check boxes. And many of those things are oftentimes orders that they’ve received from somebody else that had no confidence that marketing actually was being intentional about what was going up to market.

And so I think the very first thing is the recognition that the five to 10 slides that they might have had, that’s not executable, right? And so this is where the operational piece comes in. The other piece I want to add on to, know, when you talked a little bit about getting clear about, you know, the strategic high value work and the things that the team should be doing, and then of course what it takes to execute against it and creating an environment where the team

Scott Todaro (29:28)
No, it isn’t. And yeah, it’s quite fra-

Lisa Cole (29:47)
leans into wanting to focus and deliver against that strategic part. One of the things I’ve found that works really well is also making sure that they’re not operating in a silo, right? So how do you bring representatives from across all the marketing disciplines together and incentivize them to first understand how the business of marketing gets done? So thinking about an operational marketing plan, do we know how a campaign with multiple programs and tactics

gets from an idea out to market. Who does what across that entire workflow and then incentivize them to dramatically streamline or reimagine how that gets done. And by the way, through that process, extra bonus points if you figure out that along the way, maybe perhaps we should leverage strategic outsourcing for these components of this workflow, or perhaps we should use and embrace AI.

to automate, intelligently automate some of this repetitive work. So that the hackathons, just like outsourcing is not just for IT or HR or finance, the same thing is true for hackathons, right? So marketers, do you even know how this stuff gets out the door? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started work with a team and just genuinely asked in a listening tour.

Do you know who does what after you do your thing to get a campaign out the door? And more often than not, the next part of the team has no idea the various tasks that it’s taken to operationalize that plan before they got it. And they usually are not necessarily very aware of what happens once they complete their task. So that’s a good piece to start with. Hackathons are awesome.

Scott Todaro (31:36)
Yeah, it did.

Well, it’s interesting. I’ve done a couple of hackathons before in the past and you do come up with a lot of really good ideas, but you know, it’s interesting. What I will say is that sometimes you get so many ideas or you can’t execute them all. So one of the things that I always tell teams, they’ve got to do some ranking. And I think the other point that it’s really important that you made is that the teams are set up in silos. People are doing random acts of marketing. And as people become more specialized in marketing, it’s been tougher and tougher.

to get teams to work together to focus on what the goals are. And I can tell you that there are, you know, marketing teams out there that aren’t even looking at the company goals. I mean, we’ve run this thing called the operational marketing index. Only 39 % of marketers are setting their marketing goals based on the company goals. I always ask the same question. What are you doing? What are you doing that’s so special that you, got your own set of goals. You’re off here in the corner.

doing your own things. And, you know, this is why we say to look, if you’re so busy doing marketing and you have no idea how it’s working, okay. How about cutting a few campaigns and channels and taking the time to actually measure what you have. Right. So then you at least know what is working and you can actually explain it. And then you can do more of the stuff that’s working and cut the stuff that’s not. But if you’re not, then you just, you just don’t work and trying to look busy. And that’s just kind of a painful place to be. So

Lisa Cole (32:48)
Thank

Scott Todaro (33:02)
Talk about some key takeaways that you guys have for CMOs. What would you think are some things that they should be looking at implementing or ideating for 2025 as they’re going through that process over the next couple of months?

Lisa Cole (33:03)
you

If I just pick up on the last thing you just left off with, the answer to nearly every marketing problem or business challenge is rarely ever do more.

period, right? And so if in that experience, if they’re not quite sure how they’re performing or impacting, but rather than take a deep breath and measure what is out in market and how it’s performing and then make decisions from there, if instead they decide we need to do more in order to hit our numbers, you’re already in a less than zero position. The answer is likely not do more.

Dom Colasante (33:57)
I would add, I think as we go into planning season in the new year, do not be a victim to the budget that you’ve been given. I would argue having seen, I spend most of my time talking to CMOs and we work with lots of CMOs and great companies and oftentimes marketing does have enough budget to do what it needs to do.

Scott Todaro (33:57)
Good.

Lisa Cole (34:01)
We’ll there.

market.

Dom Colasante (34:26)
the budget just isn’t in the right place. It’s locked in headcount, not in program. It’s inflexible, so you can’t move it and adjust it as the business moves. You’ve gotta find a way to build flexibility, agility, and a lower cost operational engine into your marketing shop. Typically, we find that there’s usually 20 to 25 % of the total marketing budget that could be saved through some of the strategies we’re talking about today. That 20 to 25%, yeah, maybe some of that has to go to a budget give back.

but that creates new money, fuel, to push more money into the programs and into the campaigns and activities, which is what we all know are an underfunded element right now. And so you’ve got to think about how to free up resources within the boundaries that you have. And those kinds of decisions really put the marketer at a different level of credibility with the CEO and the CFO. And those are the kind of conditions that you can build on.

to then get more to do more, but you don’t start trying to do more. I think you need to evolve and iterate and optimize what’s already in your proverbial four walls and get that in a really high performing place.

Lisa Cole (35:41)
Scott, you mentioned something about the CEO CMO credibility problem, right? And the value of a CMO, the value of marketing. I can tell you it’s not wrapped up in how large your organization is or how large your budget is. And if you want to change the perception of marketing and change the perception of a CMO, the role of the CMO, try showing up and saying, I don’t want to hire more headcount.

Scott Todaro (35:41)
yet.

Lisa Cole (36:12)
I don’t want to necessarily redesign our website. I’m not asking that we go through a full rebrand. I am likely going to need your support and assistance to change the way that marketing invests dollars, to change the way that we are acting. So that might mean I might need your support when I reset our priorities. I might need your support when I meet with my peers and

and maybe perhaps reduce some of the lower value, lower impact activities so that I can invest more of our resources and capacity in these higher impact piece. That’s what I’ll need from you. I don’t need a larger budget. I don’t need a lot more headcount. I need your support in resetting what it is that we invest those things in.

Scott Todaro (36:59)
That’s fantastic. By the way, Lisa wrote the book, revenue ramp. You should go out there and go get it and read it. But it’s a lot of good stuff there. It’ll help you get up to speed. What I will say is the point that you guys both made on this, I think is an incredibly important one because as I’ve scaled teams, as I’ve gotten up to 35 people working for me, I lost complete visibility to what people were doing day in and day out. People have gotten so tactical that I had people on my team that just worked on

case studies and we already had like 105 case studies. It’s like, is 106 really going to drive any ROI for us? Right? I mean, this is the type of garbage that you work on. Everyone, we’ve to change the logo and the colors. We just did it two years ago. Is a new color really going to sell more product for us? And this is where I think marketers lose sight of what value they’re really adding to the operations. And I think you guys have brought up some excellent points here today. So for the final question, we always conclude with.

is what is the best piece of advice you can give for CMO or somebody that’s aspiring to be a CMO. Why don’t you go first?

Dom Colasante (38:08)
curiosity. Be incredibly curious about how the business works, how marketing works, what new models are in the market that you haven’t heard of that your peers are using. Be a lifetime learner. Our field and our profession is unfortunately or fortunately in rapid transformation and embrace that. you, if you, a lot of us have been CMOs.

Lisa Cole (38:22)
you

Dom Colasante (38:34)
you know, in previous roles or have kind of come up through one of the towers of marketing. what, know, what, what got you here? We’ll get you there to use another item, item. And I think learning something new and being willing to try something new and deploy something new, comes from that sort of inherent curiosity. that’s the skillset, to think about.

Scott Todaro (38:57)
Fantastic. Lisa, bring us home.

Lisa Cole (39:00)
Personally, think having a bias for action is incredibly important for CMOs today.

Scott Todaro (39:08)
I think, I think that is an excellent point. And I think the point that you guys made earlier, and I just want to reinforce it is that you are an executive first of the company and you happen to run marketing. So what is going to benefit the company? Cause at the end of the day, if you’re more profitable, that’s the ultimate measure. Your company is going to be worth more and you’re going to make more on your stock options as well as everybody else who keep people employed. and so these are the types of things you be, should be thinking about. What is the success of the business?

not the success of your marketing necessarily. You want to do it in context of how it’s supporting the business with the financial resources and the human resources that you have. So thank you both for your session today. Excellent points. Guys, you should go and talk to these two. If you get the opportunity, reach out, connect with them on LinkedIn. I think that they’ll, you will find an infinite amount of wisdom on ways that you can improve the business element.

of marketing and once you do that you’ll find that you’re speaking the language of the other executives and once you do that you’re to move from the back of the executive table to the front of the executive table. As you start thinking about shaping and driving revenue and not just counting the number of leads or impressions or influence marketing nobody cares about those numbers. They care about driving the business the efficiency of it driving revenue return on investment profit.

be thinking about these business metrics, LTV, those are the ones, CAC, those are the ones that are going to give you credibility at the table and be speaking the language of the other executives. hopefully we’ll see you on another podcast at some point in time. This was an excellent session. For those of you that aren’t part of the community, please join the next CMO community. is free, tons of information up there. And I look forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Thank you all.

Lisa Cole (41:05)
Thank you, Scott.

Dom Colasante (41:06)
Thanks, Scott.