Not Only Calls: The CMO On Demand Service

From the Editor
Netpeak co-founder Andrei Chumachenko has worked at Netpeak for over 17 years without burning out. One of his secrets is to change work, instead of changing jobs. After seven years of working as a CMO, Andrey decided to start a new service, and this service will soon be one year old.

Here is a first-person account from Andrei, our Chief Marketing Officer on demand. He talks about the kind of specialist he is, how he works, and his insights and unexpected discoveries.

What is an on-demand Chief Marketing Officer?

A marketing director on demand is a top-level marketing professional who does the job of CMO for a particular business on an hourly basis. The key difference here is that an on-demand CMO is a part-time consultant. Nevertheless, the experience and knowledge offered by this consultant are invaluable in growing your business.

You need a CMO on demand in three situations:

1. Your company already has a CMO, but you want to further their potential. In this case, the consultant works with the in-house marketer and helps them advance.
2. There is a marketing team, but no manager for this team. A consultant helps to find a suitable manager and set up processes. Even after the consultant leaves, the team will continue to progress on the right track.
3. The business does not do any marketing as such, but there is a clear understanding that it is time to start. In this case, before building any processes, a CMO consultant analyzes the business, identifies the most effective marketing channels, creates a portrait of the marketer, helps to find this person, and sets up their duties. There is a lot of work to be done; you have to conduct interviews, hire a marketer, wait until they pass the probation period, build a team, and work together with them.

In my experience, the third type of request is the most frequent and interesting situation I encounter as an on-demand CMO. It is in line with my own goal, which is to work with interesting businesses to produce impactful results and satisfied clients.

How is an on-demand CMO different from a traditional agency?

When you hire a marketing agency, they are ready to provide you with a specific range of services, and in return, they expect a clear list of tasks from you.

The main service of a consultant is different. As a chief marketing officer on demand, I will study your business to improve it and build effective processes. I can help set goals, break goals down into tasks, and support the team in becoming familiar with internal processes during implementation.

Not only that, continuity is key with an on-demand CMO service. The right consultant (and I humbly refer to myself as such) builds their work in such a way that they can leave the project at any time and the business will still keep flourishing.

Benefits of an on-demand CMO

My background includes many years of work as a marketing director at the Netpeak agency. All this experience can be utilized to benefit the client's business.

On that note, I often find the experience of failure helpful as well. It allows me to say, "Yes, I don't know your business in detail yet, but it didn't work for us. Here's why. Whereas, this is probably going to work, and here's why."

Experiencing failure has also taught me to take a broader view of processes, both to scale them and see them from a wider perspective. Now, when I create an ideal portrait of a marketer, I always divide the required skills into three blocks:

1. Skills required right now, e.g., building analytics reports, promoting websites, working in Google Ads.
2. Skills that would be a plus, e.g., experience with Google DataStudio.
3. Skills to be learnt later: these should be mastered in the next six to twelve months.

Another important advantage is independence. I am not threatened by losing my job or a conflict with the sales team. That is why my evaluation is as objective as possible.

What services does an on-demand CMO provide?

I prefer to work with a marketing specialist on the team. If you don't have one, the first thing we will do is hire one. Then, we will work together to develop and achieve the client's goals through tasks such as creating a marketing plan, setting KPIs, and so on.

By the way, I do not like the phrase "marketing strategy". The typical marketing strategy tends to be a mix of many different approaches and opinions. It often presents itself as a huge document with numerous visualizations and general thoughts. It takes a lot of time to create this document, and then only 30% of it is used within a year, at best.

A marketing plan works much better. It's a Google spreadsheet containing the following columns:

• top marketing goals for the year;
• subgoals by which the top goals can be achieved;
• key results;
• definition of “done”, i.e., what is considered an accomplished subgoal;
• a list of tasks into which the subgoals are broken down.

Apart from a marketing plan, we will also make a Gantt chart, where deadlines are specified for each task. Ideally, budgets are included.

How do I work?

In addition to the strategic tasks that I do at Netpeak Agency as a managing partner, I have two other authoring projects that I love. I write weekly posts on my Telegram channel Sad But True and release interviews with Ukrainian entrepreneurs on the Let's Try It? podcast once a month.

All of this takes up about 50 hours a month, and I allocate the other 90 to 100 hours to consulting work with clients.

To dive into the details of a business and thoroughly evaluate the results, I need to spend at least 20 to 25 hours per month on a project. So, I take on no more than four consulting clients at a time. As a boutique service, it may not be very scalable, but I will be able to give my clients the full attention and the time that they need. That way, I can be confident about the results that I provide.

At the same time, my clients' businesses are all different. There is an outsourcing company, a premium car seller, a grocery company, and a seed auction. They require vastly different approaches, and this makes the projects interesting.

Normally, my work is divided into several stages:

1. Interview. I prepare a list of 10 to 20 questions and talk to the business funder and/or CEO. If there is a marketing director, I also talk to them. The questions (and most importantly, the answers) allow me to dive deeper into the problems and tasks of the business.
2. Discovery. I study the business in as much detail as possible to understand everything that it is through internal research, analytics, and CRM. I figure out what happens on the website, how the funnel works, and how the sales process is arranged. Basically, I carry out a marketing audit.
3. Assembling a team. I create a portrait of the right marketer and find them. Then, I help set up an in-house or outsourced team that will work to achieve the goals we have set.
4. Building processes and providing support to achieve the goals. I create a marketing plan and its defense. I also plan sprints and reports, establish an incentive system based on KPIs, and ensure task fulfillment.

It is a step-by-step process – if something is already set up and it works, we will proceed to the next stage. For example, one of my clients had Trello set up, weekly sprints meetings going, and reports in Google spreadsheets established even before they started working with me. All I had to do was fine-tune their processes and then set, organize, and complete the tasks.

What processes does the on-demand CMO consultant take part in?

I will be involved in all the marketing processes, as well as elements of the sales and lead generation processes. I go through the entire funnel and study each stage. I look at what happens with the client in the CRM, and I analyze or create a system of reasons for refusals, the concept of targeted and non-targeted requests, and so on. I also set up mutual verification of results between the marketing and sales teams.

Other things I check:

• Analytics (always) – what's going on with traffic and its sources.
• Cohort analysis (if built) – how marketing affects the business.
• KPIs used by the marketer and the incentive system based on these KPIs.

Interviews and business research usually take me about a month, or 20 to 35 hours, depending on the business. Therefore, changes in the workflow are made only in the second month. It takes at least three months to see the initial results. In general, I recommend planning a collaboration for at least six months for optimal results.

Once again, let me reiterate the main idea I've been conveying throughout the whole text: all businesses are different. Businesses have different goals, markets, objectives, clients, and teams. All of them are at different levels of development and ambition.

There is no answer to the question, “What should my CMO do to achieve the goals?” until the consultant understands the business. Similarly, there is no answer to the question, “When will there be an increase in applications?” until there is a marketing plan. And there is still no answer to many things – you need to explore, research, hypothesize, and test. But the results make it worth the wait.