When a New CMO Takes Over
You may feel secure in a specific client relationship. The communication is good, they let you lead, and they’ve been with you for seven years. They even let you manage an annual planning session for every upcoming year.
In spite of all that, you can still lose that account in three ways, none of which afford you any control whatsoever:
- Your client is acquired. What makes this worse is that you won’t even hear about it until the deal is done.
- Someone in Purchasing decides to do a vendor consolidation to whittle the list of agencies down from 28 to 6, and you don’t make the cut, even when your client-side contacts are fighting hard for you.
- The CMO (or CISO or Product Lead or whoever) moves on to another job or is dismissed, and suddenly you’re left with a new decision maker to impress.
This last scenario is the one I’m talking about in this week’s article, and I’d like to suggest a different way to handle it.
The Good News
There are two pieces of good news here.
The first is that you might actually pick up a new client by following that decision maker to their new gig. This happens a lot, and it’s actually the primary way firms without a good new business plan get away with not having one. Note that this happens more frequently when your specialization is vertical.
The second piece of good news is that nothing is likely to happen overnight, and so you’ll likely have some time to react and plan. Soon after that new CMO moves into their new office, you’ll get some early indications of whether or not you are the “advantaged player” as we talked about in a recent 2 Bobs episode.
The Bad News
Well, stay tuned for a few words from Captain Obvious, here. Sure, you might lose the account, but the odd thing is that it might have nothing to do with the quality of the work you’ve been doing, but only because the new dog wants to walk around the yard’s perimeter and pee on all the rocks and plants and put his own mark on things.
My Suggestion When the New CMO Emerges
I want to suggest something, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to strike you as an overreaction. You may want to keep your head down and hope for the best. As they say in battle, when the bullets start flying, you don’t want to be one of the officers sitting high on his horse, an easy shot for the enemy, but one of the lowly troops who blends in on the ground.
That’s the wrong approach, though, because you literally have very little to lose…and you’ll never have a better opportunity to reset the relationship than right now. So here’s a brief note. Make it your own, but only deliver it by email if you aren’t successful in securing an in-person meeting. That would be so much better than a written note:
Dearest All Powerful CMO,
We’re excited for the opportunity to get to know you and your plans for the company. We are also aware that you may have a preference for whichever firms support your efforts, and we really don’t want you to “inherit” this relationship, sort of like a newer General Manager who is just hired inherits an existing Head Coach.
All that to say that we want this relationship to be your choice, and if you have other plans for the company and want to install your own choice of marketing firms, just let us know and we’ll do everything we can to smooth that transition in a respectful manner.
To be clear, we still very much want to work in the same capacity. In fact, we would like to re-suggest some things that were rejected earlier. Things that we think might have staved off the breakdown between the previous CMO and the company.
Either way, we stand ready to make your job easier and to lead in thoughtful, unselfish ways. Once things settle down, let us know if you’d be willing to chat about this and hear our ideas.
Our very best wishes to you!
That’s it. But do it in person if you can, and only in writing if you can’t get an audience.
The decision is in this new CMO’s hands. All you’re doing is acknowledging it.
Your Natural Reaction
Some of you are going to think this is stupid, and it might be. But let’s assume the new CMO wants to keep using you. You don’t think they’ll love this? Or let’s assume that the new CMO is planning to fire you. Might this not give them pause?
Quit being fearful and needy. Act confidently like you know what you’re doing and have options, and the universe will smile.
And even if the new CMO fires your firm, they might change their mind when they discover how dang incompetent the new firm is. So make it easy for them to come back to you, without any regrets.
