Building the Moat and Taming the Metric: Why Being a Good Marketer Means More Than Catching the Ball
Charleston, SC, with its four centuries of history, is a city where every cobblestone and piazza seems to hold a story. It felt like the perfect, evocative setting for a Go-to-Market (GTM) conversation focused on one thing: the C-suite’s true expectations for their marketing leaders. These expectations go beyond next quarter’s tactics and are grounded in the complex, decades-long history of modern marketing itself.
We were there to unpack a fundamental question that every marketing leader is eager to know the answer to: What does senior leadership truly expect from their marketing teams? As the energy of the discussion with two CEOs (Eric Westerkamp of CaliberMind and Andrei Papancea of NLX) and two COOs (Bjorn Hovland of CIQ and Trevor Morgan of OpenDrives) settled in the quiet Dewberry hotel walled garden, the complexity of that question became profoundly clear.
The disconnect between marketers and the rest of the executive suite is palpable across the industry. Why does the average CMO tenure barely scratch two years? Why, as Gartner noted, has their role become a nexus of overlapping responsibilities, making them a “chief alignment officer” by default?
I came in expecting to hear about revenue. And I did, of course. Trevor Morgan from OpenDrives was justifiably pragmatic. “The end goal of marketing… is going to be revenue generation,” he stated, but he immediately layered it with nuance. It is never about a single action, but rather about creating a journey: visibility, awareness, demand, and finally, a transaction. The rest of the panel nodded in consensus. Revenue was the destination, the undisputed North Star.
But as the conversation unfolded, that star began to look more like a complex constellation. Eric Westerkamp, the CEO of CaliberMind who lives and breathes data, admitted his own perspective had shifted. He spoke of the brand, not as a fuzzy concept, but as a long-term investment that builds a “moat” around the company. He described it as a force that lowers the marginal customer acquisition cost over time. The more people know you and what you stand for, the less you have to spend convincing them to take the first step. Andrei Papancea from NLX added another intangible layer: “market presence,” the feeling that your company is larger and more impactful than its headcount might suggest. Well, punching above your weight class is a mighty marketing goal to accomplish that I have always put front and center in all of my previous roles.
It became clear that the expectation wasn’t just a number on a spreadsheet. It went beyond that and extended to building an asset, a reputation that pays dividends for years, and a marketer’s ability to tell a story to their own stakeholders of what they are doing, why, and how it is manifesting in the results. And this is where the first crack in the foundation appeared. How do you measure a moat? How do you quantify a presence?
Why Marketing Misses the Target
The conversation then turned to why marketing so often seems to miss this moving target. I expected to hear about poor execution or bad hires, but the reasons they gave were far more insightful. Bjorn Hovland, COO of CIQ, gave the most empathetic answer that, in my mind, validated every single marketing leader out there: “Marketing is hard. It is a hard job!” And that is truly so. Marketing is often named the most dynamic function within the C-suite as it unites, in its representation, so many distinctly different functions within it: communications, graphic design and creative, performance, operations, revenue, data, and analytics. No other function has that much role diversity within the same team – with all roles needing to come together in a holistic and measurable way.
Eric Westerkamp, CaliberMind’s CEO, brought up another point – what he called the “playbook problem.” He sees it often with his CMO customers: a new leader comes in and executes the playbook that worked wonders at their last company, failing to see that they’re now in a different market, at a different stage, talking to a different audience. They run the plays perfectly, but for the wrong game.
Then came the stories of what actually works. It wasn’t a grand strategy (and I knew such a thing didn’t exist). Instead, it was grit: that relentless and tedious ability to iterate and evolve. Bjorn laughed as he recounted an ad campaign where they’d mistakenly used a bizarre, ominous-looking photo of a pointing finger. He was furious. That ad outperformed every other polished, perfectly crafted creative by a factor of many. “I guess we should do more finger-pointing,” he shrugged, a smile playing on his lips. His point was profound: there are no awards for being perfect when you’re about to run out of money. The market rewards speed and the willingness to test, to be wrong, to look a little silly, and to follow the data, no matter how strange it seems.
The Star Receiver and the Betting Table
That’s when Trevor dropped the metaphor that tied everything together. He said that marketing can be like a star receiver who catches every single ball thrown his way, but that doesn’t necessarily win the game.
His words hung in the air. Marketing could be generating leads, building a brand, and creating a presence with flawless execution. They could be catching every ball. But they are at a betting table every single day. What worked yesterday might not work today. We bet on futures and hope that our odds are favorable based on previous history. But sometimes, the perfect handoff to sales might be fumbled. The product we’re marketing might not align with the message. The rest of the organization might be looking at us and simply saying, “Do your thing, and then we’ll sell,” creating a chasm where a bridge should be.
And this chasm, in my mind, reflects the true nature of the problem – which is rarely just in Marketing. It often expands to the collaboration across the GTM teams, and how well lines of communication between those teams are working, and how aligned their KPIs are. And business is always a team sport where every player must pull in the same direction.
Eric mentioned working with organizations where the analytics teams have incredible data, but the CMO and other executives aren’t listening. They’re too busy running their playbook. The data sits in a silo – a treasure map with no one to read it. They’re all so busy executing their individual functions that they forget to stop, measure, and analyze the entire journey as a single, unified flow across the entire GTM team. How can you align the team if no one can see the whole field? How can you adapt the plan if you can’t tell which plays are actually moving the ball forward?
Marketing is the True Alignment Officer
The final question I asked them—who they would hire as their first marketer—suddenly made perfect sense in its lack of consensus. Trevor wanted a generalist, a “Swiss Army knife.” Bjorn countered, arguing for a demand generation specialist who could execute and test channels at lightning speed while the founder still owned the core message. Andrei wanted the hungry veteran, someone who’d built the plumbing before and was eager to do it again, bigger and better.
What they were describing was not just different types of a marketing skillset but rather finding the right type of marketer for the stage at which the company they will be working for is at. So as I listened to them, I realized that without defining what marketing success looks like early on—and setting expectations on how it will be measured—any company could hire a Navy SEAL, a Swiss Army knife, and a seasoned genius, and all three could fail.
And this failure will be the result of a lack of communication, the inability to tell the story of how marketing is impacting the business (the story that so many marketers struggle with), and a lack of collaboration with other GTM functions based on a single source of truth. No single person, no matter how talented, can manually connect every touchpoint, translate data between departments, and give the entire company a shared, undeniable picture of what is truly driving the business forward.
And this is the best-kept marketing secret that the Chief Alignment Officer figured out early on. It’s rooted in their ability to see and socialize internally the complete path from a stranger’s first curious click to a customer’s signature on a renewal—and tell that story to the rest of the business to help them amplify it through the right channels, take the right action, and scale it. Without that, you’re just a collection of talented players, each catching their own ball, hoping it’s enough to win the game.
