The CMO Playbook: 5 Successful Exits, 1 Framework for Marketing Excellence with Scott Todaro

#5: Are you ready to elevate your B2B marketing leadership? In this episode of Growth Activated, Mandy Walker welcomes Scott Todaro, a seasoned Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of The Next CMO, to share the framework that has driven his five successful exits.

Scott dives into the core principles every CMO needs to succeed, from selecting the right companies and roles to aligning with executive teams for long-term marketing impact. He also shares actionable strategies for connecting B2B marketing goals to business objectives and building a 90-day roadmap for success in any organization.

Whether you’re an aspiring Chief Marketing Officer or a seasoned marketing leader, this episode is packed with insights to help you master the art of B2B marketing, track ROI, and balance creativity with operational excellence. Grab your notebook and hit play to learn from one of the best in the industry!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The three key criteria Scott uses to choose the right B2B marketing leadership roles
• How CMOs can align executive teams for measurable, long-term success
• Why many Chief Marketing Officers struggle to track ROI—and how to fix it
• A proven 90-day playbook for new CMOs entering high-stakes organizations
• How to balance creativity, strategy, and operational excellence in B2B marketing

Tune in and activate growth in your career as a marketing leader!

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Chapters

• 1:19 Introduction to Scott Todaro, 7X Marketing Leader and Author of The Next CMO
• 3:48 How to Choose the Right Company as a CMO
• 9:32 Scott Todaro's First 90-Day Playbook for CMOs
• 14:49 Go-to-Market Must-Haves: The Non-Negotiables
• 18:12 Transitioning Business Goals into Marketing Goals
• 34:34 Marketing Campaigns, Programs, and Projects Defined
• 41:43 Building a Partnership with Your CFO as the CMO
• 47:31 The Future of CMOs: Mastering Creativity and ROI
• 50:54 Closing Remarks: What's Next for Scott Todaro

Transcript

0:35 - Welcome to Growth Activated
Mandy introduces the podcast and her first guest, Scott Todaro, sharing how his book, The Next CMO, impacted her career.

Mandy: Hey everyone, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Walker, and I'm so thrilled to have you join me for this very special first guest episode. So today, I'm honored to welcome Scott Todaro, an executive, entrepreneur, author, and mentor to so many in the marketing community, including myself.A couple years ago, when I was transitioning into an executive marketing role, I discovered Scott's book, The Next CMO, A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence. And honestly, it was truly a game changer for me. I applied the principles in his book, combined them with my own experiences, and eventually earned a seat at the executive table. So having Scott here today as our very first guest feels like a full circle moment for me.Now, Scott has over 30 years of experience as a marketing leader driving growth for both B2B and B2C companies and has achieved five successful exits, four acquisitions, and one IPO. And so today we're diving into the strategies, principles, and mindset that have fueled his incredible career. So let's dive in. Hey Scott, it's so great to have you on the Growth Activated podcast here today.

Scott: It's great to be here, Mandy. Thanks for reaching out.

Mandy: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I know. I've shared this with you, but for all of our listeners, I just have to say you have been like the CMO mentor that I've never had. A couple of years ago, when I discovered The Next CMO book, I was an executive director at a really large company, and I had never had a CMO. It had been years since I had had a VP of marketing that I was reporting into, and your book really changed my career. I've probably read it three or four times since then, but I'm just so excited. So it feels very surreal and sort of full circle to have you as the first guest on my Growth Activated podcast.

Scott: I'm happy to be here, and those are kind words. I appreciate it. I'm not sure I've read the book three times, but—

Mandy: That's okay. I did the work for both of us, and I'm going to grill you on the questions today.

Scott: All right. Very good. Hopefully, I still have the answers.

3:04 - How to Choose the Right Company as a CMO
Scott shares his three critical criteria for selecting companies: product value, executive alignment, and role scope.

Mandy: Absolutely. Well, Scott, hey, look, you're obviously so incredibly successful as a CMO with over 30 years of experience. But one of the things that really sticks out to me is that you've had five successful exits over the duration of your career. And I would love to understand, what is your secret sauce? You know, how are you choosing these companies before you take on a role with them?

Scott: Yeah, I—well, Voodoo. I do a lot of Voodoo and so, or I'm very lucky. I have a lot of like horseshoes around my house and shamrocks and all kinds of other wonderful things. But seriously, the way that I always look at selecting a company is the first thing I always look at is the product. And when I look at the product, I look at it from the standpoint of, does the product have a strong value proposition that I can believe in?And the second thing is what is their position in the market? So I won't take a job unless I've done a lot of market analysis, and I—sadly enough, I coach a lot of CMOs, and they take jobs just because they want to become CMO. They want the title, and they're willing to take a job, you know, that probably isn't going to pan out, and they probably know that upfront, but they're so interested in becoming a CMO because it's a life goal of theirs and they know it's so hard to get an opportunity when you haven't done it before that they take it and they don't ask a lot of the tough questions.

Mandy: Totally.

6:30 - The Importance of Executive Alignment
Mandy and Scott discuss identifying executive alignment during interviews and the impact on marketing success.

Mandy: And Scott, I'm so curious to hear your perspective because I've interviewed for a lot of fractional roles this year, I've even interviewed for some full-time ones. And one of the things that has seemed really concerning to me is just the lack of executive alignment.That there is, at least the companies that I'm interviewing for, on what their primary goals are, what they're really focused on over the next year, whether it's related to marketing or not. But that has seemed like when I'm interviewing with the CFO or I'm interviewing with the CEO or the COO, it seems like there's really no clear vision. Do you work that into how you're vetting companies? Do you see that often?

Scott: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, the question I always ask is, what are the goals for this year?And I ask each one of the executives, what are the goals? If they're all in alignment of what the company goals are—not marketing goals, the company goals are—then I feel comfortable. I went to a company once, and I won't say which one because people probably know who the executives are on it, but literally I interviewed and none of the executives were on the same page.And so what I did in the first week there is I ran a positioning exercise, right? Where I brought all the executives in. It took us two full days, and we came up with two sentences as to who our target audience was, what was the benefit that we were offering and the pain that we were solving, what was the product and how are we gonna define it and how we were different than the competition. It took two full days.But once we got that nailed down, then it was easier to create the goals because we knew where we were going with what product. And then it was better to—it was so much easier just to build that plan off of those goals. And then four and a half years later, you know, they have this amazing IPO.

Mandy: Totally.

8:48 - Scott's First 90-Day Playbook for CMOs
Scott outlines a counterintuitive but essential approach: spending the first two months auditing the business and building a solid foundation.

Mandy: And I just sort of went into my next question, which was once you've decided, okay, this company has some promise, I'm excited, I want to join the team, what's your playbook for the first 90 days, six months? How can we all be like Scott when he enters an organization?

Scott: This is going to be wildly unpopular, but this is the truth. And the only reason why it's the truth is because I spent 32 years making mistakes until I got to the right—well, it probably took about 25 years of making mistakes before I got to the right mix.The reality is that you need to have the intestinal fortitude. And if you don't, don't take a CMO role. You need to have the intestinal fortitude to say to the CEO and to the CFO: when they say, "I need leads," the day you walk in, you're not walking in with a pocket full of leads that you can just spread on the table and say, "Here you go. I did it."The reality is that if they didn't have a CMO prior to this, and that means they're finally starting to figure out what marketing is. And if they did have a CMO prior to this, then that CMO got fired. Now, usually, when the CMO gets fired, it's because the CMO didn't do their homework coming into the company. They didn't fully understand the buyer and the product and the marketplace and all those other elements.They dove straight into a problem from trying to generate sales and tried to do lead generation without fully understanding those elements.

Mandy: Totally.

14:05 - Go-to-Market Must-Haves: The Non-Negotiables
Scott emphasizes ICP development, persona building, and assembling a strong team as the keys to executing a successful marketing plan.

Mandy: Are there certain sort of go-to-market core artifacts that you're like, these are non-negotiables that have to be done the very first thing after we do our plan, before we can even go start building a demand engine?

Scott: One of the things that you, when you do your audit, you should be putting together that target audience and those personas, and those should all come out as part of the work that you do when you do the analysis. So your planning should include your findings, and, you know, obviously, if there's debate, you can hash that out with the executive team because they've been there a while and you want to take their input.

17:28 - Translating Business Goals into Marketing Goals
Scott explains the three overarching marketing goals—awareness, perception, and sales—and how they align with company objectives.

Mandy: And I actually just was talking to a CMO the other day, and she was like, "Hey, can you help me with my goals for this year?" And she was sharing, "Okay, this is our company goal to grow revenue by this amount. It's going to come from here. And then here's our marketing goals."And it was like, we're going to send this many emails, and this is going to be our engagement rate, or we're going to post on social, and this is how many followers we're going to have. And I was like, how does that—where's the path there? It feels very tactical versus these great business goals you have. Walk us through how you think about actually, like in practice, taking a business goal and coming up with the right marketing goals.

Scott: It's really this simple. I mean, you are an executive, and you should be sitting on the executive team as they craft the company goals for the year. Now, if you look at the company goals, I can guarantee you between 60 and 100% of those company goals marketing is either going to own fully or have some responsibility for helping achieve. Here's a little secret, and I wrote it in the book, and I'm sure you've read this. There are actually only three marketing goals. That's it. Right. You're either looking to create awareness because no one knows who the heck you are. You're looking to shape perception so people have a positive opinion of you, or you're looking to sell. That's it.Now, there are tons of sub-goals. I can increase sales by selling more to my customers. I can do that by positioning or partnering. Lots of different ways that you can set up the goals for measurement. But start with those three. And when you go into the executive team meeting, really understand what the company's trying to accomplish.

26:46 - Balancing Long-Term Vision with Short-Term Goals
Strategies for balancing ambitious long-term goals like being "the best" in an industry with practical, measurable short-term wins.

Mandy: And I guess one of the other questions I run into with clients often is how do you recommend as marketing executives that we are balancing the long-term vision and goals with maybe the short-term goals that need to happen?As an example, I was just talking to a COO earlier this week who said, "You know, we want to be known as the best service provider in our industry." That feels like a long-term goal. That feels like something you're always working towards versus, you know, the revenue target we have for this year and how we're going to do it.And so would you recommend in that situation that we have that goal until we feel like we've achieved it in terms of being the best in our industry?

Scott: Sure. You can run long-term campaigns. They're going to run for years to try to create certain types of perception. I mean, companies have been doing this since the beginning of time. I mean, the Nike Just Do It campaign started in 1988, and we're still doing it, right?So it's worked, right? But what I'm saying is more so on this is that be looking at the execution of your goals. You talked about being the best. Well, the best is the best. Is it that I have the most revenue? Is it that I have the most customers? Is it the best by customer satisfaction ratings?

33:50 - Campaigns, Programs, and Projects Defined
Scott clarifies the differences between campaigns, programs, and projects and explains how to structure a marketing plan.

Mandy: Well, you talk about campaigns. I know that you've got sort of a hot button for how we use as marketing leaders, the word "campaign," and that we call everything a campaign. Share with us, what does a campaign mean to you, and how are we misusing it?

Scott: Well, we're misusing it because of the tech providers. And so I have the ultimate credibility in saying this because Peter and I were founders of Plana, which was a MarTech product. So I'm gonna throw a little shade at the tech industry because a lot of the products that you use today—HubSpot, Marketo—when they were building out those technologies, they were built by engineers.And those engineers actually didn't spend a lot of time talking to marketers. They try to figure out what they could build in the context of data and other things along those lines. And when they looked at sending an email, it was like, "Oh, this is too wimpy to call it an activity. Let's call it a campaign."

40:59 - Building a Partnership with Your CFO
Tips for aligning with your CFO, communicating ROI effectively, and positioning marketing as a critical driver of business success.

Mandy: What advice would you have for marketing leaders or marketing executives that don't have a strong rapport with their CFO or whoever's approving their investment in their organization to even get these investments approved?

Scott: Well, then I would say you've done messed up. The reality is that you need to partner with the CFO. It's like, "But they're so scary, and they control my money." And it's like, you know what happens? A lot of CMOs try to avoid their CFO.

46:47 - The Future of CMOs: Mastering Creativity and ROI
Scott discusses the evolving role of CMOs and why blending creativity with analytical skills is essential for the next generation of marketing leaders.

Mandy: When you think about the next generation of CMOs, what are you seeing? Are you seeing that this is gonna be a really critical element for people to master in order for them to hold onto their jobs?

Scott: Well, obviously, you gotta do the ROI stuff, but you brought up the creativity stuff, and it's not an either-or. And I think when you hear the either-or, then that CMO is an either-or person, right?

50:10 - What's Next for Scott Todaro
Scott shares his current projects, including teaching, coaching, and running the Next CMO community.

Mandy: Well, that's awesome, Scott. And thank you so much for the time today. What's next for you? Where can people find you? Are you joining any new hot startups here soon?

Scott: No, no, I'm winding down. It's my time to give back. I'm teaching now at Babson College and at the University of Massachusetts. So it's great to interact with graduate and undergraduate students. As I'm getting older now, it's great to be around young people.

51:07 - Closing Remarks
Mandy wraps up with key takeaways and an invitation to subscribe, review, and share the episode.

Mandy: All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast with Scott. I know I personally had a lot of great takeaways and things I will be implementing with my clients, and I hope you did too. As always, thank you for tuning into Growth Activated.If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with your network. And in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your business. See you next time.