Intelligent Agility Is The New Black For Today's CMO

Life as a B2B startup CMO is not for the faint of heart. Markets and circumstances can change in the blink of an eye due to competitive threats, changing macroeconomic environments and windows of opportunity opening and closing. It is critical to develop the ability and agility to see what’s coming, quickly assess situations and respond with a plan of attack that doesn’t derail your overall strategy. In other words, speed and intelligent agility is the new black. Your marketing teams have to move quickly and keep the trains running on your integrated programs, including demand generation, product marketing, PR, social and more. Recently, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arose for my company when IBM announced the end of life of its CLM Emptoris product and those customers were forced to move to a new solution. We could either let the opportunity pass by or rally our team to jump on it. We did the latter by showing Emptoris customers that our offering could solve their age-old problem. This is just one example of having to be agile and intelligent. Had we not reacted, we would have missed a golden opportunity.