Greg Welch leads the marketing, sales and communications practices at Spencer Stuart, and has spent two decades placing chief marketing officers. His shorthand for the swing the discipline has taken is poets and plumbers: creative, artistic marketing at one end, and data at the other.
The uncomfortable observation he offers from inside those conversations is about what senior marketers spend their attention on. Asked to name their five most important initiatives, many name things that do not produce growth.
Key findings
- Welch describes the search process in numbers rather than in principle. A typical mandate reviews between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty profiles, speaks to sixty or eighty of them, and meets around twenty.
- The funnel narrows to four or five candidates presented and two or three finalists, over roughly fifteen to twenty weeks. He is explicit that nobody clears the criteria completely.
- A large part of the work is managing the client rather than the market: keeping expectations aligned to what the market will actually yield, on location and on cost, and stopping the decision becoming a popularity contest.
- Welch is candid that most of his days are spent delivering bad news, and that he keeps the letters people wrote back after he did. The ones he values are from candidates thanking him for being straight with them.
- He also names a prediction of his own that did not come true. He bet that marketers would become chief executives, and says plainly that it has not played out the way he expected.
Where Da Vinci came from
The origin of the phrase is specific and slightly absurd. Welch had come out of a breakfast session on the attributes a future marketing leader needs, walked up the steps, and saw a restaurant sign while in the middle of reading a biography of Leonardo.
What the book gave him was the half of Leonardo that is not the painting. He was an engineer, an inventor and an architect, and held both registers at once.
The part Welch turns into the analogy is the anatomy. Leonardo dissected bodies to understand what was under the surface before he modeled it, and the parallel he draws is with understanding what is actually moving a customer rather than what they present.
His observation about who does the job well is that they sit in the middle of the range rather than at either end of it, and that they are leaders before they are specialists.
The book that was early
Welch co-wrote a book on the conscious corporation roughly a decade before the conversation, and describes the premise as a hunch that people were beginning to buy on criteria that had nothing to do with the product.
He is careful not to overclaim it, and calls it early work whose subject is only now playing out.
The letter that landed on every chief executive’s desk
The interviewer traces the movement through three markers: the annual letter from a very large asset manager, the American Business Roundtable restating the purpose of a corporation after decades, and Davos.
What made the letter bite, in his telling, is that it made investment conditional on a strategy for the other stakeholders rather than merely encouraging one.
Welch’s reading is about the mechanism rather than the sentiment. A commitment to withdraw from companies deriving a set share of revenue from thermal coal produced immediate effects because it obliged an answer from every communications and investor relations team.
The question he thinks it forces on marketers is the blunt one, and he says he likes watching them ask it of themselves.
The chair is not held for long
Welch puts average tenure at forty four or forty five months, and draws a practical conclusion from it rather than a lament. A marketing leader is a caretaker for one chapter and has to move quickly.
What he wants that caretaker to do with the time is not to harvest it. The marketers he admires are planting things intended to be thriving after they have gone.
The same logic applies to the crisis then underway. His expectation was that the market would forgive the quarter and judge the plan for coming out of it.
What the CMO’s peers say when nobody is in the room
The most useful thing in the conversation is a question Welch asks during a search. He sits with the heads of supply chain, operations and finance and asks what they want from their marketing partner that they are not getting.
His advice to a marketer arriving in the job follows from what those answers usually contain. Time with the peer group outranks time on the marketing in the first stretch, because without those relationships you will not know what is happening.
He is careful that this is not capitulation. The obligation runs both ways, and part of the job is making the peers understand the marketer’s constraints too.
The attribute he would lift to the top of the profile is collaboration, and the way he defines it is by indifference to credit.
The interviewer supplies the supporting research: effectiveness and tenure both correlate with the number of productive relationships a marketing leader holds across the executive committee, and the most common stated reason for failure is misaligned expectations with the chief executive.
Round yourself out early, because later is harder
Welch’s regret about the most senior marketers he meets is that the breadth was never built. His advice is aimed at people who still have time to get it.
What is expanding instead is the job itself. Customer service and e-commerce are being pulled into the role, and he treats that as access to the evidence rather than as a land grab.
A board that hired without shaking a hand
Welch reports completing a chief executive search entirely remotely. Interviewing by video was already routine for him. A nominating committee appointing a chief executive without ever meeting the person was not.
His practical advice to anyone being assessed this way is to stop relying on the interviewer’s questions and supply the case yourself, before or after the meeting.
What clients are looking for underneath the record, he says, is what a candidate’s peers would say about them.
What good looked like that spring
Welch lists the responses he had noticed, and they are all operational rather than promotional: a retailer reimbursing employees who ate at local restaurants, a technology company continuing to pay hourly campus staff who could not come in, a manufacturer converting production to hand sanitiser.
He also tracks how the marketing conversation itself moved over about five weeks, from whether to speak at all, through fear for the business, to how the company should show up.
The leadership he singles out is a chief executive’s video message to a company in serious trouble, which he describes as visibly costly to deliver.
Scope and limitations
This is a search consultant’s account of his own market, recorded in 2020. The figures for search volumes and tenure are his working numbers rather than published research, and the roll call of companies handling the crisis well is what he had noticed at the time, offered alongside a hope rather than a finding.
Source
This page summarises HGS #8: Greg Welch (Global Marketing Leader, Spencer Stuart) on how the best marketers drive growth, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2020-05-26.