What Managing Partners Should Expect From a Chief Marketing Officer

Law firms increasingly say they want strategic chief marketing officers. They want marketing leaders who understand growth, challenge assumptions, bring greater commercial discipline to business development and help the partnership make better decisions about where to compete.

Yet many firms continue to manage the CMO as though the role were primarily responsible for fulfilling requests.

A partner wants an event. A practice wants a campaign. Another group wants to enter a directory, pursue a sponsorship or develop a new market. The requests arrive individually, each with a reasonable rationale and often with an influential partner behind it. Marketing responds.

Then, at the leadership level, the managing partner asks a much bigger question: Why isn't our marketing more strategic?

There is an uncomfortable contradiction here.

A firm cannot expect its CMO to behave like a strategic adviser while treating the marketing function like an internal service desk.

If managing partners want more from the role, they should expect more than excellent execution. They should expect commercial judgment, client intelligence, portfolio discipline and, occasionally, disagreement.

But those expectations come with a corresponding obligation. A CMO cannot meaningfully help shape the firm's commercial strategy if they are invited into the conversation only after the important decisions have already been made.

Expect A Point of View, Not Just a Plan

One of the most valuable things a CMO can bring to firm leadership is an informed point of view about where the firm should—and should not—invest.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it can be difficult in a partnership.

Law firms contain many legitimate constituencies. Practices have different ambitions.

Partners have individual relationships and business-development priorities. Offices operate in different markets. New opportunities continually emerge.

The easiest response for marketing is to accommodate as many of those priorities as possible.

The more strategic response is sometimes to challenge them.

If three practices want to reach essentially the same group of clients through three different initiatives, the CMO should be asking whether the firm needs three programs or one stronger proposition.

If a practice wants to enter a new market, the CMO should be able to ask whether the firm has sufficient client demand, competitive differentiation and credibility to justify the investment.

If a sponsorship has renewed for years largely because it has always renewed, the CMO should be willing to question it.

And if leadership identifies five new priorities without retiring any existing ones, the CMO should be able to point out that the firm's resources have not expanded simply because its ambitions have.

This is not the CMO obstructing partners.

It is the CMO doing the job at an executive level.

Managing partners should therefore be cautious about evaluating senior marketing leaders primarily on responsiveness. A highly responsive marketing department can become very good at executing requests while doing relatively little to advance a coherent firmwide strategy.

The better measure is the quality of the choices the CMO helps the firm make.

Expect The CMO To Tell Leadership What Clients Are Saying

Law firms possess enormous amounts of client knowledge. The challenge is that much of it sits inside individual relationships.

Partners know their clients exceptionally well. What they may see less clearly are patterns developing across the firm's client base.

That is where the CMO can provide a different kind of intelligence.

Client interviews, pitch feedback, business-development data, market research and conversations across practices can reveal themes that no individual partner is positioned to see alone.

Perhaps several clients are raising similar concerns about pricing. Perhaps an industry the firm has historically treated as secondary is generating opportunities across multiple practices. Perhaps a major institutional relationship is narrower than revenue figures suggest because most of the work still depends on one partner. Perhaps clients increasingly associate the firm with an expertise that leadership has never considered a strategic differentiator.

Those signals should not remain inside marketing reports.

They should reach firm leadership.

A sophisticated CMO should be able to walk into a management meeting and say, in effect: Here is what the market appears to be telling us, here is where it differs from our internal assumptions, and here is what I believe we should do about it.

That last part matters.

Information without interpretation is reporting.

Executive leadership requires judgment.

Managing partners should expect their CMO to connect what clients are saying with decisions about growth, positioning and investment—even when the message is uncomfortable.

Expect Portfolio Discipline

Most law-firm business-development decisions are individually rational.

The problem appears in aggregate.

One practice sponsors an event. Another launches a thought-leadership series. A third develops an industry initiative. Several partners pursue overlapping organizations independently. None of these decisions is necessarily wrong.

Together, however, they may produce a commercial portfolio that is fragmented, expensive and difficult for the market to understand.

The CMO occupies an unusual position because the role can see across those individual activities.

That perspective should be used.

Rather than simply administering the firm's collection of marketing and business-development initiatives, the CMO should help leadership evaluate the portfolio as a whole.

Where is the firm investing disproportionately?

Where is it spreading resources too thinly?

Which practices are pursuing the same buyers independently?

Which initiatives reinforce the firm's strategic priorities, and which exist largely because someone requested them?

Where could several disconnected activities become one stronger market position?

This is particularly important in partnerships because no individual practice leader is responsible for optimizing the firm's entire commercial portfolio. Practice leaders are appropriately focused on their own businesses.

Someone must look across them.

The CMO should be one of those people.

Expect A Connection Between Activity And Commercial Outcomes

Managing partners should also expect the conversation with their CMO to extend beyond marketing activity.

Events held, articles published, pitches submitted, website traffic and media coverage can all be useful measures. They are not, by themselves, evidence of commercial progress.

At the same time, reducing every marketing investment to immediately attributable revenue would be equally misguided. Legal services have complex buying cycles. Reputation compounds over time. Relationships may develop for years before producing a significant mandate.

The answer is not simplistic attribution.

It is commercial accountability.

The CMO should be able to help leadership understand whether the firm's investments are strengthening the relationships, markets and capabilities the strategy says matter.

Are priority clients expanding their relationships with the firm?

Are more practices entering those relationships?

Where is the firm winning and losing competitive pitches?

Which industries are generating meaningful opportunity?

Are major sponsorships creating access to the people the firm intended to reach?

Is the firm becoming known for the expertise it has deliberately chosen to emphasize?

These questions move the conversation from What did marketing produce? to What is changing in the business?

That is where a CMO should be operating.

Expect Constructive Dissent

Perhaps the most underappreciated expectation managing partners should have of a senior CMO is the willingness to disagree.

This is difficult in any organization. It can be particularly difficult in a partnership, where senior marketers may be advising the same partners whose requests their teams are expected to support.

But a CMO who never disagrees with leadership is providing only part of the value of the role.

Sometimes the most useful advice will be that a proposed market is not as attractive as leadership believes.

Or that the firm does not yet have sufficient differentiation to credibly claim a particular position.

Or that two practices are competing for the same audience when they should be approaching it together.

Or simply that the firm is trying to do too much.

Managing partners do not need a CMO who reflexively says no. They need one who understands the difference between an obstacle and a trade-off.

The point of having a senior commercial adviser in the room is not to receive enthusiastic validation of every idea. It is to improve the quality of the decision.

That requires enough trust for disagreement to be useful rather than political.

What The Managing Partner Owes The CMO

There is another side to this relationship.

If managing partners expect commercial judgment from the CMO, they have to provide the conditions necessary for that judgment to develop.

First, the CMO needs information.

It is difficult to advise on growth without understanding financial performance, client concentration, pipeline, pricing dynamics and the firm's strategic priorities. A marketing leader who sees only marketing data will inevitably provide marketing answers.

Second, the CMO needs early access.

Bringing marketing into a discussion after leadership has decided to enter a market, launch a service or pursue an initiative allows the function to influence execution. It does not allow it to influence the decision.

If the firm genuinely wants the CMO's perspective, that perspective has to be present while options are still open.

Third, the CMO needs a firmwide mandate.

If every individual partner request automatically becomes a marketing priority, there is little practical ability to concentrate resources behind the priorities leadership says matter most.

Managing partners do not need to remove partner autonomy. They do need to make clear when firmwide priorities take precedence.

Finally, the CMO needs permission to challenge assumptions.

That may be the hardest condition to create because it cannot be established through an organizational chart. It depends on the relationship between leadership and the CMO.

If disagreement is interpreted as a lack of support, the rational response is compliance.

If thoughtful disagreement is valued, the firm gains an adviser.

The Real Test Of A Strategic CMO

The evolution of the CMO role is sometimes framed as a question of whether marketing deserves a seat at the leadership table.

That is the wrong question.

A title does not make a role strategic. Neither does attendance at executive meetings.

The real question is what leadership expects the CMO to contribute once they are there.

If the expectation is primarily updates on campaigns, events, communications and partner requests, the firm has a senior marketing executive.

If the expectation is a point of view on clients, markets, growth priorities, competitive positioning and where the firm should concentrate scarce resources, the role has become something more consequential: a commercial adviser to leadership.

That distinction matters because law firms do not need more activity for its own sake. Most already have more opportunities than they can pursue well.

They need better choices.

A strong CMO should help make those choices. They should bring information into the room that leadership does not otherwise have, connect patterns across practices that individual partners cannot easily see and be willing to challenge investments that no longer serve the firm's strategy.

Managing partners should expect that standard.

But they should also recognize what it requires from them.

You cannot ask a CMO for commercial judgment while withholding commercial information. You cannot ask for firmwide prioritization while allowing every request to become a priority. And you cannot ask for strategic counsel if the strategy is already settled before the CMO enters the room.

If the first question leadership asks its CMO is how to market a decision that has already been made, it has engaged the role too late.

Read more by Janita Pannu on Law360 Canada