CGO Career Path

The most natural career path for marketers is to move from a Director of Marketing to VP or a CMO position. This is the obvious path. Less obvious is what comes next. Where do you go from CMO?

The most natural path is to evolve into the Chief Growth Officer for organizations (Note: A Chief Growth Officer is not the same as a CRO).

Chief Growth Officers bring together Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success to work on the biggest growth levers of a business.

While you could argue this is the role of the CEO, as organizations grow the CEO transitions his or her efforts to leading bigger picture items like Vision, Culture, M&A, Investor Relations and more. This typically happens as companies cross the $10M ARR mark.

This leaves a gap in the organization -- whose responsibility is it to lead the overall growth strategy of the organization?

The answer to this question is a CMO who can think about strategy at the highest level across functions and bring people in the organization together to execute.

CMOs are better positioned to execute on the role of the Chief Growth Officer than any other role because they are connected to the market, customers, product, sales and customer success already.

To learn more about hiring CGOs, CMOs and other marketing leaders for PE-backed companies, take a look at our full article: How to Hire Marketing Leaders for PE-Backed Companies.