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A star manager at the price of an executive



Ask any CEO the one thing he would kill for and he will say automatically: “fast growth on low cash and even lower risk.” Of course even as he says this he would realise that such stories belong exclusively to the realm of make-believe fiction. In real-world business ‘cash-burn’ is a bad but unavoidable word. The predicament for every business manager is that growth without large marketing spends, which includes a top-dollar business development team, is simply not possible—not thus far, anyway. “It’s a risk I must take or simply perish,” is what most CEOs will tell you. The problem is that as markets get increasingly crowded, competitive and disruptive the chances of such risks paying off are diminishing all the time, particularly for start-ups riding on a bubble of investor cash and valuations.

In the new-age of business (regardless of its nature) CEOs need to constantly think out-of-the-box for gaining every square inch of mind and market space. While technology (be it ERP or Ecom) has constantly broken new ground in step with changing business dynamics to help companies get smarter and stay ahead of market trends, when it comes to managing the marketing function the change has not been nearly as innovative and companies are still stuck in an age-old debate: should I hire a clutch of agencies or a fancy marketing team of my own? Recent evidence shows that neither works well enough and yet simply for the want of a ‘third-front’ solution, business leaders continue to vote for one of the two options or in some cases a mashup of the two and thereby expose themselves far more than they ideally must to achieve their growth targets.

In a world betting on the shared economy concept, which helps us enjoy premium services at economy costs just by sharing it with others, this paradigm does sound old-fashioned: simply put, it should be possible for companies to fly premium on economy fares and thereby get on top of their market places! Stretching that metaphor, just as we share seats with dozens of others on a flight and thereby pay only for the space we use instead of for the entire plane, it has been theoretically always possible to hire ‘premium’ marketing talent at the price of a senior manager. If that has not happened yet then its only because it has seldom (if ever) been offered as a viable proposition.


Our Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer or OCMO concept is set to change this status quo fundamentally. How? By placing an outstanding manager to lead your marketing function…a CMO with a trailblazing record…when you want, where you want and at a price you can afford. That’s not all. The Outsourced CMO will work with you just as any of your other senior ‘employees’ and yet not sit on your payroll…that is you have zero pain searching and recruiting your dream CMO, and even less pain replacing him should you ever be dissatisfied with his performance. That is, your Search, Recruit & Retain HR pains all knocked out with one tight-fisted punch.

This is still not all: unlike your payroll employee who will have to be paid his fat salary even when he is out enjoying a Caribbean vacation with his family, you pay our hotshot CMO only when he works. And since he does not enjoy employee benefits like casual, privilege and sick leave, he is always ON for you. Finally, you end up saving on office space, power, phones, computers and a dozen other overheads that are part of the employee baggage!

OCMO is a jet-age plug-and-play model, which insulates you from a truck-load of pain, cost and stress so you can focus all your time and energy on the big picture. You pay only for the services you use and for the length of the time you use it. Zero overheads, no fringe pains. Only results. In other words an idea invented for modern day business.


So how is the Outsourced CMO any different from an agency?

Isn’t he just an agency with a different name? Certainly not. Unlike an agency, which, whether you like it or not, would be more concerned about its bottom lines rather than yours, the Outsourced CMO would be a part of your internal executive leadership team and as much a part of your problems as your solutions. His only concern would be to boost YOUR bottom lines in line with YOUR vision, YOUR resources and YOUR budgets. In fact, he would be a part of your think tank and be responsible both for crafting your marketing road map and executing it to ensure that YOUR planned ROI targets are achieved. Outsourcing your entire marketing function to agencies is a bad idea unless you have dedicated high knowledge resources internally to manage them 24/7. In other words exactly the kind of expensive internal resources that you wish to avoid. Unless you have a crack internal resource to manage them (the kind that’s hard to find, recruit and retain) there are few more efficient ways of wasting cash than hiring agencies...particularly because so much marketing happens now online.

In summary, the Outsourced CMO is neither your full-time payroll employee (meaning zero liability) nor an external agency (meaning zero headaches), he is superior to both. Our CMO will work shoulder-to-shoulder with you, be it for mapping strategy, finding, on-boarding and managing agencies or executing plans with the best and most cost-effective vendors. He will help you craft your marketing plan and be fully accountable for its execution, doing whatever it takes within your budgets. And here comes the clincher: You get such a resource for the price of a senior level executive. It’s an idea whose time has come.

For more information or feedback please write back at vineet@outsourcedcmo.in

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