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When hiring a marketing leader, it’s easy to overvalue the things that look impressive during a search: a recognizable company on the resume, a massive budget, a big team and an impressive portfolio. Those things matter, but mostly they tell you about the environment a candidate worked in, not what they’re capable of building in yours.

What I actually want to know is what they did with what they had. Did they inherit a well-oiled marketing machine, or help build one? What problems did they diagnose, and what got better on their watch? Managing a $100 million budget is meaningful experience, but it doesn’t automatically tell me that someone can walk into a growth-stage company, find the real opportunities amid the noise and build a marketing strategy that turns those opportunities into growth.

I’m looking for diagnostic muscle: the ability to figure out what this particular business needs, then build the playbook to deliver it. Whenever I take on a new role, I try to answer one question within the first 30 days: What role does marketing need to play for this business to be successful? I don’t expect candidates to have that answer walking in. I want to see that they know how to find it. Experience should give someone principles, pattern recognition and a deep toolkit, not a script they run regardless of the business in front of them.

Marketing should help create value, Not just communicate it

Marketing shouldn’t enter the picture only after the business has decided what it wants to sell and how it wants to sell it. One of the distinctions I look for is whether a candidate sees their job primarily as communicating the company’s value proposition or whether they understand marketing’s role in helping shape it.

That means working upstream and bringing customer and market perspective into decisions that may not look like marketing decisions at all. If technology is an important source of differentiation, what can we build that customers will actually value? If the company competes on service, how should the user experience evolve? If it’s a product decision, how should unmet customer needs and competitive whitespace inform development? The best marketing leaders don’t simply receive the business and promote it. They help build a business worth promoting.

I get at this by asking candidates about decisions they influenced outside the conventional marketing lane. Tell me about a product you helped develop. When did a customer insight change the direction of the business? When have you advocated for an investment outside of marketing because you believed it would create more value for the company? Those stories tell me a lot more than walking through another campaign.

This is also where financial and business literacy matter. A CMO should absolutely maximize the impact of marketing, but sitting on the executive team comes with a broader responsibility to make the best decisions for the enterprise. That means understanding the company’s economics and weighing marketing investments against other priorities, including the possibility that the next dollar may create more value somewhere else. I want a marketing leader who can advocate forcefully for the function without losing sight of the business they’re there to help grow.

What I actually look for

I think of the best marketing leaders as operators: people who know their craft but also know how to turn marketing into business results. When I’m evaluating a senior candidate, I look for six things:

1. Business Orientation: Do they understand how companies create value and make money? Can they think beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing?
2. Command of Craft: Do they have a deep marketing toolkit and know which capabilities this particular business actually needs, rather than chasing every trend?
3. Organizational Leadership: Can they build the structure, talent and culture required to deliver without personally pulling every lever?
4. Cross-Functional Influence: Can they get peers across sales, operations, finance and technology moving in the same direction without relying on formal authority?
5. Executive Presence: Can they operate credibly with the executive team and board and articulate both the business strategy and marketing’s role in it?
6. Judgment: Among the thousands of things marketing could do, can they figure out what matters most and say no to the rest?

I put particular weight on cross-functional influence because so much of a marketing leader’s success depends on people who don’t work for them. A brand isn’t just the advertising or the campaign. It’s the experience customers have with the company, and marketing doesn’t control that experience by itself. You can’t be an effective brand builder without influencing the other functions that help create it.

I test for this by taking apart one of a candidate’s signature wins. Who outside marketing had to do something differently for it to succeed? Who resisted, and how did you get them on board? Where did you have to compromise? Did another function change your thinking or make the idea better?

I also pay attention to their leadership tree. How many people who worked for them went on to lead marketing organizations or take on larger leadership roles themselves? Delivering results is one thing. I also want to know whether they built a strong function and developed people who went on to deliver results of their own.

The gap between strategy and execution

One of my more instructive hiring mistakes wasn’t even a CMO, but it changed how I evaluate senior marketing leaders. Years ago, I hired a director who interviewed extremely well. He was smart, articulate and comfortable at the strategic level, which mattered to me because I wanted someone who could operate upstream rather than simply take orders. Over time, though, I found that he had much more appetite for the strategic dialog than gusto for activation. He also struggled to build productive relationships with his team and peers. About 18 months later, I let him go.

Looking back, I had overvalued strategic fluency and hadn’t probed deeply enough into his ability to lead and deliver. But the failure wasn’t his alone. I had also created an organization with overlapping responsibilities and unclear swim lanes that contributed to some of the conflict. Both things were true: I had made the wrong hire, and I hadn’t created the best conditions for that hire to succeed.

That’s why I try to pull senior candidates out of “interview mode.” Most experienced executives can tell a polished story about a successful strategy or campaign. I want to get underneath it. What happened after the strategy was approved? What did it actually take to get the organization behind it? Did customers respond? Did the business results follow? What broke along the way? Did they stay close enough to the consequences of their decisions to know whether they actually worked?

And I want to hear the version with the scars in it. Tell me about the bad call, the failed attempt to influence someone, the hire that didn’t work out or the time another executive changed your mind. Senior leaders have all made mistakes. I’m less interested in whether a candidate has made them than whether they can recognize them, learn from them and tell me what they would do differently now.

What the right hire changes

Getting this wrong costs more than compensation or wasted marketing investment. You can lose a year or two pursuing the wrong priorities, frustrate good people and erode confidence in the function. Eventually, other executives start working around marketing instead of with it. Then you replace the leader and start rebuilding all over again.

Get it right, and a year later I’d expect to see greater clarity about the customer and where growth will come from, a stronger marketing culture and improved collaboration across functions. One of the simplest tests may be whether other executives are pulling marketing into important conversations because they value the perspective and believe it makes the decisions better.

Don’t confuse the scale of what someone has managed with evidence of what they can build. The biggest budget, the most recognizable company or the most impressive portfolio may get someone into the conversation, but they shouldn’t decide the hire. Look for the marketer who can understand your business, figure out what marketing needs to do for it, build the capabilities to deliver and bring the rest of the organization along.