“The team I inherited were all rock stars,” says Fred Studer, CMO at Tibco. The veteran Valley company that aims to unlock and join up enterprise data value. “The building blocks were all there, they just hadn’t been rationalised and put together.”
That’s pretty much the way that Denver-born Studer sees the role of the modern CMO: assembling optimised teams, monitoring and constantly tuning. But he has been around the block long enough to know that it can be a tough and crazy gig too.
“We have the role with the lowest life expectancy. As CMO, it’s shortened to 12 to 18 months and its very unforgiving,” says this previous marketing chief at NetSuite, FinancialForce.com and Gigamon.