4 Tactics for CMOs to Lead an Enterprise Into Its Agility Era

We’re almost halfway through 2025, and there is one word on CMOs’ minds for the remainder of the year: agility.

Today’s CMOs are tasked with bringing real, operational changes to their organization; they must be architects of change while remaining nimble. However, research shows that CMOs are concerned about their organization’s lack of agility. Which begs the question: How do you build agility amid a shifting macroeconomic landscape and other business challenges? 

Building agility is about adopting a mental framework that allows you to build resilience and ensure the rubber band snaps back, no matter the landscape dynamics. And in today’s market, innovation happens at lightning speed. Take AI, for example—already in its next cycle of innovation with a new offering, agentic AI.

So, when nothing is static, how can CMOs be agile?

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Build trust with your CFO 

The first and most important step is to build trust with your CFO. Think of meetings with your CFO almost as therapy sessions. Go into these conversations not looking to sell an idea, a budget increase, or an investment. Instead, challenge yourself to ask what problems the business is facing. Look at your CFO not as an accountant, but as an investor in your job. The onus is on you to translate how your marketing activities affect that investment. 

Truthfully, marketing is often looked at as a cost center. Building this rapport and level of trust puts marketing in a more strategic partnership role and heightens its image, helping you understand how to become a profit center for the company and drive real impact.

Establishing this partnership early on can provide a solid foundation and open dialogue with your CFO to strengthen the connection between marketing and sales. It allows you to take bigger swings and approach risk with a smarter, more strategic lens.

Learn the language of the business, rather than expecting your CFO to speak the language of marketing. By doing so, you naturally open your aperture to gain a commercial perspective and understand the broader business challenges that keep your CFO up at night. The return is twofold—you build immense trust and can later cash in on that investment to position marketing as a driver of growth and transformation. 

Assess when to be an early adopter, and when to wait

When AI first hit headlines as a new tool that promised cost-effectiveness and cost-cutting solutions, the organizations with an open mindset and a track record of adopting past technologies were the most ready to experiment with the tool and determine how it could best suit their organization. In 2024, global venture capital funding for generative AI surged to $45 billion, nearly doubling from the previous year. This wave of investment highlights a major opportunity for marketers, and CMOs should be asking themselves if they’re maximizing their investments today to transform delivery and increase effectiveness tomorrow.

The marketplace shifts quickly, so it’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of innovation to help ensure your organization can lead clients into new ventures with confidence. 

But there is a fine balance: Technology adoption should be approached with strategic implementation. Before going all in, make sure the technology in question meets your company’s specific needs. Think of it as a multivitamin for your business. It’s not a lifesaver or a life raft, but it can be used daily for maintenance, convenience, and more, without requiring a full-scale change to your overall direction.

Champion cross-functional marketing 

An important step in building agility is reducing marketing for marketing’s sake. As CMOs, the primary focus should be creating and implementing a cohesive strategy that connects solutions with sales and marketing to increase ROI. Sales teams must think like marketers—and vice versa—which is a massive effort to instill across an organization. 

Encouraging the whole enterprise to think creatively unlocks a greater creative value and brings more people to the table. This drives other business leaders (like counterparts in commerce, service, and strategy) to innovate and meet the market demands, helping reduce these “random acts of marketing” and keeping everyone working toward the same goal. But more importantly, this approach helps maintain relevance and differentiation in the marketplace.

Trust your instincts

It’s important to remember that anyone can follow best practices. The traditional marketing playbook is easy to replicate, and that’s why it rarely sets anyone apart. CMOs didn’t rise to leadership by playing it safe—they got there by trusting their instincts and taking the road less traveled, even if it’s riskier.

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As you embrace agility, consider how new technologies can be leveraged to your advantage, or whether they should. Not every AI solution will integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, and that’s perfectly fine. Agility is about giving yourself the freedom to take those risks, whether it’s by challenging the business norms by implementing innovative tools or by staying the course and rejecting the latest trends if they don’t align with your business. 

Trust your instincts and be ready to shift direction, refocus, or double down quickly. Often, the things that scare you the most are the very things that will drive the biggest impact.