Becoming a company’s first CMO doesn't mean starting with a blank slate.Sangeeta Prasad has done it twice.
First-CMO Mythology Myth #1: Everyone knows what marketing does. “Everyone thinks they’re a marketer, everyone thinks they can do marketing,” Sangeeta says.
Sangeeta knew she wasn't going to change those opinions with a better definition of marketing. She had to learn the business first:
- How does the company make money?
“Be as good a listener as you are a talker,” Sangeeta says.
The better she understood the business, the better she could connect marketing to what leaders already cared about.
“Once you speak the language of business with leaders, you start getting a lot more credibility and trust,” she says.
That also meant leaving some familiar marketing language behind.
Impressions. Engagement. Clicks. Campaign performance.
“They don’t care.”
They care about the business metrics: pipeline, revenue, growth, ROI.
Busted. Now what?
Start with company goals, not your marketing plan.
Meet with leaders one-on-one. Understand what they’re accountable for, how the business works, and what they’re trying to improve.
Then make the connection to marketing in terms they already care about.
“It’s not a marketing campaign or activity you’re selling,” Sangeeta says. “You’re selling the outcome that’s going to be an improvement for the company.”
“Marketing may be your craft, but business acumen has to be your foundation.”
Myth #2: Once leadership buys in, the hard part is over. Sangeeta led major rebrands at both Russell Reynolds and Slalom.
The assignment looked similar. The resistance wasn't.
At Russell Reynolds, the CEO had the vision for where the brand needed to go. Some long-tenured leaders didn't see the need to change.
So Sangeeta went one by one, meeting with leaders across the company and around the world. She listened to their objections, explained what the rebrand could accomplish, and built support.
At Slalom, leadership already wanted the rebrand.
The challenge there was activation. Individual markets were used to doing what worked for them, and now they needed to show up as one brand.
“The process was the same, building the trust and the one-on-one relationships,” Sangeeta says. “But the objections underneath them were different.”
Busted. Now what?
Executive buy-in and organizational adoption are different problems. Know which one you’re solving.
→ Does leadership still need convincing? → Does leadership agree, but the organization hasn’t followed? → Do people understand the strategy but not know what they’re supposed to do differently?
Myth #3: You have to convince everyone yourself. At Russell Reynolds, Sangeeta noticed three groups as she worked to build support for the rebrand.
There were the early supporters, a much larger group in the middle, and the naysayers.
She didn't need to personally convert every naysayer. She needed the early supporters to help move the middle.
“Getting leaders on site who have large voices in the companies, big influence in the company, to become your voice when you're not there is super important.”
Busted. Now what?
Find the people who already believe in the work and have influence with everyone else. Give them the business case and evidence they need to advocate for it when you’re not in the room.
Your job isn’t to be the only evangelist. It’s to create more of them.
Myth #4: Hiring a CMO means the company has invested in marketing. At Russell Reynolds, Sangeeta noticed three groups as she worked to build support for the rebrand.
This was one of the bigger surprises Sangeeta encountered when she became the first CMO.
Leadership had hired her and built a marketing team. From their perspective, they'd invested in marketing.
“My leaders didn't realize that hiring a CMO or a marketing team is not the investment,” Sangeeta says. “The investment is truly the dollars that you put into the campaigns.”
In functions like HR or finance, she explains, the people can represent much of the investment.
“In marketing, people are just a part of the investment.”
But Sangeeta also didn't expect leadership to hand her a giant marketing budget on day one.
The “one day” goal was to build a brand that could highlight the breadth of the business, but because the company had never formally invested in the brand, Sangeeta knew she’d need to make the ask easier for the business to evaluate. She started with small bites–things like LinkedIn campaigns–where she’d lay out the outcome she was trying to drive, what she expected the investment to return, and what she didn't know yet. All in service of evolving to a more traditional campaign approach.
Maybe she expected 10x ROI. But if it was the company's first time trying something, it could return zero. It could return 100x.
“Anything you do for the first time is a risk,” Sangeeta says. “But it's a risk worth taking because the goal is growth.”
That transparency helped her build a partnership with finance.
Busted. Now what?
Show the business what it’s betting on.
Start with the outcome you’re trying to drive, the investment it will take, the return you expect, and the downside you’re asking the company to accept.
Then start with a bet the company is willing to make.
“You pilot it. You try it. You pivot,” Sangeeta says.
Bring what you learn back to leadership, including what didn’t work — and use it to make the case for the next investment.
What becomes possible once you’ve built the belief At Slalom, Sangeeta didn’t walk in and ask for the biggest marketing investment the company had ever made
She built to it.
When she arrived, Slalom had done smaller paid efforts, including LinkedIn campaigns. It had never run a global paid-media campaign across channels.
Then came Zero Legacy, a company-wide campaign focused on helping companies modernize legacy technology.
Sangeeta made the case that it couldn't be a marketing campaign off to the side. To have the impact they wanted, it needed to activate across Slalom and across channels, including commercial and paid media.
Slalom invested roughly 100x more than it had in any previous campaign.
“I was able to do that because my CEO and my leaders had seen the impact we'd made to date,” Sangeeta says, “and were willing to take the risk on doing this.”
According to results shared by Sangeeta's team, deals associated with Zero Legacy were 144% larger than Slalom's 2025 average deal size. Slalom also saw a 50% increase in average modernization deal size and a 58% increase in modernization deals per month.
The smaller bets gave Sangeeta the results she needed to make the case for a much bigger one.
“It takes time to build to that,” she says. “But when you have all the data and the elements in place, I think it's worth trying.”
Getting the CMO job is the easy part There's plenty of pressure on a company’s first CMO to prove themselves quickly.
But getting the title doesn't mean you’ve inherited an organization that believes in marketing.
You still have to build faith.
