“The best CMOs I know are as comfortable diving into numbers as they are pitching in the boardroom.” — Enrico Ferrari

Why CMOs Are Winning - and What Data Teams Can Learn From Them

The best marketers are not just running campaigns and posting on social media. The great ones are shaping company strategy, making million-dollar investment calls, and sitting next to the CEO in board meetings. They are fast, analytical, bold, and deeply connected to business impact.

And here's the twist: the most successful CMOs are also some of the most data-driven people you’ll ever meet.

Recently, my former colleague and friend Enrico Ferrari - a former CMO at Rocket Internet, chief growth officer at HelloFresh US, senior advisor to McKinsey, and founder of Growth Vision Partners - shared a ​LinkedIn post featuring 6 traits of successful marketers​ . Enrico has worked with over 500 marketers in the past 12 years. He’s seen what separates the ones who rise to the top.

In this newsletter, we’re going to reverse-engineer those traits: not for marketers, but for you, the data professionals who work with them.

Because if you want to collaborate with top marketers, you need to speak their language, understand their world, and match their pace.

Let’s get into it.

The Six Traits of Top CMOs: And What They Mean for Data Teams

1. They Speak Finance Fluently

The best marketers don’t just talk about clicks and conversions. They translate results into business impact — revenue, margin, CAC, LTV.

They say things like:

“We improved conversion from 10% to 11% on 100,000 visits. That’s 1,000 extra orders/month, or $1.2M in yearly revenue at a $100 AOV.”

What this means for data teams:

If you want to be a strategic partner, not just a service desk, you must speak finance (AND the language of other domains), too.

You need to:

• Learn how marketers think about CAC, LTV, payback period, margin, etc.
• Frame insights in terms of business outcomes, not technical metrics → Instead of “Bounce rate dropped 10%,” say, “This drove 5,000 more sessions to the signup page, which increased MQLs by 8%.”

Most importantly, get close to your stakeholders:

• Understand how they use their tools (Google Analytics, Hubspot, etc.)
• Don’t force your data warehouse on them, understand why they might still prefer Hubspot for certain decisions
• Be humble. When you start, your job is to learn their workflows before trying to change them.

If you don’t understand your stakeholder’s day-to-day work, you can’t serve them well. And they won’t trust your insights.

2. They’re Comfortable with Ambiguity

Enrico puts it clearly:

“Marketing is probabilistic. There are conflicting data sources, inconclusive A/B tests, and you often have to act without full certainty.”

Great marketers move fast, despite the messiness of the data. They accept imperfection and focus on speed and action.

What this means for data teams:

You must drop your obsession with perfection.

If your instinct is to fix every edge case before delivering insights, you’re already late.

Instead:

• Aim for 80/20: Deliver 80% of the value in 20% of the time
• Be open about imperfections in your data infrastructure → Don’t hide gaps: collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize what to fix first
• Work in short feedback loops and iterate together

Also, support your stakeholders in their pace:

• Give them frictionless access to data → My favorite trick: expose BigQuery data to Google Sheets → This empowers marketers to answer 80% of their questions themselves, in a tool they love
• Build trust through transparency and responsiveness

Your job isn’t to build the perfect model. It’s to help the business make the best decision right now.

If you want to learn the exact frameworks I used to enable my stakeholders to answer 80% of their questions themselves, check out my ​Masterclass "From Dashboard Factory to Strategic partner"​ which has helped hundreds of students from 40+ countries do the same.

3. They Feel the Numbers

The best marketers live their KPIs. They know their CAC, ROAS, and LTV off the top of their head. When something’s off, they feel it - even before the dashboard updates.

What this means for data teams:

You can’t afford to lag behind.

• You need to catch issues before they do
• Build robust monitoring systems and anomaly detection → Revenue dropped? CAC spiked? Alert the team before they ask
• Treat alerting and issue detection as a first-class product

If your stakeholder notices a data issue before you do, you’ve already lost some trust.

4. They Have a Strong Sense of Aesthetics

Great marketers care about design. They instinctively know what “looks good” and resonates with customers.

What this means for data teams:

Honestly? Not much.

The best marketers I know are obsessed about aesthetics for the end-customer but they don't care if your dashboard is beautiful or not. They care about whether it helps them make the right decision.

5. They Take Calculated Risks

Top marketers constantly test new channels, creatives, and messaging. They know some experiments will fail - but they’re betting on the upside.

They’re comfortable losing $10k on a campaign if there’s a shot at uncovering a $1M winner.

What this means for data teams:

Be part of the testing.

• Help design smarter experiments - proper test vs control, clean randomization, clear metrics, test design
• Validate uplift with rigor - no guesswork
• Educate teams on false positives, sample size, and test power

You’re not just the data police. You’re the co-pilot.

And here’s the real magic: When you support testing, your impact becomes tangible.

→ You helped run a landing page test that lifted conversion by 15%? That’s your win too.

This is where data work gets undeniable business visibility.

6. They Go Deep

The best marketers are willing to be hands-on. Like an engineer needs to know how to code, a marketer needs to know how to run marketing campaigns.

What this means for data teams:

In my experience, the best data leaders are the same.

• They can go relatively deep into the tech: data models, pipelines, SQL, maybe even some code (Personally, I am fluent in data modeling and SQL, but I don't know any programming languages)
• But you also need to talk to the CFO, head of sales, and CEO - and be fluent in their world

This is the data leader’s sweet spot: Deep enough to build, broad enough to influence.

If you want a seat at the table, you need to both understand the numbers and communicate the impact.

Bottom Line

Enrico’s six traits aren’t just a profile of top marketers, they’re a blueprint for cross-functional excellence. And if you're a data professional who wants to work with high-performing marketing teams (or become a data leader yourself), these traits are your roadmap too.

Let’s recap the actions you can take:

→ Learn to speak your stakeholders' language: Frame your insights in terms of CAC, LTV, and revenue → Embrace ambiguity: Deliver faster with 80/20 thinking → Be proactive: Catch anomalies before stakeholders do → Support self-serve access: Use tools like BigQuery + Google Sheets (self-service is NOT a myth) → Get close to experiments: Help design and measure real impact → Balance depth with breadth: Go hands-on, but also communicate at the exec level

In short: Be fast. Be useful. Be business-minded.

And if your company wants to grow like crazy: Hire Enrico ;) 

Cheers,

Sebastian