CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

Ant Hodges
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Field notes and insights from a Fractional CMO in the modern marketing world. www.cmofieldnotes.com

  1. 3h ago

    Ep 29 - Clarity Keeps Good People

    In a growing business, your best people are often quietly carrying work that nobody ever actually gave them. I'm seeing this all the time. As a fractional CMO, I'm working with business owners and CEOs at that higher level of leadership. But when I spend time one-to-one with team members, this comes up again and again. Picture someone reliable in your team. They're good at their job, and they care. Something lands that doesn't obviously belong to anyone, so they deal with it. Then another thing lands, and another, and they deal with those too. Nobody asked them to, and nobody really noticed. Months later, they're carrying far more than anyone realises, and nobody's sure whose job half of it was anyway. That's how good people burn out, or quietly start looking elsewhere. From the top of the business, it doesn't look like there's a problem. Everything is getting done, after all. The reports being sent to you, whether that's growth, revenue, finance or marketing, all look great. The cost is hidden in one person's evenings and weekends, where work is getting done that you don't know about. When my agency was at its busiest, I was lucky to have learnt this early. We had different departments, and everyone had a specific role. I worked with an HR advisor and consultant who helped me put proper job descriptions in place, so people knew exactly what they were responsible for. And here's the thing I think gets missed. People knew their own role, and they also knew everyone else's. When someone joined the team, they could see who did what across the whole business. That meant they knew who to go to, and nobody had to guess. I see the opposite in growing businesses today, where things are fluid. There's some growth, and people just take things on, rather than stepping back, looking at the tasks and jobs, and getting real clarity over ownership. People can still be happy to help one another. Clarity itself doesn't make everything rigid. It just means that when somebody gets help, it's a choice someone made, rather than an assumption that one person will just take it on. A good job description does a lot of quiet work to build cohesion in your team. It tells somebody what good looks like, so they don't have to guess. It gives a manager something fair to review against, rather than just a gut feeling. And it makes the conversation about extra work much easier, because you can both see when something sits outside the role. Just imagine a team of 8 where nobody has a written role. A customer complaint comes in, and 3 people each assume somebody else is dealing with it. Two days later, the customer is still waiting, and everyone feels bad about it. Now picture the same team with clear roles. The complaint lands, one person knows it's theirs, and it's sorted the same day. It's the same people with the same skills, and a completely different result. If you've got a growing team, there are 2 moves that will make a big difference. The first is to update your org chart. It doesn't need to be beautiful, as long as it's honest. Show who reports to whom and who owns what, and then share it with the whole team. You'll be surprised how many people feel relief just from seeing it written down, because it confirms what they're responsible for and, just as importantly, what they're not. The second is a steady meeting rhythm. A lot of businesses have one big meeting with everyone in it, where the conversation drifts and the right people don't get the right time. Narrowing that down helps a lot. Have a focused leads meeting on a regular cadence, and let team leads run their own team meetings. The right conversations then happen with the right people. Neither of these is complicated, and that's really the whole point. Clarity is one of the simplest things that you can give a team, and one of the cheapest. It's far cheaper to build than burnout is to repair. Look at your own business this week. Who's the person everyone goes to when something doesn't have an owner? Ask them what they're carrying that isn't really theirs. Write it down, decide who should own it, and update your org chart. Your best people will thank you for it, even if they never ask. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 29 - Clarity Keeps Good People

  2. 1d ago

    Ep 28 - The 109 Videos

    A few episodes ago, I told you about a client I gave a full refund to, a few weeks after she'd paid us $19,000, and I promised I'd tell you what happened next. It's one of my favourite stories about keeping marketing simple. It's also exactly how I work now as a fractional CMO with founders and business owners, whether they've got a big team or operate on their own. Here's a quick recap of the story. She'd paid $16,000 for a guru's programme, and it came with a blueprint for a big online ecosystem. There were sales pages, upsells, downsells, ads and a whole product to create. To build it, she needed to record 109 individual videos. Some were short little thank-you videos, and some were much longer. She was already busy running a successful in-person business, and that list completely paralysed her. Week after week, nothing happened. When I handed her money back, I didn't just walk away. I gave her 3 specific things to work on, and told her to come back when they were done. The first was to find one piece of her bigger programme that could stand on its own as a low-cost, no-brainer product. To find it, I asked her to think about the hot topic. Which part do people always talk about the most? Which lessons get the most comments and the most questions? That's the bit people already want. If we could turn it into a low-cost product at the front of the funnel, people would come in as buyers rather than freebie hunters. The second was to take that same topic and set up a couple of paid online workshop dates. They didn't need to be fancy, just live sessions on Zoom where she could teach. That gave us a second, slightly bigger step, and something we could drive people to. The third thing made the biggest difference. I asked her to make sure her calendar had real availability for sales calls. Those calls had to be with her personally, rather than an appointment setter or an outsourced salesperson. Then we built the simplest funnel that could possibly work around those 3 things. Traffic went to her low-cost product. Straight after buying it, people were offered the workshop as an upsell. We also drove traffic straight to the workshop. Inside the workshop, she invited people to book a call with her, and offered the product as well. For anyone who bought the product but didn't take the workshop, the follow-up emails invited them to a live call. The live calls are where she made sales too. She came back to me on a Zoom call 3 weeks after the refund, ready to go. We put it in place, and within 3 weeks she had over 100 paid leads, meaning people who'd paid her for either the low-cost product or the workshop. She then had 27 customers in her high-ticket programme. That added up to over $135,000. Her investment with me to set all of that up was only $2,500. Compare that with where she started. She had a $16,000 blueprint, a $19,000 build, and 109 videos that never got made. That became the moment I realised what the Minimum Viable Funnel really is, the thing I write about in my book, Simplify the Funnel. It helps people start with the smallest set of pieces that can actually make a sale, get their marketing engine working, and then build on what's working from there. I think for me, you have to lead with what people already want. You don't need to keep inventing new offers. Look at your audience and what they ask about the most, and package that. That can become your low-ticket, no-brainer product, and when people buy it, you get paid leads. Get people to buy something small before you ask for something bigger. A buyer, even at a low price, has handed over a dollar or more to you, and they behave very differently from someone who just downloaded a PDF from your website. The final thing I really want to say is to keep the human in the most important part of the funnel. The automation did the routine work of moving people along. The founder took the calls herself, and that's what turned interest into revenue. If your marketing plan feels like 109 videos right now, it might be time to ask a simpler question. What are the 3 things that would actually move the needle on your marketing funnel this month, more than anything else? If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 28 - The 109 Videos

  3. 2d ago

    Ep 27 - Build the Machine Before You Market It

    Big launches and campaigns are rarely won on launch day. They're won weeks earlier, in the boring work of building and testing the machine behind them. Working as a fractional CMO, this is what I try to do with clients. We build out the campaigns way in advance. If you have a team, or an agency you outsource some of your marketing to, and you're planning campaigns, I really want you to listen to what happened to me with one particular guy back in my agency days, so you can avoid it. When I was running my agency, we'd regularly get calls from people who'd been let down by another agency, a freelancer or their own team. They needed somebody to jump in quickly and rescue something. After a couple of these, I started to see them as red flags, and I started saying no. The last one I took sealed it for me. A business owner was about a week from launch. The marketing was already running, and the emails were ready to go. The sales page wasn't ready, though, because they'd parted ways with the people building it. Could we write it, design it and build it, so the link would work when the emails went out in about 6 days? We had other work on in the agency, but I could prioritise this as an urgent job. I quoted slightly more because it was an emergency and would need more of my own time. He paid, and we got straight to work. We wrote it and got it signed off. We designed it and got it signed off, with a few amends. Then we built it into his Kajabi site, exactly as it had been written, designed and signed off. And then came the amendments. If you're in this space, you'll understand. It was change after change after change. The final one landed at about 7 o'clock on the Friday evening, and the launch email was going out the next day. I fixed it, hit send, and told him it was done. That Saturday, I was at a family gathering when my phone lit up with text messages, and one of them was full of swear words. Customers were having problems with the launch. So I stepped away from my family and called him. The problems had nothing to do with the sales page. They were all about what happened after somebody bought. Customers weren't getting their login details, and the automations that were supposed to grant them access to the products weren't working. The whole machine behind the scenes had been built by somebody else, and nobody had tested it properly. Before I even started on the sales page, I'd asked if there was anything else we could help with, and he told me everything else was sorted. But I was the last person to touch the launch, so I got the blame. I told him it wasn't us, because we'd had no remit to look at any of those things. I'd asked him, and I didn't appreciate being spoken to like that. I said I'd be happy to look at it on the Monday, but he wasn't happy, and he ended the call. Before long, I was getting notifications that he was rubbishing me on social media and in online communities, telling people I'd screwed up. That project had been going on for months, and he'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on it with other people. It fell over on day one because the machine had never been tested from start to finish. So here's what I think every business needs to do. Separate building from marketing. Set a date, ideally at least a month before launch, when the technical build is finished. After that, the last month is purely for marketing and measurement. If the build is still going on in launch week, it's already too late. The whole process also needs to be tested with a real purchase. Buy the product yourself, or have someone in the team do it. Check the payment confirmation, the login details coming through, the access, and every email that follows. If one real person can't get from payment to product smoothly, nobody can. And I often say that sign-offs should be treated like deadlines. Approvals belong in the plan with owners and dates, exactly like tech tasks and project milestones. Late approvals are what cause those 7pm Friday changes, and late changes are what cause things to break. My final piece of advice is to make your content on time. A campaign asset that's finished after the moment is no use, and even something created the day before is really too late. Seasonal content that's edited after the season ends just sits in a folder forever, waiting for a "maybe next year" that never comes. So what does ready actually look like? For me, the answer is pretty simple. A month out, everything is built. A fortnight out, it's been tested with a real purchase. In launch week, the only job left is marketing it. When you work that way, whatever the size of your company, launches get calmer. When you're calm, you make better decisions. And if you've got somebody owning that entire process, you can get on with your own work, knowing your marketing is on point. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 27 - Build the Machine Before You Market It

  4. 3d ago

    Ep 26 - Automation That Sounds Like Nobody

    A few episodes ago, I talked about keeping the human in the front office and AI in the back office. In this episode, I want to come back to that, because there's a grey area in the middle that I think a lot of businesses are getting wrong right now. It's the automated message, the chatbot, the form and the follow-up that goes out on autopilot. Done well, these things save hours. Done badly, they quietly push customers away. Let me give you 2 examples from my own life recently. The first was HP. I was on an ink subscription with them, and I'd gone through WhatsApp because I wanted to speak to somebody, and that's the only way their customer service works. Every time I started a conversation, it had no idea who I was. It asked for my first name, last name, email and the serial number of the printer, all over again. We'd go back and forth and finally sort something out. Then if I had one more question, even right at the end of that conversation, we'd start the whole process all over again. At no point did that feel like being looked after. It felt like being processed. The second example was completely different. I rang a local garage to book my car in for a service. The voice on the phone asked what car I drove and when I'd like to bring it in, then confirmed the booking. Then it asked if I had any other questions, and said it would transfer me to a member of the team. Only then did I realise the whole thing had been an AI voice, and honestly, it was brilliant. It was quick, it was clear, and it got the job done. Being able to then speak to a real person about my car mattered to me as well. So what's the difference between those 2 experiences? The garage used automation to triage. It handled the simple, repetitive part, then handed me to a human the moment I needed one. HP used automation as a wall. It made me do all the work, it forgot me every time, and there was no easy way through to a person. Let me add something to that. The next time I rang the garage, I knew it was an AI. It asked me who I was, and from my phone number and my name it came back with, "Do you want to talk about your Tesla again, Ant?" It remembered the car I'd brought in and used it in the conversation. Genius. That's the line I want to draw. Let automation triage people and gather the basics, and handle the routine stuff like checking a calendar and making appointments. Then let the human serve them. There's another problem I see in a lot of growing businesses. Once you've got a bigger team, lots of customers and things are growing, a quiet problem starts to creep in. Automations and bots get set up in a hurry, often by someone who has since moved on. The messages are generic and off-brand, and they sound like nobody in particular. Then a warm prospect gets one of those emails, feels like a number, and goes off and buys from somebody else. Nobody in the business even knows it happened. That's revenue leaking through a system nobody's looking at. So here are 3 simple checks for your own automations. First, read every message out loud. Does it sound like you? Would it sound human if the customer could hear it? If the answer's no, rewrite it in your own brand voice. Second, make sure your systems remember people. If a customer has given you their details once, they should never have to repeat them. Nothing says "we don't know you" faster than asking for an email address you've already got. Third, build an easy exit to a human. Every automated sequence should have a clear point where someone can say, "I'd like to talk to a person," and actually reach one. As a bonus, put someone's name next to each automation. When it's owned, it gets checked. When nobody owns it, it drifts. Used well, automation and AI can make a small team feel much bigger and more responsive, and customers will love it. Just remember that every message a customer reads is part of your brand, whether a person typed it or a system sent it. See you in the next episode. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 26 - Automation That Sounds Like Nobody

  5. 4d ago

    Ep 25 - The Job Title Trap

    As we get ready for the week ahead, I want to talk to you about hiring. One of the most expensive mistakes a growing business can make is hiring someone who interviews brilliantly for a job they were never going to do well. As a CMO, I'm involved in hiring decisions and conversations about hiring within the companies I work with. But let me tell you about a hire that went horribly wrong for me, in my own business. Back in my agency days, I interviewed a guy who was brilliant. He was confident, he answered every question well, and he had a great story for everything. Back then, I'd give people the benefit of the doubt, hire on attitude and what they told me, and go with my gut most of the time. So, against my better judgement, this guy got hired, and a few weeks into his probation, the penny finally dropped. This man was a brilliant salesman. The problem was that I hadn't hired him for a sales job. He sold himself so well in the interview that I believed every word, and very little of it showed up in the work. He ignored procedures and pushed back on direction. He was always thinking about himself and what was in it for him, and he wasn't a team player either. None of that came out in the interview. To be fair to him, I hadn't done the work to find it. My reference checks weren't thorough, and I hadn't done my due diligence. Due diligence is so important, and there's a trap here that a lot of us fall into, which is focusing on the job title. When you hire from a job title and an interview, you end up hiring the person who performs best in the interview. That's sometimes a different person from the one who'll actually do the job well. I've learned this the hard way. We need to define the work that needs to get done, rather than just the job title. Write down the outcomes this person must own. What will be different in 90 days if they're doing the job well? What decisions will they make? What will they be measured on? That's what a good job description should be built on. When you start with all of that, the job title, whatever you're going to call this role, becomes almost an afterthought. Then really interview against the job description you actually wrote. It's surprisingly easy to drift in an interview. Somebody's background is impressive, they tell a story, the conversation flows, and before you know it, you're assessing them for a job you don't have. I like to keep a simple scorecard next to me, built from the outcomes, and apply it to every candidate. And this is a big one for me now. Look for evidence over stories. Anyone can tell you they've grown a business, led a team or got certain results. Ask them for the specifics behind it. Ask what they did, how they did it, and who can confirm it. Then actually call the references they give, and do the checks. These days, I ask that question before any hire, whether it's a senior position or not. "Can you show me the evidence, rather than just telling me?" It's changed the quality of the people I bring into the roles I'm involved with. There's one more pattern I see a lot. Businesses advertise a big, broad job title because it sounds impressive. Sometimes it attracts strong candidates, but it can also have the reverse effect. Interviews start, and they keep circling around a much narrower and more urgent issue. That's the signal worth listening to. It usually means the real job hasn't been written properly yet. You've written a big job title, and you want one person to do everything. You're looking for a unicorn. When you notice the urgent and important things that really need to be in the job description, stop and rewrite the role before you do more interviews, and certainly before you make a hiring decision. It's far easier to fix a job description than it is to fix a hire. This is about being fair to the people you're interviewing, and also to your team and your business. When someone joins knowing exactly what they own and how success will be measured, they have a real chance to win. When they join on the back of a vague title and a great interview, everybody's guessing, including them. So as we get ready for the week ahead, if you've got a hire coming up, try this. Write the outcomes first, and build a scorecard to score every interviewee against. Have set questions you ask every single person, note their answers, and ask every candidate for evidence. Make the reference calls too. Even when your gut says yes, check that what they've told you is true, and get those references back from people who know them. See you in the next episode. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 25 - The Job Title Trap

  6. 5d ago

    Ep 24 - A Good Name Is Worth More

    Before the week starts, I want to take a few minutes to talk about something that really matters to me, more than any kind of marketing tactic. It's about what you do when doing the right thing costs you money. Before I closed my agency in 2023, there was a project that tested this in a very real way. I actually write about it in my book, Simplify the Funnel. A client had bought a high-ticket programme from a guru she'd seen speaking on stage. It cost her $16,000, and it came with a blueprint for an entire online business, as well as one-to-one coaching. That coaching came from someone in his team rather than the guru himself, even though that wasn't made clear at the sale. It also came with a huge library of video training, content, templates, SOPs and all kinds of stuff. She came to me asking my team to build the whole thing out, because I'd bought this same programme before, and she wanted it done exactly as the blueprint said. Because I knew it inside out and back to front, I put together a full proposal. We quoted $19,000 for the work, and she paid in full. We broke the work down for her, and part of that was a list of 109 videos she had to record. These were product videos, sales page videos, upsell videos, ad videos and lesson videos. Within a few weeks, it was clear the project wasn't going anywhere. We'd already done quite a lot of work and made a good start, but she was already busy and successful, and the sheer amount of content she had to sort out had completely overwhelmed her. Nothing was coming through from her at all. Now, let me be honest about where I was. We could have carried on, and technically, we'd been paid to do the job. We could have kept chasing her for videos for months, and it felt wrong. There was no way that project should have been delivered like that. I wasn't going to lead her down a path of more complexity and more hustle. So, less than a month after she'd paid, I offered her a full refund. She was shocked, to say the least. Most people don't expect an agency to hand money back, but my faith was absolutely at play in that decision, because integrity is huge for me. You have to do the right thing, even when it shows up on your bank statement. There's a verse in Proverbs that I come back to a lot. Proverbs 22:1 says, "A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold." That verse sits at the heart of how I want to run a business. Money comes and goes in every business. Your name, the way people talk about you when you're not in the room, is something you build slowly but can lose very quickly. Esteem gets built in small moments. It's the email you answer honestly. It's the deadline you own when you've missed it. It's the advice you give when it costs you the sale. People sometimes ask me whether I felt like I'd lost out on that project, when they've read the book or heard me tell the story on stage. Honestly, I don't feel like I lost anything at all. Earning money by doing the wrong thing is simply not where I want to be, and it's certainly not what my faith teaches me to do. And that's the thing I'd love you to think about before the week starts. Every business hits moments like this. Maybe it's a client who'd be better served by doing less, or a project that's drifting and you know it. Maybe it's an offer you would make money with, but you really know it probably wouldn't help the person buying it very much. In those moments, it's easy to tell yourself a story. After all, they signed the contract. They paid the money. That's the work they asked for. It's not your job to tell them what they need. I get it. When you know the work won't serve them, the right thing is usually the honest conversation. That might mean scaling the project back, changing the plan, or, like I did, handing the money back. Integrity can be uncomfortable, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I've found is that doing the right thing rarely leaves you worse off in the long run. That client came back a few weeks later, ready to go with a simplified strategy I'd suggested. And what happened? I'll tell you that story another time. So as the week starts, here's my encouragement. Look at the work you've got on this week. Is there anywhere you're carrying on simply because you've been paid, or because stopping feels awkward? If there is, have an honest conversation. Protect your name above all things. It's worth far more than the invoice. See you again in the next episode. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 24 - A Good Name Is Worth More

  7. 6d ago

    Ep 23 - The Nice Message Nobody Answered

    It’s the weekend, so I’m going to take this one a little bit slower. Wherever you’re listening, just take a breath, and let’s talk about something that quietly costs businesses more than they realise. In the last episode, I promised you the first proper field note I’ve published for a while, and I said it was about a message nobody answered. Picture this for a moment. Someone reaches out to your business because they’d like to work with you. Maybe it’s a potential partner, maybe it’s a big customer, or maybe it’s someone who could open a door you’ve wanted opened for years. They send a message, and it sits there. A little later they follow up, and that sits there too. The final message arrives. It’s warm, gracious and friendly. It says the offer still stands, and it wishes you well. If you read it quickly, it sounds like a lovely note. That message is actually the door closing. Most founders have had messages like that in their inboxes at some point, and the frustrating part is that the opportunity was never actually turned down. It just drifted away while everyone was busy. Revenue rarely dies with a no. Most of the time it fades away in a conversation that nobody picks up. So why does this happen? Usually it’s 3 things. There’s too much on everyone’s plate, nobody is clear who owns the conversation, and it simply slips through the cracks. Honestly, I think the reason matters less than the actual outcome, because the result is always the same. You end up with silence, and silence has a cost. Shared inboxes make this especially easy to happen, and they can be like black holes sometimes. A message can land somewhere several people can see it, and everyone looks at it and assumes somebody else has picked it up. Usually it’s not about being careless at all. Assumptions have been made, and the system itself hasn’t told anyone that this particular message is theirs to deal with. So there’s one simple practice that any business can adopt. Once a week, take a short look at any ageing threads in your shared inboxes. Every open conversation that could lead to revenue should have a named owner and a clear next step. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s a short review where you ask 2 or 3 questions. Who owns the conversation right now? What is the next step? And when exactly will that step happen? The second thing is learning to recognise people’s walk-away point. It’s the polite final message that sounds friendly and is really the end. Once you start spotting these, you realise how many of them could have been saved with a slightly faster reply. And a timely reply can be quite short. Something as simple as “Thanks, I’ve seen this. I’ll come back to you properly on Tuesday.” That keeps the door open. It’s just an acknowledgement, and it shows that you care. It tells the other person that a real human has actually read their message, and very often that’s all they need to hear. Now, because it’s the weekend, I want to look at the other side of this. A lot of people hear about the cost of a slow reply and decide they need to always be on. They check email on a Saturday morning. They reply from the sofa on a Sunday night, and they never really switch off. And honestly, I understand that pull completely. The fix for a slow reply is a better system, and that’s good news for your weekends, for your loved ones, and for your own health and sanity. When every conversation has an owner and a next step, you don’t need to watch the inbox all weekend. You know that on Monday morning, each thread gets picked up by the right person. Your client gets a proper human reply, and you actually get time to rest. It’s about process. It’s about identifying what those internal processes are, and if you’re using systems for shared inboxes, it’s telling that system what to do. This all links back to what I said in the last episode. AI can do a lot of the back office work here. It can flag threads that have gone quiet. It can sort them by age. It can remind the right person based on the context of the email. The reply itself, the part where someone feels heard, should come from a human being most of the time. But if a one-line acknowledgement could go out as an automation, why not send it? So here’s your weekend thought challenge, and it’s a gentle one, because I don’t want you getting into deep work. Think about Monday morning. Block out some time on Monday morning in your calendar right now, so you can look at the conversations in your inbox that could turn into revenue. Look back through them. See which conversations have been missed. Find the ones that have gone quiet and give each one a next step. Pass it to someone, deal with it, or reply to it. Once you’ve put that appointment in your calendar and written down what you’re going to do, shut your calendar app and enjoy the rest of your weekend. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 23 - The Nice Message Nobody Answered

  8. 6d ago

    Ep 22 - Human at the Front, AI at the Back

    It’s been a few months since the last episode of this show, and I wanted to start by telling you why. Back in June, I recorded an episode about whether a CEO’s decision to use AI was the right one or not. Then the summer arrived, and I made a deliberate choice to step away for a while. Some of that was for family. We took proper holidays together, and I protected that time on purpose. I’ve spent over 20 years running my own business, and I’ve learnt that work will always be there when you get back. The moments with your family don’t wait for you in the same way. The rest of that time went on something I’d put off for far too long. I needed to properly understand what AI is doing to marketing. Everybody is talking about AI right now. Your inbox is full of it, your feed is full of it, and most of the conversations I hear fall into 2 camps. Some people want AI to do everything, and some people want nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to pick a side based on headlines. I wanted to hunker down, use it every day, and see for myself where it helps and where it hurts. So that’s exactly what I’ve done, and it led to some real repositioning of how we run the business. Here’s where I eventually landed on all of this. So let me be clear. We are pro-AI. In fact, I’d go further and say that we’re now AI-first. There’s a single rule that sits over everything we build, and it’s quite simple to say. The human stays in the front office, and AI works in the back office. Let me explain what I mean by that. The back office is everything your customer never sees. It’s the research before a campaign. It’s pulling the numbers together for a report. It’s drafting, checking, sorting, scheduling and tidying up all of those processes that keep the business running. That’s where AI is brilliant. It saves hours, it doesn’t get tired, and it frees people up for the work that really needs a person involved. The front office is every moment where a customer meets your brand. It’s the reply to their email. It’s the call where they decide whether to trust you. It’s the moment something goes wrong, and they want to know someone cares. Those moments should stay as human as possible, because that’s where trust gets built. When a business gets this the wrong way round, you can feel it straight away. You’ve probably had it happen to you. You send a message that matters, and you get something back that sounds polished but empty. It answers the words you wrote and misses the point completely. In that moment, you stop feeling like a customer and start feeling like a ticket number. The opposite is just as costly. If you refuse to use AI at all, your team ends up buried in work that a machine could be doing in minutes. That’s time they could have spent talking with customers. So the anti-AI position doesn’t protect the human side of your business either. It just quietly starves it instead. The real work, and this is what took the time, is building the processes so each side does its own job. Where does AI hand over to a person? Who checks whether it’s doing the job correctly? Which conversations should a machine never actually touch? Those answers look very different in every business, and getting them right is a leadership decision more than a technology one. That’s a big part of what I really want to talk about from now on. And there’s another change I want to tell you about. CMO Field Notes is now a daily show. Every day there’ll be a short episode, around 5 to 7 minutes, built from what I’m seeing in the businesses I work with. I want to build on real situations, with all the names and business information taken out. I want to talk about situations that have happened, what they taught us, and what you can take into your own business. During the week, the episodes are going to focus on the nuts and bolts. We’ll talk about teams, processes, structure, customers, culture, reporting, campaigns and all the things a CMO deals with. These are the everyday decisions that quietly decide whether a business grows or fails, and that’s what I want to unpack. At the weekend, I want it to feel a little bit different. Saturdays and Sundays will be a little more reflective. We’ll talk about pace, rest, and how you handle clients who expect a reply on a Sunday afternoon. And sometimes I’ll share the lessons my faith has taught me about running a business and a life as well. The summer break taught me something too. Stepping back gave me the space to see things clearly, and I came back with more focus than when I left. So if you’ve been listening from the start of this podcast, thanks for sticking around and staying subscribed. And if this is your first episode, you’re very welcome here. Tomorrow, we start the field notes properly, and the first one is about a message that nobody answered. If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

    Ep 22 - Human at the Front, AI at the Back
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Field notes and insights from a Fractional CMO in the modern marketing world. www.cmofieldnotes.com

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