Benoîte Yver
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Dear CMO: Are You a Plumber or a Rainmaker?

9/6/2025

 
I was an engineer by trade. I started my marketing career building the "plumbing" for a Fortune 500 company's marketing department. I led the digital transformation: building the martech stack, the e-commerce site, and all the analytics and dashboards that went with it. These skills are essential; good plumbing makes a marketing department run smoother, more efficiently, and helps track marketing ROI.

But let's not confuse the pipe with the water.

Today, many growth marketing job descriptions are over-indexed on technical skills: a long list of martech tools and "plumbing" requirements. While critical, these skills alone don't generate sales pipeline or make customers buy.

The job of a growth marketer is to make it rain hard and long, to trigger storms and tsunamis. It’s about cranking up the water pressure, not just fixing leaks. It's about coming up with high volumes of high-quality campaigns, not just clean pipes.

As we navigate the next wave of transformation, this time with Gen AI, remember to balance your team. You need skilled plumbers, but you also need brilliant rainmakers.

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    Benoite Yver

    Serial Tech Chief Marketing Officer

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