When Switching CMOs Isn't the Answer

When a CMO relationship starts to go badly, two instincts kick in. One is to look for the exit. The other is to build the case that they are the problem. Both feel productive, and both are usually wrong.

I have been in this spot more than once. A CMO we had partnered with was not meeting our expectations. The processes between us were cumbersome and confusing, work took longer than it should have, and honestly, the two teams did not seem to like each other very much. There was tension on nearly every call. You could feel it before anyone said anything.

The easy read on a situation like that is that the CMO is failing you, and you either fix them or replace them. It is the read most of us reach for, because it is the one that does not require looking in the mirror.

What we did instead was sit down with them and have an honest conversation. Not a status meeting, not a scorecard review. A genuine airing of grievances, and not just ours. We had to actually listen to theirs, which was the uncomfortable part, because it turned out we were not the innocent party in the story we had been telling ourselves. They had real frustrations with how we were operating, and once those were on the table, it was pretty clear we were about as much to blame for the state of things as they were.

That conversation did not fix everything, but it changed the footing. We came out of it with a real game plan, a set of commitments on both sides, and a way to follow up and track whether things were actually moving. Some of them moved. Some of them did not. But we kept the door open, kept having the honest conversations, and the transparency started to build on itself.

The part I did not expect was how much the relationship itself improved. As both sides got more honest about what we were each dealing with, the tension started to drop. We understood what the other team was actually up against, and it got easier to give each other the benefit of the doubt. We started, genuinely, to like each other more. That is not a soft detail. A relationship where both teams trust each other runs better than one where every call opens with its guard up, and there is no SLA in the world that buys you that.

Now, we did do our homework along the way. We looked at other CMOs and benchmarked what else was out there. And here is the thing that has stuck with me. You are going to run into challenges everywhere. Some CMOs are genuinely worse than others, that much is true. But no CMO is markedly better than the next. There is no gem out there waiting for you, no partner who turns out to be easy because you finally picked the right one.

Which means jumping ship every time things get hard is not a strategy. It is a way to spend a lot of money and build a lot of frustration chasing a partner who does not exist. Switching a CMO is enormously expensive, and the cost is bigger than people tend to account for. There is the tech transfer and requalification. There is the time and attention it pulls from everything else. There is the stretch where you are running the old supplier in parallel with the new one, paying for both at once, funding the relationship you are trying to leave while you stand up its replacement. And there is the cost of eventually winding the original down. If you are going to pay all of that, it should be because the relationship is genuinely unworkable, not because it is hard right now, since it is going to be hard somewhere else too.

None of this means you tolerate a CMO that truly cannot deliver. Some relationships do need to end, and there are partners who are worse than the rest and worth leaving. But a lot of the relationships that feel unworkable in the heat of a bad stretch are not unworkable. They are strained, and strained is usually fixable if both sides are willing to be honest about their part in it. The exit is always there if you really need it. More often than not, the better return is on the relationship you already have.