It is tempting to see an Ecommerce CEO as a natural progression of a Performance Marketer but actually there are many more aspects to the successful leadership of an ecommerce firm than this narrow skill-set. The pros of promoting a performance marketer include their ability to react fast in a data-rich environment, their attitude to balanced risk-taking and a deep understanding of how to allocate budget to create the greatest efficiency across multiple channels.
However, even in the field of marketing, they may feel uncomfortable dealing with issues that extend beyond the measurable and into the much less solid KPIs of brand and top-of-funnel activity. There are also many other aspects of ecommerce that contribute to a D2C or multi-channel business’s success. Merchandising will have its idiosyncrasies across physical and on-line; fulfilment including warehouse, 3PL and delivery is a crucial piece of the ecommerce experience as is the increasingly sophisticated world of Customer Support and/or Customer Service.
Finally, there is what the Duke of Wellington defined as “the ability to see the other side of the hill” – a facility to weigh up intelligence and hearsay, separate the wheat from the chaff and chart a course through the highly dynamic digital environment.
As this piece stated at its start, Performance Marketing would seem to be the natural stepping-stone to becoming a successful Ecommerce CEO. But actually, we believe that it is a flexibility, openness of mind and general intelligence coupled with excellent communications skills that marks out a good Ecommerce CEO – we have placed people from FMCG and in one case have worked with a CEO who had a background as an HR Director but nevertheless made a superb D2C leader.
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