The CEO's Guide to Marketing-Led Growth (Second Edition)
How to Drive Business Success Through Strategic Marketing: Marketing as a Growth EngineBy Michael Shenher
Length4h 48m
About this audiobook
Why do some companies grow effortlessly while better products lose on price? The difference is rarely the sales team, the market, or the economy. It's a blind spot at the top: CEOs who treat marketing as a department to fund instead of an asset to build.
In this revised second edition, author and business advisor Michael Shenher shows chief executives how to take strategic ownership of marketing — without writing a single ad. You'll learn the five-stage Marketing-Led Maturity Model, the two numbers every CEO must know cold, how to hire and keep the right marketing leader, how to budget like a capital allocator, and how to win in the age of AI. And in the book's signature chapter, Shenher draws on decades of valuation and exit advisory work to reveal what acquirers actually pay for: a growth engine that survives its founder.
Practical, direct, and built for owner-operators and mid-market CEOs, this is the playbook for building a company the market chooses and buyers pay a premium for.
Audiobook details
GenreBusiness and Economics
Length4 hrs 48 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 4, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction: The Growth Lever Hiding in Plain Sight
2The Delegation Trap
3Marketing Is Capital Allocation by Another Name
4Why Now
5The Lighthouse and the Tugboat
Show all chaptersShow less
6What This Book Will Do for You
7A Note on What I Am Asking of You
8PART I — THE MINDSET
9Chapter 1: The CEO’s Marketing Mindset
10The Conductor’s Podium
11What Marketing Actually Is (and Why the Word Fails Us)
12Two Operating Systems: Sales-Driven and Marketing-Led
13The Case of the Distributor Who Kept Losing on Price
14The Journey Is the P&L in Disguise
15The CEO’s Move
16Chapter 2: Acquisition, Retention, and the Economics of Loyalty
17The Two Numbers
18The Fully Loaded Truth About Acquisition Cost
19Lifetime Value: The Number That Changes the Question
20The Leaky Bucket
21Costco: A Business Model Built on Renewal
22The Software Company That Grew Profit Forty Percent Without a Single New Logo
23The Hotel Test
24The CEO’s Move
25Chapter 3: The Marketing-Led Maturity Model
26Why You Need a Map Before a Plan
27Stage One: Marketing as Expense
28Stage Two: Marketing as Function
29Stage Three: Marketing as Alignment
30Stage Four: Marketing as Strategy
31Stage Five: Marketing as Operating System
32The Self-Assessment
33The CEO’s Move
34PART II — THE ORGANIZATION
35Chapter 4: Building the Marketing-Led Organization
36Strategy Doesn’t Fail in the Boardroom
37The Cathedral and the Scaffolding
38The First Belief: The Customer Is Everyone’s Department
39Working Backwards: The Amazon Mechanism
40Structure: Silos, Bridges, and the Revenue Question
41The Case of the Manufacturer Whose Org Chart Was the Strategy
42Routines: What Survives the Enthusiasm
43The CEO’s Move
44Chapter 5: The CEO–CMO Partnership
45The Shortest Seat at the Table
46The Translator
47Hire for the Stage, Not the Résumé
48The First Ninety Days: A Contract, Not a Honeymoon
49Evaluating Honestly: Leading Indicators and the Two-Clock Problem
50The Fractional Option: The Mid-Market’s Honest Answer
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