The CEO of a company is the person most responsible for the long-term value creation in a business.
They should not only be bought-in to your strategic marketing plan, they should be involved in creating it.
Briefing them on what you think they should do won’t work.
To get the best results, you need their knowledge, intuition, and experience infused into the plan you create.
No amount of expertise or discovery on your end will compensate for this.
If they’re not involved in the strategic planning process, they won’t understand the thinking behind it.
And that means they won’t be able to make the often hard but necessary trade-offs and investments to make it work.
The CEO should be your best friend. Once a plan is decided on, it’s their job is to champion the ideas internally and remove the inevitable roadblocks.
Nobody else can do that for you in the company. Not their team, not their marketing manager. Only the CEO.
If you can’t get them involved in the strategic planning process and bought-in to the outcome, the project will flounder and then fail.
It’s your job to say that, too.