The intersection of product, sales and marketing is where your revenue is made or lost in a digital business. Your CMO sits at the edge of that intersection, not the centre of it. That positioning is a commercial problem masquerading as an organisational one.
I spent time inside a matrix organisation at exactly that intersection. Product ideation, build, the commercial layer connecting the product to the customer who needed it. The insight that came from sitting at the centre of that intersection rather than at the edge of one part of it was irreplaceable. You could see what the product team built and understand whether the sales team could position it and know whether the marketing team could communicate it honestly and predict whether the customer would experience it as promised.
That four-way visibility is not available from inside the marketing function. It requires a position that is above the functions rather than inside one of them. The CMO is inside the marketing function looking across at the others. The commercial system operator is above all three looking at the connections between them.
Those are different vantage points and they produce categorically different reads of the same commercial situation. Your board is buying the wrong vantage point.
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