7 Questions Every B2B CMO Must Answer Before Starting a Positioning Project

Get the positioning pre-work wrong, and no amount of brilliant strategy will save you. Quick summary: Seven questions most B2B CMOs skip before starting a positioning project. Get them wrong and you won't end up with bad positioning. You'll end up with no positioning at all. Most B2B positioning projects fail before the first workshop. Not because the strategy is...

AI Experience Optimization: Is Your B2B Marketing Ready for What's Next?

For 20 years, B2B marketers built systems to bring buyers to them. Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, on why that model is changing and what replaces it. Quick summary: AI experience optimization, or AXO, is the next frontier for B2B marketers. Buyers are using ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to research and shortlist vendors before visiting any...

Rethinking Go-to-Market in an AI-First World

At CMO Huddles Strategy Labs across the East Coast, Amanda Kahlow challenged marketing leaders to rethink go-to-market from scratch. When Amanda Kahlow joined our recent CMO Huddles Strategy Labs, she started with: What would your go-to-market strategy look like if you started today, with AI at the center? It’s a deceptively simple question. Yet it exposes something important: Most companies...

AI Maturity Model for Marketing Teams: The 6 Stages You Can't Skip

Nicole Leffer has trained 100+ B2B companies on AI adoption, from Series A startups to Fortune 50s. Her verdict: Most teams are chit-chatting with ChatGPT and calling it a strategy. Here's the maturity model that shows where you actually are. Quick Summary: Most teams are still chatting with AI. The real advantage comes from building repeatable workflows, clean inputs, and...

8 AEO Lessons for B2B CMOs: How to Show Up in AI Search 

Generative AI has altered the playbook for digital discovery. Buyers researching vendors will find AI-generated answers at the top of Google, and many are turning directly to AI assistants for recommendations. In many cases, those answers shape the shortlist before a buyer ever clicks a link. That shift has pushed many marketing teams into a new discipline: Answer Engine Optimization...

The 5 Positioning Pillars Every B2B Category Leader Gets Right

Insights from Bob Wright, Co-Founder of Firebrick Consulting — drawn from positioning sessions with senior B2B CMOs across four CMO Huddles Strategy Labs. What do GitLab, Workday, Calendly, Postman, and Verifone have in common? Beyond their obvious differences in size, market, and product, they've each built a market position that shapes how buyers think before a sales conversation even begins....

The Top 6 CMO Communities

It has never been easy being a CMO. With the advent of GenAI, it's gotten that much harder. Expectations of efficiency are skyrocketing, with ever-diminishing timelines. Organization structures are evolving. GTM strategies are adapting. AEO/GEO are top priorities as buying behavior morphs into LLM-driven decision making. This is a transformational moment that will test the leadership skills and tech acumen...