The CMOs Playbook for the Coldest Seat in the C-Suite

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

Hey, it's Drew. You're about to hear a conversation I had on The Marketing Share podcast with Alec Cheung and Barbara VanSomeren. We talked about the pressure CMOs are under today and what it takes to lead with focus, guts, and a little humor, all while holding down what might be the coldest seat in the C-Suite. We got into pipeline pressure, how Gen AI is changing the way teams work, the CMO+ mindset, and why stepping beyond marketing helps build influence in the boardroom. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to both podcasts and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Alec: Welcome to The Marketing Share, everyone. Thanks for joining us back again at our show. I'm Alec, and I'm here with Barb, my co-host. You know, Barb, every time—not every time, most of the time—when we have guests, we have a lot of guests that are experts in a particular field in marketing and always provide some really good insights, or at least that's what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to provide some deep expertise so you can quickly learn about an area that you might feel like you want to sharpen your skills on. But our guest today is of a different nature—more of a big picture look at marketing. And I think that's going to be a nice switch-up and also a really valuable thing for our listeners to hear about. Can you tell them about who we've got today?

Barb: Yeah, I'm excited. We have Drew Neisser with us today, and Drew is another community leader, right? So we actually had a few community leaders on, but he's the founder of CMO Huddles, and it's a B2B marketing leadership community. They're united around all the shared goals that we have for marketing, especially the challenges that many CMOs are facing today, right? I mean, from growth pressures to shifting C-Suite dynamics to tech overload and all the things that are expected of today's CMO. You know, it's kind of a tough space to be in right now. As he says, it's the loneliest or the coldest place in the C-Suite. I've heard him say that. But he's also the author of "Renegade Marketing: CMO's Periodic Table," and he hosts the Renegade Marketers Unite podcast. So I'm excited to get into his expertise and let's learn what he's got to offer, because he's talked to a lot of CMOs.

Alec: He has, and I think the cool thing is that he's really being frank about the fact that it is a tough time right now for CMOs. So if you've ever felt like—talking to our audience right now—if you've ever felt like as a head of marketing that you're in this alone, you're not. Drew is going to tell you about that. So let's go interview him.

Barb: Hey Alec, I'm super psyched. We're here with Drew Neisser today from CMO Huddles, and he's going to share a lot of insights around what CMOs are thinking about today. And you know, you and I are thinking about a lot of things, that's for sure, and many have a lot of things on their minds today. So welcome, Drew.

Drew: Hey guys, welcome. Thank you, Barb, Alec. Thank you so much for doing the show. I know how much work it is, so I appreciate being here.

Barb: Hey, it's a passion project for us, for sure, right? Well, tell us a little bit about how you started CMO Huddles. Give us just a brief snapshot on your career journey. And I would love to hear about your brand signature penguin, because I always see you in the penguin paraphernalia.

Drew: Yes, well, let me answer that one first. So a group of penguins is a huddle. And that was an epiphany that I discovered when I was in the Galápagos. And the naturalist said, "Anybody know what a group of penguins is called?" And literally, the guy says the answer was a huddle, and I am on a ship in the Galápagos, and I texted the art director/designer and said, "Figure out how to get penguins in our logo. We're changing the brand." And that's awesome. And there's one other thing that is such an amazing story I have to share, and then we can go to the other thing.

And I'm going to ask you this question: So 6,000 emperor penguins get together in Antarctica. They huddle. Guess what the differential temperature from the outside to the inside is? Just take a wild guess in degrees.

Barb: Ooh, I'd say it's about 10 to 20 degrees higher.

Alec: Yeah, I'm going to say 15.

Drew: Okay, 70 degrees. Mind-boggling. And so you think about it: 6,000 folks working together to keep everybody warm, and they rotate, and they have a way of dealing with this. And if you think about CMOs right now, this is the coldest job in the C-Suite, so let's bring them in from the cold. So anyway, it's a wonderful metaphor. We've had a lot of fun with it.

Barb: I don't know if that says that there's a lot of hot air in the middle of the huddle, or if it really is the collective energy that's together.

Alec: No, come on, Barb, don't go there.

Drew: Just so you know, we are not animal appropriators. We donate 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. So bring it. Come on, let's do some penguin stuff. I love it.

Okay, so back to the story of how it started. Just a quick recap for us. Okay, so I have to go back 18 years. A friend of mine, Pete Kranik, who was a client—we ran an agency at the time—said, "Hey Drew, I'm starting this thing called The CMO Club. Can you help?" We designed the logo, we designed the first website, and I became involved in this organization. And as a way of having a role, because I was a vendor, I started interviewing CMOs.

Fast forward 18 years. March 2, 2020: Pete Kranik sells for cash The CMO Club to Salesforce. Literally the next day, the light bulbs go off and I say, "Okay, that's not going to work." This is pre-pandemic by two weeks. It's not going to work. And then, of course, when the pandemic hits, I know it's not going to work because it was based on in-person meetings.

April 1, 2020, I called up 20 of the CMOs that I knew really well, all B2B, and said, "Hey, let's huddle. Let's meet." We met 55 times in a six-month period because, you remember, that was crazy. You know, how do you do work from home? How do you—then Black Lives Matter. There was a lot going on. So by October 1st, we had a business.

Barb: Really exciting.

Alec: That's a really cool story, actually. That it went from the agency, but then you didn't even know it at the time, but you were about to have this unheard-of opportunity.

Drew: Yeah, no, it was so exciting. And what was great was that these initial 20 huddles sort of said, "Okay, there's a business here. Here's the business model, here's how much you should charge, here's the structure of the thing." And you know, most of those folks five years later are still members.

Barb: Yeah, that's very cool. You know, I started in the agency business as well, and I think that's actually pretty remarkable to become the actual person in the CMO huddle from an outside perspective on that. I think that's a testament to how you interact.

Drew: Well, I will say that it helped that by the time I started CMO Huddles, I'd already interviewed four or 500 CMOs for articles, and I had been running the B2B curriculum for the CMO Club for like the last four years at their summits. So it wasn't a huge leap for me to do this and, you know, and now I get to be the guy who sits in the middle of conversations like we had one last night where I'm just asking questions, like you guys doing, yeah, do that. And you know, from podcast work, another thing, how much you learn in every one of those conversations?

Alec: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so then the big question to lead with, then thank you for the background, is so you, you've spent years talking to, probably by now, thousands of CMOs, right? What's going on these days? What are you hearing right now? What's it like for CMOs? I think, I think we, our audience, would love to hear that big picture perspective.

Drew: To call this a perfect storm would be trite. It is without question. And again, I've been talking and interviewing CMOs, the hardest, you know, for a lot of important reasons to be a B2B CMO in particular, right now, you have just massive tech transformation and an expectation that you can do, you know, with 20% of the staff, what you did before and you. Also have AI within that tech transformation that is impossible to keep up with. So you have this sense of, I should know all this stuff, and it's impossible, nobody can and then you have, you continue to have CEOs who less than 20% have ever spent a day in marketing. So you have complete ignorance, and you have an expectation that a CMO can come in, and in three months transform the business, like who can do that? I mean, that's sort of that they have these magic wands, and that expectation issue has been the same for 10 years, but with AI, it's accelerated. You have a lot of PE backed firms, which makes it even worse. And so the outcome of this, and there's some good news in all of this, because it's a really exciting time to be a CMO. But I know a lot of CMOs who are really good at what they're doing, saying, I've had enough. I'm walking away from the role and that that that depresses me.

Barb: Yeah, I totally hear you. I mean, remember, you know, I'm still a believer. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I'm still a believer that you should be able to have an impactful career and also have fun at it. Gosh, you know, what about having fun at your work? Right? But I do see it as well, right? I see a lot of what you're saying. So we all hear about the CMO as a result of what you just mentioned, the CMO having kind of the shortest tenure in the C-suite. We've heard that a million times. And what I hear you say is, you know, this all comes from a lot of maybe unrealistic expectations from the C-suite. So this has to, you know, I mean, come on, it's causing a crisis of confidence, right among some CMOs, perhaps, right? And maybe even if it's not among the CMO, the you know, it's among the C-suite, it's among boards. And there's this skepticism out there about how much the CMO can contribute sometimes. So how are they dealing with this?

Drew: Well, you know, it's funny. I was talking to a CMO last night who said that the CEO, on day one said, you know, I don't really believe in marketing. The CFO said that, right, the person who controls the purse strings so and, and it was interesting to hear how this CMO sort of dealt with that, and, you know, worked to build credibility and got to know them, and how they look at the business and explain finance and all those good things. So it has never been an easy job. But the I think, and this is a theory that I cannot prove, but I do believe seems to happen, is all the data and all the emphasis on demand generation has only made it worse, not better, because if you want to be seen as a leader of the organization, you need to drive strategy and business impact. And if you are driving strategy and impact, it is not about counting leads and pipe necessarily. It is about transforming the organization, so you have a better go to market. Well, go to market makes up marketing and sales and customer success and service, right? It's all four of those things. And so most of the time when a business stalls, it's not a marketing problem, it's a business problem. So if you say that we're going to solve this by creating a better engine, a demand gen engine, you're probably going to have some problems doing that. And then let's just compound that, because the CMO, if they get a year in some cases, and it's an 18 month sales cycle, what's happening is each CMO comes in, they're dealing with what that other CMO did in 12 months, or 14 months or 16 months, which is finally having an impact, and then they're changing it all so it, you know, you when you see companies who have had three CMOs in four years or something, you know, the problem is, frankly, with the CEO and the board.

Barb: Yeah, it's a red flag, isn't it?

Drew: It is, it's a real problem. So it's a weird situation. The data hasn't necessarily helped marketers the way we all thought and hoped it would.

Alec: Drew, how long do you think this has been happening? Like, did you start seeing this shifting this way from, you know, five years ago is it accelerated, like you mentioned, AI, right? Has AI just really accelerated that even more, I don't know what are your thoughts on that, just like the latest trends and how it's the evolution of state,

Drew: It is a trend that probably started 10 years ago at least, and it's just accelerated. And let's face it, when in 2021-2022 the market was really good. All the boats were getting lifted, and so you didn't really have those were kind of good times for a lot of brands, even though the same trends were happening the minute you have external forces like. What's the uncertainty that tariffs have caused? You have a slowdown of positivity, which may the CFO becomes a CFO, and this is on your buyer side. And so suddenly you have to go back to recession playbooks. You have to change the way the company thinks about its go to market, and a lot of companies haven't adjusted to the current economic situation. Again, blaming marketing when it's a macro issue. So, oh well, it's a macro issue, but marketing can't solve it. So let's switch this for a second. Say, why is this the most exciting time to be a CMO? Because I think it is, there are a number of CMOs, I'm not going to say it's a majority that are driving the AI implementations of the company. You say, Wow, that's crazy. How is that happening? Well, they were spending more on tech anyway. Tech was the AI was coming to them through their martech stack already, they were the first ones to use it for content and realize, oh, wait, there's other bigger problems that we could solve, and there's organizational opportunity here. So the like the CMO at KPMG, North America, she's driving the AI initiative at KPMG, it's amazing. And I know another number, and those CMOs are seen as business leaders, not marketing tacticians. And that's this real important thing. I mean, it is Chief Marketing Officer.

Barb: So let me ask you this, first of all, that's a lot to unpack. And you know, first of all, AI for sure we're gonna get there absolutely. What you said is this synergy, you know. And I guess I've been in a company at in that position since 2000 so I'm really used to, you know, huddle with my brothers and sisters on the C-suite, and not being necessarily the person in the marketing tactician seat, but how are we going to move this business forward, right, as a member of that team? So I've always kind of been in that space, but a lot of people struggle with that, right? There's been this like hierarchy of, you know, in the marketing's down there and the CFO is up here. So in my experience, these leadership teams. You know, driving trust alignment and influence is the biggest job, almost right, and none of those things, as you can see, are acquisition, no and retention and many of the practices that many marketers have. So you think the the best way that CMOs are doing this today is by leading in the front with AI. Is there any other ways that they're navigating this?

Drew: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. So we in Huddles, we talk about this notion of CMO plus. What is your plus? What is that other area that gives you business credibility? And so a number of members of our community, for example, are chief marketing and Chief Customer Experience Officer, yeah, great, right? And it's great for a lot of reasons, because now the conversation is so much broader than what's the pipeline look like?

Barb: Yeah, I've often said, you know, you can't grow exponentially. Grow your way with just operational skillset, right? Operational skillsets exciting, but you know, it's usually incremental wins, whereas when you combine, you know, more of a whole company effort, and when you think about the entire end to end experience for customers, you can probably plus up the business a lot quicker and more in a more robust fashion I think,

Drew: Yeah, I want to make sure that we divide the world into PE and non PE, because I do think that it's a different experience. And I've been really hard on PE backed companies for a year, and I've written a lot of rants about them, and some of them have gone viral. And then I started to talk to more PE people to sort of try to get a balanced perspective on it. It's very hard, and the reason is they are looking at the data, and they're forcing and so if you work at a PE firm, you really do. You earn your credibility first by showing that you understand how to drive pipe. And I don't think there's any way around that. Oh no. And then, and so you, if you spend, if you look at the pipe as it currently is, and if you know how to tweak it here and tweak it here, and you can get 5% 10% 15% more yield out of whatever it is that you were doing before. Then you then have permission to actually do the job

Barb: That's interesting. So you have to prove yourself operationally, that you can drive top of the funnel, lower the funnel, you know, pipeline, etc. And then. You have permission to do other things, that's interesting,

Drew: Right? But if you're not at a PE firm, the CEO is probably leaning on the CMO to say, I you know, if they don't have a chief strategy officer, they're leaning on it. And say, you know our customers better in theory than anybody else, and you should, and you have a perspective, and you think long term, because short term was yesterday's news. It's, you know, all the revenue and pipe, those are lagging indicators of whether or not you've transformed a company, right? I mean, just think about analyst relationships. That's a place, way that you can transform a business. You move it up a quadrant that takes 18 months, 12 months, 18 months, right? So if a CMO has a year, they're not going to do that. They're not going to bother and so the big, transformative things take time. So how do you you either are working with a CEO at a non PE firm who will give you that time? Say, here's where I want this is my vision for the companies where we want to be. Help me get there, and then translates that into employee comms, in terms of customer comms into and then prospect comes, and that's so marketing should be all channels, not just acquisition. And this is the challenge that you know at PE firms, it's net new and net new, net new.

Alec: Let me ask you about that a little bit more, because I think it's really insightful that you call out this distinction. First of all, I don't know the trends on this, but have PE firms become more prevalent? Like is the ownership of companies increasingly shifting to PE, and therefore their influence on the CMO role is becoming bigger? I don't know if you've looked at any data like that.

Drew: I wish I had the exact data on this. I can look at our community, and because we're heavily tech, heavily SaaS, yeah, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if it was 50% or more PE backed.

Barb: Yeah, honestly, I think of them all in the same bucket, right, in terms of, you know, VC, PE, you know, private equity, and of course, your boards. Everyone's more data driven. And when we all introduced demand gen and, you know, engines, they were like, "Great. Finally, we can put an ROI to this crazy thing called marketing."

Drew: Right. Yep. And by the way, VCs are, I mean, there's some similarities and differences, but usually VCs are earlier stage. They're trying to do proof of concept, they're trying to find product market fit. And it's not rule of 40, you know, 25% growth and 15% EBITDA. They'll take growth.

Barb: Yeah, yeah, that's true. But, you know, usually it's like they're expecting marketing to deliver the leads even at young stages, right?

Drew: Yeah. And, I mean, I get that, and marketing has to be active, but often where marketing can play, it's interesting. I've seen this with a couple of members of our community, where you're an enterprise company and you're, you know, a few whales will change your year. The CMO and the CRO are working together, and they have a war room for this one big client, and the CMO is so much better at constructing a story that will persuade over time and building up the resources and all the things that it takes to get 14 people at an organization to spend $100,000 or more. You know, often the marketer's the one who can make that happen. So, and that's through a number of things that are both short term and long term. Like, if that marketer over a year period of time does analyst relations and changes the perspective and gets better reviews on TrustRadius and does these things, it makes the sales guy's job so much easier, right? And so, and then they can package and tell that story. And it's not a features driven thing, right?

Alec: Drew, what advice do you have for CMOs then today that are at PE backed companies?

Drew: So you know that there are a lot of folks that are really focused on this. I mean, Alan Gonsenhäuser has written a lot, and that's what he does. And the PE firms that I've talked to is, look, you have to understand the basic thesis of the investor. They bought this company because they expected it could grow in this way. Like, if they fix this thing, or they merge two companies, they could achieve profitable growth as a result of maybe they were going to introduce them to a new industry or something. Whatever that thesis is, the CMO has to internalize that to the point that everything that they do aligns with the thesis. And if the thesis is right, and the CMO does and delivers against it, they'll, as one PE marketing guy said, they'll make a ton of money, and they'll never have to work, you know, they'll never be looking for a job, because the PE firm will put them in the next company. I wish it was that simple. Well, it's, you know, let's face it, it's rarely that simple.

Barb: Right, right? And, you know, I caution people when they start out to say, "I'm gonna drive pipeline. I'm gonna drive pipeline right away." Many of the companies I work with, and that's because, you know, they are scale-ups in some cases, but they're kind of on the trajectory, right? Many of them did not look at some of their business segments. They did not really drill down on customer data. And they really don't have a great grasp for what the pain points are and how to trigger some of these great B2B segments that they're working in. So the risk in, you know, just starting to churn stuff without learning is real, I think.

Drew: Yeah, oh, it is. And the pressure to do something quickly. So it's funny, we have this long list of quick wins checklist that we provide to our membership to help them buy the time to fix the real problems. If a company is not growing, it's probably not a marketing problem. It's probably a go-to-market problem. It's competitive. You know, the pricing might be wrong, or the product isn't actually delivering the way it should, or there's a weakness at customer service and so forth. And you know the old saying, there's nothing like great marketing to kill a bad product. Well, that's real, and I've seen it in B2B and B2C, where great marketing campaign created demand and then couldn't deliver, and the customers that were currently there were so unhappy you didn't have the test, you create a downward spiral. So there are always things you can tweak, little things that could make a difference. 5%, 10%, just by in these days, doing a few things to help your website, you know, be a little more generative AI, LLM friendly. Those are little things. They're not big things, but, you know, they might have an impact. And so you have that checklist, and you do those things, but most likely, and then and, and I'd love to talk about what you're seeing and thinking about. Most B2B looks exactly the same. The playbooks are the same, the way they spend. And then every once in a while, you get something interesting that's different. And those are the brands that I love to talk about, and those are the CMOs I like to interview. I'm just curious if you have talked to some folks that are actually doing something different.

Barb: You know, thanks, you're flipping the switch on us. So I think this is a great topic. And I do, my sense is the playbook is a good baseline, and to me, it's almost table stakes, and you have to do that, especially if companies are not doing sort of the basics. I think those are the basics, right? Do you have a segmentation to your customer base? Do you really understand what the pain points are? Are you communicating that on a regular basis? You know, what's your top of the funnel look like? Are you setting yourself up for relevancy in this customer team? Right? Because it's one thing to get down the funnel, but are you even in the relevant set for most of these folks? So there is some brand that comes into that as well. So I believe that that's table stakes. To me, I think solving the big problems, and sometimes what you're talking about, to me is innovation, and I have seen big wins in the baseline playbook, okay, plus you're going to do something out of the box, and you're going to do something a little innovative that the marketplace has not seen yet or done yet. And it may be in events that go with that, a different kind of event. It may be a different kind of, you know, I've had wins on really impactful retention strategies that changed the game on this for my customer base. You know, I've had new technologies that I worked really hard on with my product folks, that we were going to deliver a meaningful tweak in this business so that it was marketing, operational excellence number one, and then a plus of innovation. That's how you get to growth, I think.

Drew: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I agree with everything you said. I'm looking at the very few brands that say are community led or customer led. You go, "Wow. Okay." I mean, what 6sense has done with coffee talks and how they built that community is fascinating and effective in terms of perception of the brand, you know, customer led. If you're a well established brand, you have a lot of companies right now. Those companies are the ones that have the opportunity, because landing a new one is tough. Upsell, cross-sell, very, very different things, like champion tracking is in terms of that, and it is there's a nitty gritty thing, but I'm just looking for somebody who actually has a unique point of view. Yeah, that's hard. Find one with a unique point of view.

Barb: Yeah, no, I'm with you.

Alec: I think we're always searching for that, and it's hard, but that is really innovation at its best, right? You happen to find something that you really are truly unique on. It's already hard enough, I think, just to even put into play the playbook that you know is supposed to work. That job is already so hard in and of itself. So I think if you're a CMO that can do that, but also innovate on top of that? Yeah, that's where you then rise to the top, right? You really are, you know, top 1%, I think, if you can pull that off.

Barb: So, let's talk about, Alec, you and I were talking about this before, right? So, what does it require of the CMO to do that? Well, right? I mean, think about this, the skill set of the CMO has to be huge and very widespread. Like, what do we expect CMOs to know today? Right? I mean, if you look at a job description for some of these CMOs, like, "I want you to have SQL Server experience," you know you have to be an expert on the 11,000 plus MarTech tools that are out there today. You have to be a great brand communicator. You have to be a great storyteller. You have to be a great design driver. I mean, is it? Are we unrealistic expectations?

Drew: That's, it's, it's lunacy. I mean, if you were just saying, all right, what does a leader do? Let's just stop there. A leader. This is a chief. They set the vision, they build the team, and they allocate resources. It didn't say anything about expertise. There vision, people, allocation resource. And I, by the way, whatever task is given. If you don't have strong number twos, you're, you're, you're done. So we, we know that. But the third one of allocate resources is a very ripe area. Again, I did this last night. It says, "So, how are you spending your, you know, giving on 100 being the total." And it was like 65% people or 60% people, 30% programs, 10 to 15% tech and so, oh, that's interesting. What would happen if you put 65% into programs? How would your reach change? How would you spend your money? You know? What would you do? How would you staff it? Yeah, that's a radical way of thinking about allocation. But most, but like and again, if you're at a PE firm, they're telling you what your allocation is. They're not saying, "Oh, figure out whether it's better to be 50% people." No, we want your people to be 45%.

Barb: That's so crazy to me. You know, I had early in my career somebody that said, "What if you had this huge strategy built out? And, you know, the CEO or the board came into you, or the PE firm came in and said, 'Yeah, I approved all your data points on this. I understood the strategy,' et cetera, et cetera. And then what if they changed it at the last minute?" And I said, "Why would we want to do that? Maybe we've got the wrong fit, right?"

Drew: Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of the reasons that right now is so difficult. We had Michael Watkins, the guy who wrote "The First 90 Days" - great, great business book - and he has a new book out on the six disciplines of strategy. And I think about strategy as something that you get into place, and it's like a three-year plan, right? He was talking about quarterly strategic reviews. And I thought, "Ooh, that's really hard." But if that is the speed of change in the way things think, then I guess the CMO is going to have to adjust. But the big boy table, if you will, is about strategy, and the closer that CMOs can get to be a respected member of the strategic team, the more likely - because then they can show this is how we're executing against the strategy that we came together. Go-to-market strategy, not marketing strategy. Go-to-market. And so it's a different conversation than "go fix pipe." And maybe you have to earn that right. But man, if there's an opening, and AI seems to be one of those openings, the smart ones are really grabbing that and running right through it and saying, "Yep," because it's a strategic issue, not a tactical or strategic opportunity.

Alec: Yeah, that's great advice, right? It's seeing the opportunity, or seeing that there's a moment here where there is something bigger that takes you beyond what you're typically kind of boxed into, right? And if you can take that opportunity, then you can break out of that. That's a very interesting perspective and a way to look at AI that I think is bigger picture than just the tactics of AI. I think we spend a lot of time trying to figure out - you're in the bowels of AI, like, how do we make this work? How do we make this work? But it is also the bigger picture of, like, "Hey, why? Why is AI an opportunity to really change the landscape and be seen as a leader?" That's a very interesting perspective, and something I think we should think about a lot.

Drew: And let's expand that. And this is where it gets really - if you're the arts and crafts, God forbid, just the marketer person, you're looking at AI and you're saying, "Oh, it's great for content. It's speeding up. It's helping me. You know, I'm producing more, I'm producing it faster, and maybe I need less people." If that's where you're stopping, you've just missed the whole opportunity, because there's so many different ways where marketing will transform workflow. Everything that you're doing repetitively - like we produce a podcast every week, sometimes twice a week. It used to take us 10 to 15 hours. Now it takes two because of a workflow. You know, we analyze the whole workflow. So you look at all your workflows and you say, "Wow, these are repetitive. These involve 15 steps. What if I sat down with somebody who actually knew how to write code or a little bit of code, and thought about, how do we fix this workflow?" Now, again, you're transforming how you work. And then there's just so much more from a strategic standpoint. And then I want to share one fun thing. This is interesting. So if the problem is the relationship that you have with the CEO, the CFO, and the board, imagine you create a GPT for each of those folks, and you train that GPT on that individual. And every time you have a conversation, you remember the conversation. You put it into that GPT. I recommend that you do this on your personal account, not the company account. And then you have your CEO, and you say, "I think my CEO is probably this personality, but let me tell you the behavior that I'm seeing all the time. Now tell me, let's role play. What questions are they going to ask? What's important to them? Let's do this." The amount of the ability to prepare and deal with and overcome these personalities and play the game - and you're going to be the only one in the C-suite doing this right now. That's number one. Number two is, be prepared for your CFO to walk in and say, "Hey, I just had ChatGPT help me figure out how we could grow pipeline," and literally hands you the two-page report from ChatGPT that says, "To do this, go do that." So you might as well do that exercise in advance. "Yeah, yeah, I know we did. We looked at it. Yeah, thanks," as opposed to being caught off guard, because that's what's happening right now.

Barb: I caught myself off guard, actually. I actually looked at a successful fractional CMO stint. I did 218% growth, 30% pipeline growth, and I was like, "Okay, I want to see if my plan was the same as ChatGPT's plan." So I did that with my digital twin, and it wasn't exactly the same plan I had, but I was shocked, right, that it was probably 65% of the plan. So that's an interesting check that you're looking at. What if I had - how much time would this have saved me? Would this have been a good investment for 65% throughput right away?

Drew: Yeah. I mean, I think that for every single thing that you do in life today, it is worth checking with the GPT. You know, I just think the mistake that folks do is they take that and say, "Oh, okay, I'll do it," because, you know, it's the human in the loop that's going to make something different. But you know why not? Yeah, particularly if you understand prompting and are doing a good job and giving it enough data and really being systematic about your prompts and tracking your prompts. And your use case was a great example of that, because you had - you did it, it worked. Now you can go and see what you got.

Barb: That was reverse engineering, right?

Drew: So, you know, and this is a new habit that all of us are having to train ourselves on.

Barb: Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about CMOs that are having fun and thriving right now. Tell me some stories about people who are winning and doing it well, and by the way, you know, what I would encourage CMOs to think about is, we're all learning this together, right? It's not like you have to be the whole company expert. We're all learning it together. And by the way, other angles of your company - if you have product managers in your company, they're all using it as well. You know, by sharing some of that with the company, I think could be a win for some CMOs.

Drew: So they're taking their moments of fun. I can't say that if I had a barometer and said zero to 10, 10 being fun all the time, I don't know if many CMOs are getting to five right now, okay? But where they are having it is they're trying to create protective zones and have the marketing department be fun, if you will. Yeah, that marketing is still a place where fun doesn't go to die. That's part one. And you see that joy whenever there's a post on LinkedIn, and the folks said, "I got my team together physically. We were all at an event. We got our customers together, and we shared how - look what we're doing." And I think the hard part with - if marketing gets small, you don't feel like you're part of something big. And I think CMOs are challenged when they create demand gen and brand and divide the groups as they do. It's like you're doing something that drives business. You're doing something that nobody really believes in. All marketing drives demand. So let's not look at our departments that way. But so I think one of my favorites in this - Kelly Hopping, the CMO of Demandbase, and she's been on the show and talked about this publicly, so I'm not sharing secrets. She talks about "our role is to make sales love us." And I think that's it. So it's like, literally, we have a mission statement as a marketing team, and how do we make sales love us? Well, you think about if we do marketing that drives pipe, that's good. If we create sales enablement programs that help them sell better, that's good. If we know our customers, and we go in with them and go on sales calls, those are all ways. And I think by having that kind of - there's a sense of control. We know what it is that we're trying to accomplish. And again, that's set the vision, and it's more fun, not going to use it as lower, you know, small 'f' fun.

Alec: Maybe the other key here too is, how often do you find a CMO and CRO are peers? Or how often do you find where a CRO actually owns marketing?

Drew: Oh, God. Okay, so if you said to me, "Should a CMO report to a CRO?" I'll say no, easy answer, because most CROs that have that have never spent any time in marketing, so they're just looking at marketing as a cost. It's rare that you have a CRO who has - because it's really the old COO job. It's in theory this role with someone who manages marketing, sales, customer success, and they have an overview of the thing. I get that job. But when you just have a CRO with no marketing experience - now I know a CRO who came from marketing, and they have a marketing person and a salesperson reporting to them, and it's working out great. So it's all about the experience. They also had sales experience. So they can do it. The more common structure is CMO, CRO, right, reporting into the CEO, or reporting into a COO. And I would say there isn't a member of our community who doesn't strive to be bonded with their CRO. And you know, they present together, they have shared metrics. There aren't marketing metrics. And you know, that's why you hear so many people saying, "No more MQLs. We're not talking about that. We care about pipeline. We care about cost per acquisition. Care about the things that sales cares about," and so forth. And that's good. I still think that, if that's it, you're just on this short-term lagging indicator thing. You're not thinking about the bigger things. So look, you can never go wrong being bonded with your other members of the C-suite, so knock yourself out. But recognize the difference between marketing and sales and the purview is different.

Alec: Yeah, isn't that - I feel like that's the two chief level roles, though. CMO and CRO are unlike other C-level roles, though, in that what you just said, right, is that - because what other chief roles really do operate so closely and intertwined together? It seems like that is a unique aspect.

Drew: No, it's true. And, you know, they often - they go down together, or a new CRO comes in, and "we got to get rid of the CMO," or the CMO comes in and "the CRO is no good," whatever. There's probably as much turnover at the CRO level, again, when they're parallel, yeah, particularly when the economy is uncertain, like we're facing now. Let's blame the sales guy.

Barb: Yeah, I was gonna say, we used to call that line employees, right? You know, line employees are on the line for the number, right? So it's great to be a CFO. They have to do projections, and if the guidance isn't correct, it's bad too. Blah, blah, blah. But the people who are on the line for performance, you know, I always like to elevate that team a little bit in the eyes of the business, because, you know, let's face it, right? I mean, nine out of 10 times, if there's questions, it's going to those two.

Drew: Yeah. And again, I think CMOs can get ahead of that, just like CROs. Again, they present - there's no such thing as if sales aren't doing well, marketing should be pretty unhappy and working to solve it and recognize that this is on them too.

Barb: In most companies, it's SG&A, right? Sales and marketing are together in the same line item, right?

Drew: Yeah, well, right. And again, going back to the PE firm, they will tell you what that percentage should be. That's a combined 25%, and 7% of that should be marketing.

Alec: What? Wait, what is the average?

Drew: That's one specific, very large PE firm. It's like 25% is sales and marketing combined spend, 7% of that should be marketing.

Alec: 7% of the 25% should be marketing. So, okay.

Drew: So 7% and 18%. 18 equals 25.

Alec: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, okay, all right. That's good to know.

Barb: Boy, I could counter that on a brand new company or a new market entry, and, you know, a whole host of other scenarios. Good to know what an average is.

Drew: And it's silly, because if you're going at net new often, that number could be 50%.

Alec: Yeah, right.

Barb: I do a lot of business in healthcare, and it's like, across the board, right? Drugs, devices, you know, totally a different spend, you know, benchmark.

Drew: I mean, one of the things we haven't really talked about, which is this other side of it. So, you know, we have all these metrics that show sort of pipeline, and you know, those things. But the bigger issue is, are you making progress against your target audience? Right? And very few brands actually have any kind of sophisticated brand tracking, because they don't want to spend the money on that. Well, there's a lot of surrogate metrics for brand health today, and that's part of the story. And again, it's not about the exact number—it's about, are you making progress over time? Because eventually you'll get the anecdote where a CEO of a company said, "Yeah, I heard of you guys. I saw your presentation at XYZ," right? And then suddenly everybody goes, "Oh, my God. Marketing works," because of an anecdote. But you have to have this other thing. And I don't think enough CMOs argue for "Look, our dashboard can't only be lead gen." If that's all we're talking about, you just need a VP of demand gen, and that's it. By the way, that's happened a lot these last two years.

Alec: Okay, wait, so you teased that a little bit. What are some of these surrogate measures? What have you seen other people using?

Drew: So there are—we're working on a model right now that actually tracks this, and we're not ready to go public with it. But there are, you know, sort of old school stuff, like Share of Voice that you can get from a Meltwater or something like that, share of impressions. But there's social impressions, there's website traffic. And I know those all sound like vanity metrics, but there's, you know, there's time on website. There's certain key leading indicators of brand health. There's booth traffic, or lack of booth traffic. There's all sorts of ways of looking at, are we engaging more members of our audience tomorrow than we did yesterday? Are we in a month? And you can add it up, and you can weight them any way you want. I talk about this in my book, in chapter 10 of Renegade Marketing, and it provides you, again, sort of these buckets, where you can take these numbers and then you can put in any kind of percentage allocation. But all you need is five of those, and you weigh them up to 100 and you track it over time, and you can show progress. And I have seen brands that have actually been able to—when they do that, and it's like they cut PR, and guess what? The brand health number went down six months later, and they went, "Oh, we better add it back." But if you don't have that in place, all you have—you're living and dying by form fills and stuff, which is garbage.

Barb: Right? I'm telling you, you can't grow your way to operational efficiency if you want really interesting metrics. But you're exactly right on the brand side. And we've heard this too, right? Especially now with brand authority coming out. Right? Brand authority is going to be one of those ways that the AI is going to pick up your brand relevance. And if you're not in, you know, that top overview section when you're in Google, if you're not in ChatGPT's answer or Copilot's, this is going to cost you in the future. So you better rethink things like PR. But I would love some metric that said, "Yes, this brand health or brand relevance," whatever you say, that you could prove to the board. Wouldn't that be nice?

Drew: So, and I think I forgot a bunch of areas where that's really important. It's where sort of recommendations and referrals are another way. So like, if you go look at your TrustRadius thing and you have more recommendations this month than you did last month, that's progress. If you look at employee survey and you ask them the question, not likelihood to recommend working, but "Are you proud to work here?" Yeah, yeah, that pride in work, in workplace is a reflection of how they feel about the brand, right? And so you can add that. So if you have an employee sort of health and a customer health, and then prospects, in terms of the noise that you're making in the industry, and then again, you look at all those up, and are we trending up, or are we trending down? Yeah, and you can always see after budget cuts, you're going to be trending down, and it's important to be able to show that, because that impact is going to come into pipeline 12 months later. But if you don't have that again, you're living and dying by the metrics that are basically sales metrics. And that's a problem, because you got to be thinking 18 to 36 months out as the Chief Marketing Officer.

Alec: Drew Neisser, this has been a terrific conversation. A lot of wonderful perspective. And I think at a level also that we often don't get. You can really speak at this very general level, having spoken to so many CMOs, so you can speak to some of these broad trends that we all feel. And I think a lot of us probably wonder like, "Gosh, am I the only one?" And this is comforting to know that it's not just me, right?

Drew: No, come in from the cold. It is, right. It is. No, it's cold for everybody out there, right?

Barb: Yeah, if people want to get a hold of you, where could we go?

Drew: LinkedIn is, you know, it's Drew Neisser on LinkedIn, and that's easiest. Or they can go to cmohuddles.com and find me there. Or, and we still run renegademarketing.com—it's a media website with lots of lots of information for senior marketers.

Alec: Yep. And I should point out, I think that part of your Huddles program also is helping CMOs that are looking for their next role as well.

Drew: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, we have something called the Transition Team.

Alec: Yeah. So that's a big one as well. Well, thank you so much. We turned the tables on you. You're normally the one asking the questions. You got to be the one answering. So I hope it was still fun.

Drew: Oh, it was. It's no, it's a real treat to not have to feed questions. But I did get a question or two in on you.

Alec: You did, you couldn't resist.

Drew: Thank you again. Thank you again for doing your show. It's so important and valuable.

Barb: I hope this was a piece of fun for us today.

Alec: That's right. There we go. That was a good close. Thanks, Barb. Thanks, Drew.

Show Credits
Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!