What 2026’s CMO Survey Reveals About Marketing Under Pressure

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. You're about to listen to an Expert Huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome CMO Huddles community.

In this episode, Christine Moorman of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business brings fresh data from the CMO Survey on where marketing stands right now. She gets into the pressure pushing CMOs towards safer, short-term decisions. She looks at the rapid rise of AI, the growing gap in talent and capabilities needed to use it well, and through it all, she makes the case for marketing to reclaim its strategic role in driving growth.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Okay, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and chief marketing renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers. It's been a few years since I spoke with Professor Christine Moorman, who's given me permission to call her Chris, I still want to call her Professor Moorman. I can't help myself, who is the T. Austin Finch Senior Professor of Business Administration, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She's also the founder of the CMO Survey.

The CMO Survey, if you didn't know, is one of the longest running and most respected studies of marketing leadership, and the spring 2026 results paint a fascinating picture. More pressure, more AI, and more contradictions, frankly, than I think I remember seeing in one of these studies. So we're going to unpack what all of this means for B2B CMOs, and more importantly, sort of what effective leaders need to do differently in perhaps moments like this.

So, hello, Chris. How are you? And where are you this fine day?

Christine: Hello, Drew. I am, you're finding me on the Duke University campus in one of our video technology suites. So glad to be with all of you today.

Drew: Nice to have you here. So, one of the things we like to do on these is an exercise where, just in case they have to leave early, or we need to convince them to say, if you can list three, maybe four findings, just list them, you think CMOs really need to take heart, and we'll go through them one at a time.

Christine: Absolutely. So there are many interesting findings from the survey, but these here are sort of three summary points that I think stand out.

So, one is that marketing leaders are responding to the economic uncertainty and organizational pressure, and they're doing so by managing marketing more for the short term, making safe bets. Unfortunately, they're creating, I believe, reinforcing a narrow view of marketing. Okay, just a lot of other facts. That's it.

Drew: Okay, just because we'll discuss all those details. So go ahead, next one.

Christine: Second is that artificial intelligence is delivering real and growing value in marketing. On the other hand, there are troubling indicators that technology adoption is outpacing the organization's ability to manage it to its full potential.

Drew: Right.

Christine: And then finally, marketing capabilities are really important to business performance, but marketing organizations are systematically undermining them in the way that they're managing budgets, hiring, and the strategic priorities that they place on capability.

Drew: Interesting. Wow, okay. So let's talk about the first one. There is undoubtedly, I've looked at the graph today. Other than the Great Recession and the beginning of COVID, we are at a moment where they're really feeling the uncertainty more than they have in several quarters, that's for sure, right?

Christine: Absolutely. In fact, when you look at this over time, which is one of the nice things about the CMO Survey, we've been doing this since 2008, we get a very negative portrait on this issue of economic pessimism. So, marketers, COVID levels were 50.9 on a 100 point scale. We're now at 56, which is the lowest point that we've seen since COVID.

So marketers are pessimistic. What's going on? What are they doing? So one thing that's going on is that we are seeing tariffs, and now probably all of the other economic forces that are at play with the war translating into price increases, and this is across the board. So nearly half of companies have already raised prices or plan to do so in the coming year.

And for B2B companies, these numbers really split out between B2B products and B2B services, which you might imagine. So the B2B product companies are more likely to have raised prices, I think we have almost 60% either have raised prices or expect to raise prices. B2B services, on the other hand, we see that number is more like 30%, so almost half of that.

So that's what's happening with regard to prices. But the bigger issue, strategically, in my view, is that they are responding to the uncertainty by pulling back their targeting strategies, and they're focusing more on increasing the loyalty of their existing customers rather than pursuing new customers. And we see this with growth spending. We ask an independent question about growth spending, and nearly 60% of them say they're going to stick with the market penetration strategy in terms of the way that they're going to spend those growth dollars.

Drew: So wait, I want to make sure I understand this correctly. Because this is sort of recession strategy playbook number one, which is hang on to your existing customers and try to upsell and cross-sell them. So, in response to this downturn, you're seeing them say we're putting more energy against existing customers.

Christine: Absolutely. When we ask them why, they say, well, this is where we have our strengths, we're going to leverage our existing strengths. The second reason is we have all of these resource constraints, and then the third, which makes sense strategically also, is that they think that there's more opportunity in those markets. They have these existing relationships, they're going to go after that untapped growth opportunity.

Drew: And in your experience, that emphasis on existing customers versus expansion into new customers is short-term thinking and is problematic. I mean, I know that Professor Sharp is a big believer, and it's always focused on the next customer, because the existing customer you have, and don't spend any money on them. So there are different schools of thought on this.

Christine: Absolutely, I think you really want to think about this as a portfolio. I think in general, marketers are tipped towards market penetration, perhaps too much. My data can't tell us exactly what's more or less effective, that would take a different kind of a longitudinal view of the performance effects.

But I would say, if we just look at when we ask them why they're pulling back, they say basically they think that it's more important to build on the loyalty of their existing customers, not even so much in the sense of cross-sell and upsell, which I think does make sense, but we don't see that.

Drew: Interesting. I mean, because in reality, what comes up in Huddles is it's so hard to get through procurement at these bigger companies. If you're already there, it's just easier to do it. But let's move on to AI, because I think your findings are fascinating and do represent a real problem for the businesses and probably a societal problem as well. So AI adoption is up, and you mentioned that AI is delivering value. Can you talk about the details of that and what that looks like?

Christine: Absolutely. So this is obviously a very bright spot for marketing, because marketers are really benefiting from the AI adoption. So we see that AI use in marketing has nearly doubled in two years, and companies project that it will account for about half of all marketing activities within the next three years.

You can imagine that number being even higher in some sectors, but the business case is also strengthening. So what we see there is we've asked about customer satisfaction. We see gains to customer satisfaction year over year of 10.8%, marketing overhead cost reductions of 14.6%, and sales productivity, which I know is important to your B2B marketers, 14%.

So we see adoption is up, we see the value increasing, but there are these troublesome signs that the marketing technologies in general are outpacing organizational readiness. So we could go through some of those.

Drew: Yeah, and I'd like to, because it's funny. Pre-AI, if you asked me, you know, the fact that marketers were spending anywhere from 10 to 23% of their budgets on Martech, and then if I asked the same marketers, how were you staffed for them, they were always understaffed, and so they were always underutilizing the Martech.

But with AI it's kind of a different story. It's not about understaffing, it sounds like it's under-training.

Christine: I think it's actually both. So when we ask them where their weaknesses are with regard to AI and marketing technologies, we see this consistent message about, we're not hiring to manage these technologies well, we're not training employees on these emerging technologies. These tend to be, when they rate themselves on these types of technologies broadly, they tend to rate themselves most poorly on the human capital piece of it.

So that's one thing, I think, just making sure that we get the hiring right and the training right. If we're going to pull off AI, I think it goes beyond the system. In other words, we have to have the human capital piece of it, right? And that's true when I looked at the numbers specifically for B2B companies, that's true for B2B companies as well. In fact, they tend to do no better than any of the other types of companies. That's just one, go ahead.

Drew: Right, they don't do any better when it comes to hiring more for the tools or training more.

Christine: That's right.

Drew: But there was some adoption difference. I think that B2B companies were, I think I remember seeing, leaning into AI more.

Christine: I think so. I don't have that number on the tip of my fingers, but I think that's right. They do tend to, because, in some ways, it's a deeper part of all of their marketing activities if they can make those systems work.

But just kind of pulling back into some of the other challenges, what we see is that marketers are giving a lot of attention to things like content creation, content personalization. Those numbers are way up. So 73% of companies are using AI for content creation, 65% for content personalization. But then when you drop into these more strategic activities, like targeting, we're down to 45%. Segmentation, we're down to 36%.

So there's a missed opportunity here to deploy AI in this way towards these broader strategic issues. So I think that is a big issue, expanding the breadth of marketing's use of AI across these strategic activities.

Drew: Yeah, it's so interesting, because sort of level one adoption of AI is content. And just one note for the listeners: I am absolutely convinced that you're going to rethink how you structure your content teams and so forth, and it's going to be like the content team is going to be the AI content team, and you're going to staff it accordingly as you think about it. So that's content, and everybody's there, and at least in our community, they're using it for content, and they're also, it's helping with their AEO work and all of that.

Level two is workflow, and then level three is sort of agentic, where it's actually doing your media buying and optimizing it in real time, and there are very few companies, at least in the B2B that I know of, that are at that level. So that data is consistent with the anecdata that we have here in Huddle Land.

So, we talked a little bit about AI. Here's the interesting part: a lot of the CMOs in our community are spending a lot of time in their off hours learning these tools and figuring out what they can do to help their teams. Some of them are hiring people to help train their folks, but they may not be asking their employees to do this weekend work.

And so then there's this gap, which your research has identified between knowing how to use and optimize these tools versus being told, being given it. And so that's something that I think CMOs in our community really need to think about. Are they training folks enough so that they can take advantage of the licenses that you provided them?

Christine: Let me add to this one point too that kind of ties these two points together. So we've been asking a question about how your company approaches the development of new marketing capabilities, and that would include things like AI.

And for a long time, and these numbers surprised me when I first received them, and now I've been seeing them for over a decade, the number of companies that say that they are going to do this on their own, what we call build in business, so they're going to build new capabilities by training current or hiring new employees with those skills, that number is almost 60%. So the build strategy really dominates when we think about learning new things.

The other options are partners, so I'm going to partner for those skills, that knowledge, and that could be with a variety of different types of companies. Could be consultancies, but it could be specialized partners who can do these services for you. And then finally, acquire or buy a company that can do these things for you. So you can build, borrow, which is another way of saying partner, or buy these new capabilities.

And this dominant approach focused on building points to the fact that we really do need to think about getting the hiring right, because it's so important. And the question I have about these results is why that pattern has not been disrupted, given AI, because in a world where these technologies are changing so quickly, does build really make sense anymore, or does it make more sense to think about partnering for or borrowing, if we will, these skills from other companies and maybe learning over time how we can have those occur within our companies?

And let me just point out that B2B companies are the biggest builders. So we ask, across the different sectors, we see that the average is 59.5 for the builders, but B2B product 61%, B2B service 64%. So they tend to be the more dominant builders, which means they either have to hire or train, or disrupt that strategy and start to partner for those capabilities, including the AI capabilities.

Drew: Yeah, it's so interesting that this, first of all, another data point that supports this from your data is just how many B2B versus B2C companies use agencies, and it's almost double. B2C is like 48%, whereas B2B is more like 24%. B2C services companies actually put their money into agencies. So it's amazing, they do come at this with a do-it-yourself mentality.

So that is just something that's interesting. I also think with AI, because it's so accessible, there's been a lag time with consultants, and it just felt like it's easy to build this stuff. But I think you're right, I think we are going to get to this build versus buy crisis as you get to more workflows, as you get to agentic work.

But another prediction that I would bet money on, a year from now, is that a lot of CMOs in the community will have an AI engineer on their team. That just happens, because they're the build mentality, because it's so fast. The advantage of this speed, whereas even with a partner, you still have to brief them, and so forth. And the ability to, unlike any other sort of programmatic thing that you can do, AI is like, boom, you want a new landing page, knock yourself out, go create it tomorrow in five minutes.

And so I do think that this build mentality is going to be hard to break for a while. So the last thing in your three big points was about budgeting. Maybe we could revisit your last key point.

Christine: I think the capabilities, so this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, because I really think the idea of a marketing capability is really where marketing can contribute. So when we ask marketers to rate the performance value of their marketing capabilities, they say they're doing pretty well. So on a seven point scale, where one is very important and one is not at all, they give themselves a 5.9, which is a high score in the survey. Usually we see things more in the middle range of that scale.

And so they say that these marketing capabilities are important, but there are a number of things that are getting in the way. One is to build strategy. So if they want these capabilities to perform for them, they're going to have to invest in the people to make it happen, and they're going to need to build partnerships with the CFO to be able to get the funding for those marketing capabilities.

When we ask marketers what is the biggest challenge with their marketing capabilities, we were looking for a content area, we were thinking they would say, well, it's about channels, or it's about pricing, or whatever. The number one challenge that they described to us was lack of financial resources, lack of focus on these marketing capabilities, and that's coming from the upper echelons. They're not giving marketing capabilities, they're not supporting marketing capabilities in the way that marketers think they should be.

So I think marketers are, in some ways, contributing to this, though. And maybe we can talk about some of the ways that marketers are contributing to this, and what they can do differently.

Drew: Yeah, I'd love to hear that, continue, because it's funny. I've written a lot about this arbitrary cut-your-cost-by-30%-number that's floating around the C-Suite and B2B land, particularly at PE-backed firms. And what's interesting is at the same time you've got startups who are doing incredible things with no staff and no budget, and the CMOs who have 100 people are struggling, because in order to really do this right, they'd have to create a skunkworks to completely reinvent how they do their marketing and maybe even go to market.

I do think there is a world where, if it was AI-first, AI-built, they probably could cut their cost by 30% and hit their numbers, and I didn't think that six months ago.

Christine: A couple things stand out in this issue of getting behind these capabilities, and what marketers might be doing to hurt that prospect, which will drive down their costs, right? The capabilities are powerful because they can have so many different effects on the organization. One of them is to make the organization more cost effective, because you learn how to do things.

So when we ask marketers to say why marketing capabilities are important to their business, most of them tend to focus on the ROI for every marketing dollar that's spent. So 78% of them focus on that, and I think that leaving the focus there and not extending to look at that broader impact of marketing capabilities is where I think they probably fall short.

So, for example, only 52% talk about the impact of marketing capabilities on increasing the company's effectiveness in managing customers. That number should be higher. For another, only 42% say that our marketing capabilities are important to showing our marketing strength to potential and current partners. Only a third say that marketing capabilities are important to attracting and retaining top managers and employees.

Interestingly, marketing capabilities can do all of those things, and it goes back to a point we didn't talk about, which is that marketing is often narrowing its focus on just a few functions within the organization. And our results show that they're a bit defensive about supporting the view that marketing can create these returns, and I think that's probably because they face so many pressures from top management.

In fact, when we ask them what actions they take to show the value of marketing to other functions, 86% say we focus on developing stronger marketing performance tracking. So they improve their tracking, but then they leave other things on the table. In terms of our results, for example, only 67% say that they demonstrate the value of brand and customer relationships.

So yes, they need the performance tracking, but I think our results suggest that there is opportunity here to think about, in particular, demonstrating the value of brand and customer relationships. And we can talk a little bit about some of the other data that I have on marketing metrics, if you like.

Drew: I've got some questions, or at least thoughts to share. So I wonder, on the value of brand, if there's a big difference in B2B versus B2C, and I say that because anecdotally, at least 10 CMOs in Huddles in the last six months have said our CEO, or my board of directors, or our PE firm has told me never to use the word brand again in a board meeting, literally, that has been the case. Sometimes they can get away with using the word reputation, but brand is, color, and sort of, it doesn't feel, it's arts and crafts as far as PE and boards are concerned.

So that's one of the things, but in B2C land, everybody understands the power of brand and what that means, because that's pricing power, that's the exposure, that's speed off the shelf, the bigger the brand, the better known, the feelings you see and live it. So I've never worked on a B2C brand in the early parts of my career that didn't have brand tracking.

Christine: I might disagree with you here, Drew.

Drew: Nice, good, make it spicy, let's go.

Christine: So, I think the point is that brand does mean something to your partners. Brand does mean something to your potential employees that you're hiring. I mean, hopefully you can make the case that it also means something to the end consumer, if they're aware of your brand, sometimes they're not. And so all that value is going to occur at the partner stage of the process, the people that you distribute through, or that are buying your products and services. So I think we need to think about that.

But in other data that we've collected over time, what we see is that, in support of this idea, marketers are tending to rely on things like content engagement, lead generation, even lead conversion, those are all perfectly legitimate things. But what about things like customer lifetime value? What about things that look at the value of customer relationships? Those numbers are a tenth in terms of the metrics that are being used by marketers to demonstrate the value of marketing.

Drew: I have no argument. What I was saying, we have no argument there. What I was saying is the CMOs don't use the word brand because they've been told not to, because the executives don't see the value. And so, yes, it's on the CMO to eventually try to get them to understand.

But when your CEO says never use the word brand, or your CFO does, you have a problem. You've got to come up with a way around talking about it, and often it's anecdotal. When the CEO talks to a customer and they say, yeah, I saw it, I was at your event, and it was so great, and I talked to a salesperson, and yeah, we just bought this new thing. Then suddenly they feel it, they go, oh, okay, that's marketing. But it's weird, it's a weird thing. And again, my point was, in B2C land that never happens.

Christine: Good point. Yeah, good point.

Drew: And it's a weird dynamic. 

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Drew: I know you have some other data points that you want to share. Let's get to them.

Christine: Well, a few other things. I think there's really some great news in this survey beyond the things that we've been talking about. So we do have this challenge with the short term, we do have all the things, but the good news is that we asked this question, we don't ask it that frequently. So we asked it in 2022, and now we've asked it again in 2026.

So how durable are the effects of your company's marketing investments on customers? Durability, in this case, is basically an indicator of the value of marketing. And so what we see is the median rating, because this is an ordinal scale, has gone up from several months to six months. In B2B companies it's on the high end, so it's more like a year. And so that's suggesting again that these effects, marketing is having an impact, and that impact isn't disappearing very easily. That's one thing.

When we look across all of the different responsibilities that marketing is given within organizations, marketing is being given more responsibility in key strategic areas. Things like revenue growth is one of the top areas where marketing gained responsibility. So I think those are very positive things to make sure that we face some of the challenges that I've described that are important.

I do think there is an important issue here in terms of the kind of spending that marketing is engaged in. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that.

Drew: Well, let's connect the dots, because you talk about increased short-termism. And again, if some of the CMOs on this call or others were to say, I'm doing that in response to direct orders from my CFO, my CEO, and our investors, we don't care about a year from now, we care about this quarter, and we care about pipeline, and that's what they're being told.

So whether or not they have the ability to sell the notion of, hey, I guess short term, but also I've got to be looking at the market long term too, that's an interesting challenge that I'm afraid a fair number of CMOs are not up for.

Christine: Well, the challenge there is that, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. That's what I have seen for a long time. There are these pressures, we see it in the survey results, and as a result, what we see is that acquisition budgets are about 26% on average greater than retention budgets. Those numbers are larger in B2C companies, where there's an even greater emphasis on acquisition, but they're still high in B2B companies. And I think those pressures are real, and marketing leaders have to deliver against that.

On the other hand, what I would say is that when we spend in that way, we bring attention to that shorter-term effect. As a result, I think we're sending a message about the value of marketing. There's the old quote by Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message, if you remember reading that back when you were all at university. And in this case, I think the metrics become the message. They become a message about what is the value of marketing. That's what leaders, CFOs, CEOs turn to, to form. That's what they think about.

And the challenge here is that when times get tough, what we see is that then marketing is more likely to be cut. It is the first budget that's basically cut when spending is challenged and when profits suffer. So I think there's a lot of teaching going on here with the way that the marketers are using these metrics, and of course they're not doing it in a vacuum. They're doing it within the context of organizational pressures that are very, very few.

Drew: Yeah, but it is the focus on short-termism. It's very hard to have a conversation about brand, if you will, or call it reputation, if you're not hitting your pipeline numbers. And even though those are inseparable, at least in Huddle Land, we try to talk about, well, let's look at your win rate and your, let's look at your deal velocity, and let's look at some of those things, which are not, pipeline is always a lagging indicator, but if you look at things like win rate, the stronger the brand, most likely the higher the win rate.

And that is an interesting part of this dynamic. But again, they're not getting two years or three years, they have like a year, but really they're expected to impact the pipeline really fast.

Christine: Absolutely. So I think it's a yes-and kind of situation here. Yes, they must do that, but they need to think about proving the value of, if you want to call it, the intangible aspects of marketing.

And there's one very nice piece of research that was done by unbiased marketing professors on this. What they did, which was super clever, is they took, your listeners might know about the American Customer Satisfaction Index, ACSI, which comes out of the University of Michigan, and this is collected. If not, your company may be in there, certainly your industry is in there. You can see what those scores are if you look up acsi.org.

What they did was they took those ratings for companies, and they formed a portfolio of companies performing high on customer satisfaction levels, and then they looked at the performance of those companies over time, and the effects are simply dramatic. And they've done this now, I can share the paper with you, Drew, it's been done now for 25 years, so it's not a blip.

Drew: Right.

Christine: It's a real effect. And the effect is, the numbers between even just 2000 and 2014, which is the number I have on the screen in front of me, a 500% return versus the standard S&P, which was 31%. So customer satisfaction does pay. It is a long-term effect.

And so it is something to think about, how is it that we can demonstrate some of that within our companies, because having this overall sample effect, the one that I described, is only going to be modestly helpful. You need to have something showing up within your own companies that can basically prove that point.

Drew: So, where do you see marketing's role in maybe spending when it comes to customer satisfaction? And, look, we all know that if your business has a high churn rate, you have a problem, because no matter what, you're always going to be chasing your tail as you try to grow the business. If you're losing 20% out the back door every day, it's a problem.

But I just want to make sure we're clear, from a spending standpoint, from an activity standpoint, in your mind, what should marketers be thinking about when it comes to customer satisfaction? What actions would they take?

Christine: So, first of all, tracking it regularly, and having that broader portfolio of metrics that we were discussing before, because in a lot of companies customer satisfaction isn't measured at all, right? So, measure it and watch it over time. Watch it in response to your spending. There are things that you can watch, the effects of what your competitors are doing too. So that would be one thing.

But having that broader portfolio is key. I think expanding marketing's cross-functional role, this is having more of what I would call this enterprise role. So it's not just about getting the flow through, or having the kinds of things that you were describing, there is this broader effect, because what we see is that marketing leaders don't have the kinds of cross-functional relationships that we might hope for, especially with CFOs, CHROs, even the technology folks. Those are not, they're very strong with sales and distribution, which I think would probably be true in your member companies. So having that broader cross-functional impact.

And the third is building the capabilities, because the capability is going to be the engine behind those payoffs. However, those are cheap. Now, the very specifics I can't probably deliver on, because I think those are going to be differentiated depending on the type of business. But building those capabilities, selling the capability as basically this organizational effect, is going to be helpful.

Drew: What's interesting is there is almost always high customer satisfaction rate equals high close rate, and low customer satisfaction means fewer testimonials in B2B, which means fewer case histories, which makes it a little bit harder to close the deal, and so forth. And I think the key point that you're making is, if the company isn't tracking it, marketing can lead that initiative. But more importantly, if CS is low, marketing's not going to work. That's probably the biggest thing.

And it's interesting, conversely, if customer satisfaction is good, the halo effect of marketing can be huge. And this is why B2C companies are still using television, because often it's reinforcing how somebody feels, an existing customer feels about it. So there is an impact there. So, let's see what else we should be talking about from the study.

Christine: Well, one other thing, just to reinforce the point that you were making, following up on this issue of cross-functional. So when we asked what actions do you take to show the value of marketing to other functions, I mentioned that 86% focus on developing stronger marketing performance tracking, which again reflects the pressures that are being faced. Way down at the bottom of that list, consistent with what we were talking about with customer satisfaction, collecting customer data, only 54%, offering novel customer insights, 50%, running experiments, 58%.

So there are opportunities here to collect this kind of data, develop the insights that can really drive growth. More than anything, marketing is the engine for growth within a company. Who else is going to do it? It's not the CFO. In fact, that always irritates me when I hear CFOs talking about growth. The marketing leader is the one that knows where the opportunity is. But we have to make sure that we really enact that role within the organization.

Drew: And I'm going to just throw out a point, which is, I do think that in particular, B2B CMOs have leaned into Martech to try to track every little thing, to show every little thing is actually paying off, and some have gotten really good at it. But if you're spending 23% of your budget on Martech in order to be able to make the case that marketing is working, that's a lot of money that isn't going into marketing. And so there's an irony there, you're spending more to justify marketing, and you're taking a decent chunk of change out of there.

I haven't seen anybody say, all right, I'm going to have a smaller stack, I'm just going to get rid of a lot of the tools that I have, because the pressure to show that the dollars that you're spending are working is just so great on marketing, it doesn't seem to go away.

I do want to remind those folks here, if you have any questions. I did see a comment that I wanted to throw out there, because this is from a CMO who has actually done an amazing job linking marketing to pipeline. It says that justifying marketing ROI in customer retention is tough, we tend to link it to expansion, which is still a debate with the CFO, when they've made heavy investments in sales coverage. So it's interesting that it's hard to make that business case.

Christine: Is it because the systems aren't designed to reveal retention, or the growth of customers? I would think that B2B companies in some ways have the upper hand here in terms of tracking the system. So where is the challenge?

Drew: You know, we'll have to say, Peter, if you want to come on and ask that, you're more than welcome to. If you don't, we'll just keep going.

Peter: I'm happy to jump in, if you're already...

Drew: Oh, good. Yes, please, Peter, go ahead and find yourself, please.

Peter: I will. Thank you. I would love to. I was just starting to type it out, but it's going to be quicker to say it. So, Christine, thank you first of all for coming and joining us. It's been fantastic to hear so much resonating from my own experience.

So, the specifics of this, I think, is because the perception is that customer retention is primarily a factor of sales working with customer success, usually under the auspices of the CRO. So there's a perception that says, we've already got coverage on this account, we've got heavy investments associated with sales, therefore marketing's role is not to focus on that. We don't want you to focus on that. We want you to focus on the things that we don't yet have as customers, where we don't have customer success and people working on them, meaning acquisition.

And so marketers tend to bridge back and say, well, where's the revenue coming from? We need to focus on expanding existing accounts, we need white space opportunities there. So they tend to sort of justify their investment levels around expansion rather than retention in its own right.

Now, we all know that a percentage point of churn is game-changing for any enterprise. So it is a focus at the executive level, without a doubt, the board's going to be very focused on it, it's part of enterprise value creation, it's going to be crucial. But the perception is that marketing's role there is potentially secondary or tertiary, because other investments have been made, and that's what lies behind the comment that I was making there.

Now, I'd love to hear from other CMOs on the call as to whether they think that's similar in their environments, but I think that was the background to my comment.

Christine: I think it's a really good comment, and with the way that the funnel often looks within organizations, marketing is at the top and sales is controlling the rest of it, but I think that's a mistake. That would be my argument, to say that marketing does have a role, even in those later stages of the funnel, in terms of growing the business. Sales is only, perhaps my argument would be, that it's only going to take us so far.

So I think advocating for a role in the funnel at those deeper stages, there's a case study that I do with my class, and this is one of the things that we see this company doing. They actually divide the funnel in a way that, where marketing, and they describe the role that marketing might play in those later stages.

At the same time, it's interesting, thinking about Drew's earlier comment, that brand is not important. So, if brand is not important, then what's driving people into the top of the funnel, and how do we?

Drew: And just to defend, it's not that, yeah, brand is a word that is so misunderstood. It's the word brand that's problematic. Again, if you talk in terms of reputation, you may be able to get through, because CEOs, executives know it on an individualized basis. So I think marketers have to, we've got to remarket the word brand, and either get rid of it and talk about reputation, because it's become too closely linked with, and you'll get it.

I literally, this happened on a call recently, the CFO said, well, my last two companies tried to justify, they spent a lot of money on brand and it didn't work, so stop.

Peter: Okay, if I may jump back in again, two comments I wanted to make. I'll come to the brand second. The first point was, the way that I've tried to counter this issue around retention and marketing doesn't play a role is to talk about coverage, because the reality is that salespeople and customer success people have a limited amount of engagement that they can do with one account. The reality is they're probably servicing multiple accounts, they've probably got 15 to 20 accounts that they're trying to take care of in a B2B context. By definition, they are scratching the surface when it comes to engagement with those accounts to influence their thinking and their future purchasing decisions.

If you actually, given what Drew pointed out quite rightly, we're investing heavily in Martech, not just because we want the metrics to prove that what we do is worth doing, but because we need access to many touch points within a typical enterprise. And so we're trying to drive engagement across large communities. And so we do capture a lot of data actually about how many touches we actually have with a given account, how much engagement there is. And when you look at the sales engagement versus marketing engagement, you see a difference. Marketing tends to be, you know, up to 10 times more widely engaged than sales within a specific account.

Salespeople will sell to people they know in an existing account, they'll go back to the same trough over and over and over. What they won't be able to do is get to a new buying center, or get to a different level within the account, and that's where marketing plays its role, and that's where we can justify an investment in an existing account.

But the measure of success, invariably, is, well, did they buy more from us? Have they come back? And did you succeed in getting to a new buying center? That's why expansion becomes a thing. So I think coverage is maybe one way to think about it. But I'd love your thoughts on that, Christine.

Christine: I love that, and I think that's, if people aren't doing that yet, I think it's a worthy experiment, meaning, systematically manipulate this. So increase marketing's role in some, randomly selected accounts, increase marketing.

Peter: Good old A/B. I mean.

Christine: Look, and look at the effect, because I think this is what your CFO wants, they want the proof, and you just need to suffer with a control group, meaning a group that's not getting a good idea that you think you might have.

Peter: Good luck selling that to the CRO. No, these customers are not going to touch that for a while. See how that goes.

The other thing I was going to say is the brand issue for us, in general, is creating a linkage between improvement in brand attributes of some kind or other, and business outcomes that are measurable and meaningful. Because when we aggregate it, we can see trends, and we can stand behind that. But what our bosses want to see is specifics. We spent $300,000 launching X, so where is that? Show me where that hit, where did that happen? Okay, you spent 40 grand on a drone show to launch our new brand, and what happened? Nothing. Oh, we just threw that money away, then did we? That's how it feels to them.

So we've got to be better at linking investment in brand to outcomes that are discernible and valued within the business, and that's why CFOs and CEOs get fed up with it. You just spent more money, but we didn't actually see any growth in the pipeline, we didn't see more revenue, so you just wasted that money, then, didn't you? Not doing that again, go figure it out. So anyway, enough for me.

Drew: Thank you for that. Here's where we're headed, I think, Christine, which is right now, LLMs are a small percentage of site traffic that is going to B2B sites, but they're converting at a four to six times higher rate. But it is quite likely that whatever site traffic companies have in 2027 is going to come from LLMs.

And so, what I wonder, is all of this conversation academic, because if it used to be in B2B they talk about 70% of the journey was done before you even talk to a salesperson, I'm going to argue that LLMs are going to increase that number substantially. And so if you don't show up, the whole ball game is going to come down to what people are calling either AEO or GEO, which is answer engine optimization.

I wonder if, looking ahead, are we going to radically have to change this? And thank you for the comment, Bill Straderman, about, yes, the brand will have a big impact on LLMs and performance there. So in some ways, we may be going back to things like PR and exposure and wide reputation building, but on the other hand, little companies are doing amazing things just with AEO optimization and showing up and beating the big companies, because they're more nimble, because they can get more things, because they're not afraid of Reddit.

So I'm just curious what you think, are we perhaps, at least with B2B, and maybe even with a lot of B2C larger purchases, at an inflection point where the buying process is going to completely change?

Christine: That's very possible. We asked, for the first time in this survey, in that list of all of the different ways in which AI is being used, we asked about what we call GEO in the survey, so that number is 41%. I think I mentioned the content was in the 70s, this was in the middle, but it's the first time we've asked it, so I was very surprised to see it was so high, that companies are using AI in this way.

So companies are using it. I think you're right, though, this is another reason, perhaps, to expand the way that we think about marketing's role, because this is going to play such an important role, this is how customers will find us. Now, if you look online and talk to experts, people have their ideas about how you might be able to make sure that your company does appear in that list.

But nevertheless, I think all of the different ways that marketing can contribute, building reputation, brand, building positive word of mouth, all of the ways in which we know marketing can pay off, in that, I think these will matter more in the future, and so we may be reversing course, as you said.

Drew: Very cool. All right, thank you so much for spending time with us. I want to just, if you could step back from all the data in the survey, sort of two key takeaways you want every CMO listening today to remember and perhaps to act upon.

Christine: We've covered so much.

Drew: It's okay to be repetitive.

Christine: Okay, so one is that I think what we see in the survey is that marketing spending and strategy decisions remain probably more reactive than strategic. Marketing fundamentally has a strategic role, you know, a strategic function. It has a powerful strategic role, especially around growth. What we see, though, is that it's being shaped more by financial pressure and executive reflex, rather than by marketing priorities. So we need to make sure that gets resolved, and that we think about marketing strategically, we manage it strategically.

The second is to really put a premium on getting this talent piece right. So we asked, maybe one other finding that dovetails with this recommendation, when we ask marketers to rank order the set of factors important to their future organic growth within the company, having the right talent, having all your stakeholders aligned, having the right operating model, having the right data, or having the right technology, the number one factor, the highest-rated factor, was having the right talent. The lowest-rated factor was having the right technology.

So marketers do seem to understand the importance of having the right talent, but actions aren't really consistent with that. And so I would say that instinct is right, because machines are, at least for now, not going to run themselves. And so having the right talent is going to be most important to getting the most out of these technologies within organizations.

Drew: And even if the machines are going to run themselves, you need to have people that can build the machines and check to make sure that they're running themselves correctly. So, Professor Christine Moorman, from Fuqua, Duke's Business School, thank you so much for joining us today. Fascinating conversation, fascinating results, at a really important time in the marketing world. Where can people find you or the survey, and if they want to subscribe, is there a way to do that?

Christine: Please, yes, I would really appreciate that. You can find everything that I've discussed today at cmosurvey.org. We basically give away the results for free, because this is a service for the field, and so you can find all of the results there. Everything is broken out by different kinds of sectors, both B2B and B2C, but also product, service, and then within that, different kinds of products and services, also different size companies, so you can kind of find your company benchmark there.

So please feel free to look at those results, you can see them over time too, so we've provided everything there free over time. If you want to download a couple of the last reports, we do tend to repeat some of the questions, but we also try to be kind of opportunistic, if you will, about capitalizing on new trends. So feel free to download all of that, and then also you'll see a place there where you can sign up to participate.

I think a lot of your participants in this webinar maybe did participate, so let me stop and say thank you if you did. There were 308 of you that participated in this last survey, and we would love to have any of you who have not signed up to go ahead and do that at cmosurvey.org. Everything that you share is confidential, we only report statistics like this in the aggregate.

So thanks for having me, Drew, really appreciate it, and great questions. I learn a lot in these sessions, which is one of the reasons I like doing them. So thank you.

 

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

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!