CMOs, by nature or nurture, are an optimistic lot. There’s no other way of explaining their steadfast belief they will be the ones to find success where others failed. They will be the ones to help CFOs see marketing as an investment, not an expense. They will be the ones to educate CEOs and investors that great brands are built from the bottom up, not top-down; not in ...

Recessions happen. And when they do, buying budgets typically shrink, leading to slower sales cycles and fewer deals closed. With topline revenue growth slowing if not halting altogether, investor and CFO attention turns to the bottom line. And all of this puts an increased premium on the effectiveness of every dollar spent… especially on Marketing.

So what’s a renegade marketer to do knowing that a recession ...

When it comes to events, many B2B brands are a bit out of shape. Maybe even flabby. Shows are being booked, tickets purchased, booths shipped, and hours invested, but the returns are nowhere near what they could and should be. It’s literally and figuratively a “sh*t show.”

To help the CMOs of CMO Huddles anticipate and avoid such calamities, we dedicated all the June ...

After five huddles on pipeline-related challenges, it’s clear that there’s tension in the air. And it sounds like this: “Sales isn’t closing. Sales keeps asking us for more leads. Sales isn’t trying to understand the customer’s pain points. It’s getting harder to close deals. We went from rockstars to being blamed for every sales issue.”

This is a warning sign for ...

In recognition that none of us can outwork our jobs, I’ve been thinking a lot about time management lately. To this end, I’ve been listening to a nifty book called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and wanted to share a few of these not-so-secret secrets filtered by my own experiments.

After four scintillating huddles on tech stacks, let there be no doubt this is a foundational topic for B2B CMOs. The right MarTech combo can increase the efficiency of marketing exponentially, and it gives CMOs data that allows them to make better decisions. It gives them data that helps them justify their existence (and their budget). It gives them the data to show how marketing is contributing both ...

For most CMOs, growth is a mandate. Their team is expected to help propel the company forward by generating new opportunities, providing “air cover” for sales teams, developing materials that help close deals faster, and increasing revenue from existing customers. And that’s just a partial list of the growth requests. To meet these demands, CMOs must have equally growth-oriented departments.

But how to do this? Especially ...

After four huddles dedicated to time management this December, it became very clear that enemy number one is meetings… Too many meetings, too many unproductive meetings, and not enough time to do “real work.” To save you time, here are six ways you can make your meetings more productive in 2022. The idea here is to attend 20% fewer meetings and make each meeting 20% more productive—freeing up at least 90 minutes ...