THE B2B CMO IMPERATIVE
The New Rules for B2B Marketing Leadership in 2026
How the Best B2B CMOs Are Rewriting the Role
The B2B CMO Project is a research and community initiative founded by Jon Miller (co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, CEO of Phave) and Sydney Sloan (former CMO of Salesloft and G2). The findings in this report draw on recorded interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs at companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Sprout Social. Our goal: give CMOs the clearest possible picture of what has stopped working, what the best leaders and operators are doing differently, and exactly what to do about it.
More revenue growth at companies with a single empowered growth leader on the executive committee (McKinsey 2025)
Of CMOs report high strategic dysfunction with the C-suite (Gartner 2025)
Of CEOs view their CMO as effective at market shaping (Gartner 2025)
Of Fortune 500 firms have no C-suite marketing leader (Spencer Stuart 2025)
Interviews with more than 50 senior B2B marketing leaders point to a consistent conclusion: the traditional CMO playbook has run its course. The tactics that built marketing's credibility over the past fifteen years have exhausted their effectiveness, and the metrics CMOs used to prove their value have, paradoxically, undermined their standing with the C-suite.
But the research also surfaced a clear pattern among the CMOs who have earned strong executive trust and expanded their influence. This report distills that pattern into five imperatives and a concrete action agenda, with specific moves you can make in the next 30, 60, and 90 days.
Jon Miller co-founded Marketo in 2006 and helped write the playbook that defined B2B marketing for the next fifteen years: marketing automation, MQL-based funnels, lead scoring, demand generation programs. That playbook worked. Until it did not. As Zoom CMO Kim Storin puts it, "I don't think any of it works anymore."
Sydney Sloan has seen the same shift from the CMO seat at Alfresco, SalesLoft, and G2: the buyers have changed, the buying process has changed, and the C-suite’s expectations of marketing have changed — but most marketing organizations haven’t kept pace.
The underlying problem is one of design. The traditional demand gen model treated marketing like a gumball machine: insert budget, receive leads. That mental model drives every bad decision that follows: gating content to capture form fills, scoring individuals instead of accounts, optimizing for MQLs that sales ignores, running more outbound volume when the first wave gets no response. It's a machine built to harvest demand from the 5% of buyers actively in-market at any given time, while doing nothing to create demand among the other 95%. When you've saturated the 5% — and after 15 years of everyone running the same playbook, you have — the machine stops working.
— Kimberly Storin, CMO, Zoom
Median SaaS New CAC Ratio, up 74% from $1.15 in 2016 (Benchmarkit)
Of B2B teams missed pipeline goals; only 34% met lead generation goals (Pipeline360)
Of B2B deals stall due to internal misalignment within buying groups, often driven by stakeholders marketing never identified (Edelman-LinkedIn 2025)
Of CMOs report insufficient budget to execute their strategy, while budgets remain flat at 7.7% of revenue (Gartner 2025)
The most consistent finding across our CMO interviews was not about strategy or technology. It was about credibility. CMOs who hold their seat and expand their influence do so by adopting what Patrick Lencioni calls a "First Team" mentality: their primary team is not marketing — it is the CEO and C-suite peers. That shift in orientation changes how you communicate, how you allocate your time, how you measure success, and how you build trust.
— Mandy Dhaliwal, CMO, Nutanix
The irony is that the metrics CMOs used to try to prove impact on revenue (MQLs, marketing-sourced pipeline, cost-per-lead, etc.) are ultimately the same metrics that undermined their credibility with the C-suite. When you report in marketing language, you get treated as a tactical marketing function; when you report on ‘cost per’, you get seen as a cost center. As noted in Imperative 2, the CMOs in our research who have the strongest executive relationships report differently: they lead with business outcomes, and they treat marketing metrics as internal diagnostics, not board-level scorecards.
Our research identified these consistent trust-building mechanisms among high-credibility CMOs:
1. Surface Problems and Risk Before Anyone Asks
Victoria Albert, CMO at INFUSE, recommends CMOs "surface risk early, name it plainly, and show the corrective path before it's being asked". She notes that credibility "is not about your charisma"; it is the "evidence of trust that you're building over time with every decision that you make”. The same principle applies to reporting failures.
UiPath's CMO Michael Atalla makes the same point: "Be honest when you miss. It's okay to have red on some of your metrics. They can't all be green all of the time." The CMO who surfaces a problem before the CFO finds it in a spreadsheet builds more trust than the one who only reports wins.
2. Deliver Strategic Wins the Whole Company Can See
Trust compounds fastest when marketing delivers something the whole company can celebrate. Dhaliwal repositioned Nutanix within the first nine months and "the entire market stood up and took notice." At Amplitude, Tifenn Dano Kwan built credibility by securing the top Forrester Wave ranking — a visible, company-wide win that elevated marketing's standing across the executive team.
3. Build Deep Knowledge of Every Peer’s P&L Challenges
Katie Foote, CMO at Manhattan Associates, doesn't wait for peers to come to her. She starts by learning each executive's specific business challenges and demonstrating that she understands them before proposing how marketing can help. The CMO who asks the CFO about their cost-of-capital concerns and the CRO about their retention numbers will always out-influence the CMO who shows up with a campaign deck.
4. Own the Customer Voice
No other C-suite executive owns customer intelligence the way a CMO can. Scott Morris at Sprout Social describes the role as being the "voice of the customer at scale" — and finds it gives marketing influence over broad business decisions around competition and category creation. When you're the executive who brings structured customer insight into those conversations, you get invited into rooms that have nothing to do with campaigns.
5. Do Exactly What You Said You Would Do
Strategic repositioning and customer insight matter less if the C-suite can't count on you to execute. Several CMOs in our research identified simple, relentless follow-through as the foundation everything else rests on. Amplitude's CMO was direct: the best way to build credibility is making sure peers feel "they can count on you to deliver what you say you were going to deliver. I know it sounds pretty simple, but this is the best way to build credibility." Heidi Bullock at Tealium earned her initial credibility by setting two explicit tracks — a long-term strategy and a short-term demand goal — and then hitting the short-term goal immediately. Predictability is underrated. It buys you the political capital to push for longer-term investments.
Earn Your Seat by Becoming a Business Executive First
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What to do?
Schedule 30-minute sessions with each C-suite peer. Map their top three business challenges. Find the intersection with marketing's capabilities.
Come prepared with your read of their P&L pressure, not just a list of marketing programs you could offer.
TIME FRAME
Next 30 Days
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What to do?
Create a living document of marketing risks and their mitigation plans.
Share it proactively with the CEO and CFO monthly. Include at least one metric in the red, since proactive honesty builds more credibility than a dashboard of green.
TIME FRAME
Next 60 Days
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What to do?
Lead every executive update with one customer insight.
Structure your updates around business outcomes first, marketing diagnostics second (see next section).
TIME FRAME
Next 90 Days
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What to do?
Identify one business-level initiative where marketing can deliver a result the whole company sees.
Execute with tight milestones; internal visibility matters as much as the win itself.
TIME FRAME
Next 6 months
Marketing has a measurement problem that is largely self-inflicted. For a decade, B2B marketing organizations have reported metrics that matter to marketers: impressions, MQLs, cost-per-click, email open rates. The CFO does not care. The CEO does not care. And frankly, those metrics do not connect to revenue, so they should not care. As UiPath's CMO puts it, coming in with 20 metrics at the C-level is “a big mistake.”
— Victoria Albert, CMO, INFUSE
For years, the North Star of CMO reporting was the MQL. But under pressure to hit targets, it was too easy to loosen thresholds until any webinar attendee or eBook download qualified. Sales started ignoring them, the contract between marketing and sales broke down, and trust eroded with it. Worse, MQLs are fundamentally lead-centric in a world where B2B buying is done by committees of six to sixteen people. Scoring one person tells you almost nothing about whether an account is actually in-market.
The framework below uses three categories to replace MQLs. Hand-Raisers are explicit requests for sales contact. They convert at the highest rates and sales trusts them — nobody complains about lead quality when the buyer has already raised their hand. But a Hand-Raiser-only strategy is too passive and too late. By the time someone raises their hand, they've already formed preferences and built a shortlist, most likely without you on it. As Mike Bosworth's Solution Selling research showed, companies that engage buyers while their pain is still latent and bring them to an active evaluation win over 90% of the time.
That's why you need two other categories. MQA (Marketing Qualified Account, or Buying Group) represents marketing's evidence-based judgment that an account shows meaningful in-market signals — the proactive counterpart to Hand-Raisers. MEA (Marketing Engaged) represents ICP accounts engaging but not yet showing buying behavior; this is your future pipeline and the best opportunity for the kind of outreach that creates demand rather than captures it. The key is to treat each category differently, with its own expected conversion rate and engagement approach; tracking them separately is what rebuilds trust with sales.
— Katherine Post Calvert, CMO, PagerDuty
The CMOs in our research who have the strongest C-suite relationships share a common measurement philosophy. They have abandoned vanity metrics in favor of a small set of business-outcome measures that collectively answer four questions:
The metrics are intentionally organized from business outcomes to marketing operations. Tier 1 includes shared business metrics like NRR and win rate, e.g. metrics the CMO reports alongside the CRO and CFO, not in isolation. That's by design. If your board-level dashboard only contains metrics that no other executive shares, you're reinforcing the perception that marketing operates in its own silo.
Tier 1: Business Outcomes (Board-Level)
Tier 2: Leading Indicators (CEO and CFO Level)
Tier 3: Operational Metrics (Marketing Team Level)
— Josh Koenig, SVP of Marketing, Pantheon
Brand measurement has historically been where CFOs question the investment. The breakthrough is in framing it as a financial lever: a strong brand reduces Customer Acquisition Cost, accelerates sales cycle velocity, and improves win rates. The Amplitude CMO's brand health score — a composite of AI visibility score, PR press score, social score, and web traffic — gives the CFO something concrete they can track quarter over quarter. Cindy Zhou at Imprivata has added LLM citation share, tracking how often the brand surfaces as an answer in ChatGPT and Claude queries. These are not soft metrics. They are early-warning indicators of pipeline health and company success (see Imperative 3).
Prove Marketing’s Value in the Language of the Board
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What to do?
Replace MQL reporting with a business-outcome dashboard focused on brand awareness and pipeline. But get alignment from sales and finance before you pull the plug, since replacing a shared metric without consensus will cost you credibility faster than the MQL ever did.
TIME FRAME
Next 30 Days
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What to do?
Create a composite brand health score. Present it as a leading indicator of pipeline health, not a marketing vanity metric.
Baseline it now so you can show directional movement.
TIME FRAME
Next 60 Days
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What to do?
Begin tracking the correlation of brand health with conversion rates and pipeline created 90 days later. Even one quarter of correlation can change the CFO conversation.
TIME FRAME
Next 90 Days
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What to do?
Prepare a 10-minute board session on how modern B2B buying has changed, what actually works, why the metrics need to change, and what you're doing differently.
TIME FRAME
Next 6 months
The CMOs surveyed show why the case for brand has shifted from a "nice to have" to a commercial imperative.
At any given moment, approximately 95% of your potential buyers are not in an active buying cycle — but they are forming impressions and developing preferences. The job of a brand is to create that mental availability so that when buyers finally enter the market, your company is already top of mind and on the shortlist.
Forrester reports that 92% of B2B buyers begin the purchase process with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% have locked in a preferred vendor before formal evaluation. Gartner adds that 61% of buyers now prefer a rep-free experience — meaning most shortlists are built, ranked, and nearly decided before sales ever gets a seat at the table.
The implication: If you're not already in consideration when buyers enter an active buying cycle, you've lost before sales ever gets involved.
And companies that stop investing in brand do so at their own peril. As CloudBees CMO Raj Sarkar warns, "if you stop your brand spend," you will inevitably watch your "middle and bottom of funnel... dry up," resulting in a "cost of acquisition [that] just goes up over time". Often, these lagging indicators make the connection hard to see — until the real damage to your pipeline has already been done.
— Lena Waters, 2x CMO and GTM Advisor
The economic case for a brand has three dimensions: efficiency, growth, and long-term compounding. The most persuasive CMOs pick the argument that fits their CFO's current priorities.
Efficiency Arguments
Growth Arguments
Long-Term Arguments
Investment Benchmarks
Binet and Field's research on B2B effectiveness recommends allocating roughly 46% of budget to brand building and 54% to demand generation. Most CMOs agree with the principle. The 2025 Brand vs Demand survey of 168 B2B technology companies found that CMOs' preferred split is 50% demand and 40% brand (the remaining 10% goes to ops, tech, and similar).
But preferred and actual are two different things: the real split is 70% demand and 25% brand. CMOs know they're underinvesting, and they haven't been able to close the gap.
The constraint is measurement, not conviction. In the same survey, 73% said brand makes demand gen more efficient. 63% said brand directly fuels pipeline. Yet only 28% could tie brand investment to pipeline dollars. Brand gets cut first not because CMOs doubt it works, but because demand gen has the dashboards and brand doesn't.
If you want the ability to rebalance, brand has to show up where the board already looks: pipeline velocity, CAC efficiency, win rate, and investment per pipeline dollar.
— Lisa Cole, CMO of 2X and author of “The Limitless CMO”
AI has made content creation nearly free. The result: feeds filled with polished content that offers nothing, even when superficially personalized. As Honeycomb CMO Julie Neumann warns, the ease of generation has led to a "massive distribution of AI slop." Cutting through requires content and messaging that is unmistakably human in its origin and point of view.
That’s why across our interviews, three brand-building strategies were emphasized:
1. Experiences That Can't Be Summarized
When AI can create any content asset, human, in-person moments become the differentiator. The CMOs we interviewed are consistently shifting budget from large trade shows toward curated, high-touch events where customers validate the brand in conversation with prospects. Peter Isaacson at Invoca is "leaning more into in-person" with hosted dinners and targeted events. Sprout Social’s Morris describes a deliberate shift toward "fewer bigger events" designed to "win over the hearts and minds" of key executives. These intimate settings drive outsized conversion, provided buyers feel the event is forward-looking and that the brand is acting as a genuine thought partner.
2. Relationships That Can't Be Automated
When buyers can't distinguish signal from noise, they use the source as a proxy for quality. David Keene at Agentive identifies customer case studies as "the lowest cost and most effective way of building awareness right now." Peer-to-peer learning works because you can't cement a market position until others are telling your story for you. This also explains why ecosystem-led growth and B2B influencer programs are gaining traction. Forrester predicts 75% of enterprise B2B companies will increase influencer relations budgets in 2026. Trust flows through relationships faster than through content.
3. Craftsmanship That Signals Substance
When anything can be generated in seconds, evidence of genuine human effort becomes a trust signal. Companies like Carta and Gong have built category authority by publishing insights derived from proprietary data that no AI could generate, because the underlying data doesn't exist in any training set. To stand out, brands must double down on original ideas and quality production rather than outsourcing their thinking to machines.
The common thread: all three require investment that can't be shortcut. That's what makes them durable in an era where most marketing content is commoditized.
Invest in Brand as a Strategic Economic Asset
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What to do?
Estimate the size of your out-of-market TAM and model what it would cost to be in consideration when they enter a buying cycle.
Compare that against your current brand investment. The gap between those two numbers is your brand underinvestment problem, expressed in terms a CFO can act on.
TIME FRAME
Next 30 Days
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What to do?
Add a lightweight brand survey to your brand tracking. Track aided and unaided awareness, brand perception, and shortlist position in your ICP.
Budget ~$10K and two to three weeks for 100 targeted respondents.
TIME FRAME
Next 60 Days
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What to do?
Create a systematic process for capturing, producing, and distributing customer evidence. Prioritize video and peer review formats.
TIME FRAME
Next 90 Days
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What to do?
Build an economic model showing how brand investment lowers CAC, improves win rates, and shortens sales cycles. Create the model in the language of investment returns, not marketing metrics.
Cut low performing demand gen programs and redirect the investment to brand. Once you can prove it's working you can ask for more budget.
TIME FRAME
Next 6 months
Buyers now use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to research vendors before engaging sales — and by the time they reach your website, they have a different intent than they would have a year ago. When a buyer asks an LLM to compare vendors in your category, whether your company appears, how it's characterized, and what evidence gets cited matters as much as your Google ranking used to. As Agentive's Keene puts it, ensuring high visibility with key LLMs is now the primary mechanism for "making the shortlist."
Traffic may be down, but AI-referred traffic converts at significantly higher rates. Chargebee CMO Guy Marion reports that LLM-based traffic is "converting at a vastly higher rate than traditional direct or even SEO inbound traffic." The implication: fewer visitors, but the ones who arrive are more qualified and further along in their buying process. These visitors have already been briefed by an LLM so they don't need your 101 content. They need fast paths to pricing, technical depth, and a reason to talk to sales.
But optimizing for AI search is just the beginning. The deeper shift is that AI agents are becoming a permanent audience for B2B marketing alongside human buyers. Today, agents summarize vendor websites and filter email inboxes. Tomorrow, they'll research categories, evaluate vendors, and make shortlist recommendations on behalf of their human stakeholders. Scott Brinker calls this "marketing to tech": treating AI agents as members of the buying committee.
For CMOs, this means rethinking marketing to serve dual audiences. Humans need branded experiences optimized for emotional engagement. Agents need structured access to the information they're looking for: pricing, capabilities, competitive differentiation, integration details. That’s why CMOs are investing in structured content designed explicitly for LLMs, review sites, and communities — because if buyers and machines can't find you early, nothing else downstream matters. As Xebia CMO Keith Landis frames it, “the job is to market to AI in order to get to the human connections that ultimately close deals.”
A practical caveat: the current work to optimize static content specifically for AI engines (structured FAQs, schema markup, machine-readable formatting) matters in 2026, and the CMOs in our research confirmed this. But over time, these specific technical tactics will likely become less necessary as AI gets better at reading human-optimized content, much the way early SEO keyword stuffing gave way to Google simply understanding good content. The durable investment is in investing in quality brand and treating AI agents as a core audience. The specific markup tactics are a temporary bridge.
— Amber Armstrong, CMO, Salesforce Agentforce
Decline in Google search traffic globally in 2025 (Chartbeat/Reuters Institute)
Of buyers use ChatGPT or AI tools for research before engaging a vendor (HubSpot)
The number of brands cited by AI in a typical response (BrightEdge/Amsive 2025)
Amount of B2B purchases handled by AI agents by 2028 (Gartner)
The shift from SEO to now adding AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is one of the most concrete structural changes in B2B marketing right now. Goldcast reports that they have steeply increased their discoverability on LLMs, which has led to a considerable rise in demos as the type of content they create evolves. Brands that structure content to be cited as authoritative answers, rather than just ranked pages, are gaining early-mover advantage
Layer 1: Entity Authority
Ensure your content and influencers (CEO, employees and paid influencers) are clearly and consistently represented across the structured data sources that LLMs train on: Wikipedia, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, G2, Reddit, analyst reports, and authoritative press coverage. As Sprout Social CMO Scott Morris notes, it's critical to shift investments toward platforms like G2 because "that's where modern buyers go to make a lot of their decisions".
Layer 2: Answer-Structured Content
Redesign key content assets, including buyer guides, comparison pages, and use-case documentation, to answer the specific questions buyers ask as prompts in AI systems. Structure content in your customers' voice with clear topic labeling, FAQ formats, and factual claims that are easy to extract and cite. The goal is to make your information as surfaceable as possible for generative search engines, not just traditional ones.
Layer 3: Third-Party Validation
LLMs weigh third-party sources heavily when people prompt for “the best solution for X". Analyst rankings (Forrester Wave, Gartner Magic Quadrant), peer review platforms, and credible press coverage all feed the AI visibility engine. Build a systematic program for earning these citations.
Layer 4: AI Visibility Measurement
Build an AI citation share metric into your brand index. Use your AEO tools to capture share of answer, citation source, sentiment and LLM referral traffic conversions. Track whether your brand appears, how it is characterized, and whether the evidence cited is accurate. Treat this as you would an SEO ranking report. Amplitude, for instance, has already developed a composite brand health score built partially on an "AI visibility score" to track how they appear in LLM responses, while Webflow's Chief Evangelist Guy Yalif measures market momentum by showing an "increase in answer engine visibility and traffic".
AI hasn't just changed how buyers research. It also gives CMOs capabilities that weren't previously possible.
The most significant opportunity is for true personalization. For 25 years, marketing technology has promised 1:1 personalization but hasn't delivered. B2B buying is too non-linear, buying committees are too large, and rules-based systems couldn't handle the complexity. The latest wave of AI-generated "personalization" hasn't helped either. When every vendor sends an email that sounds like it was written by a machine referencing your latest LinkedIn post, it stops feeling personal and starts feeling like surveillance.
However, as Denise Persson notes, true AI transformation lies in the "ability to hyper personalize using data to increase your relevance" rather than just automating generic outreach. Real personalization means the right action for every buyer and account: which offer, through which channel, with what content, at what time, customized to each person's interests and the context of their buying group and account.
Reasoning AI can now finally do this at scale, evaluating all available signals and sequencing the best actions across dozens of campaigns and thousands of accounts simultaneously. AI now excels at buyer signal interpretation and pattern recognition, allowing marketers to bypass tedious lead scoring and instantly personalize actions. It also provides "air traffic control" across the entire marketing program, preventing the message conflicts and frequency overload that plague any organization running multiple campaigns.
— Alexandra London, CMO of G2
As AI takes over more campaign execution, the talent profile changes. Zoom's Storin observes that the focus must shift toward hiring more “orchestrators who can manage AI-driven workflows, because that’s where speed, efficiency, and scale now come from”. The CMOs making the most progress are also investing in AI literacy across the entire team — not just in the ops function, but across content, demand gen, and field marketing.
The human side of this transition deserves as much attention as the technical side. Teams that feel like they're being automated will disengage. Teams that feel like they're being equipped will accelerate. That makes AI change management a retention and capability issue, not just a technology rollout.
Lead Marketing Through AI Disruption
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What to do?
Invest in an AEO product to get visibility into prompts and citations.
Run Webflow's AEO checker on your site and add LLM referral tracking in GA4.
Review Reddit threads where you or competitors are discussed.
Optimize your G2 profile with natural language, and FAQs.
TIME FRAME
Next 2 weeks
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What to do?
Establish baseline LLM visibility dashboard.
Measure share of answer, citation source and influence, sentiment and LLM referral traffic.
Monitor conversion rates vs. other source types.
TIME FRAME
Next 30 days
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What to do?
Build an AI forward content engine trained on the voice of your customer.
Write FAQ-structured content pieces targeting real buyer problems /prompts.
Add competitive comparison content, pro / con lists in LLM friendly formats.
Optimize your website for LLM access.
Open your knowledge base and community conversations.
Ignite a customer review program tied to customer lifecycle milestones.
Ensure all your content on the internet is up to date and consistent.
TIME FRAME
Next 45 Days
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What to do?
Identify where AI agents are mediating your content before humans see it.
Monitor top citation sources and continue to influence answers (Reddit, G2, LinkedIn, etc.)
Assess whether you're serving both structured content for agents and a compelling brand experience for humans. Redesign at least one.
TIME FRAME
Next 60 days
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What to do?
Pick one segment where you can test reasoning AI for journey orchestration.
Allow AI to select the right offer, channel, content, and timing from signals rather than static rules. Measure against a control.
TIME FRAME
Next 6 months
Of all the challenges CMOs named in our research, enabling our talent to be AI forward and incorporating agents into organizational design were the ones CMOs felt least equipped to solve. Storin identifies the core issue: onboarding the right leadership talent who can "translate this vision, be hands on, and actually make it actionable across the organization".
The challenge is compounded by a fundamental shift in the marketing skill set. AI fluency, data architecture literacy, buying-group-centric campaign design, and AEO strategy are all skills that did not exist meaningfully two years ago. Building a team for 2026 requires a different talent strategy than the one that built most current marketing organizations. As INFUSE’s Albert points out, the new era of marketing requires "fewer tasks executives and more system thinkers" who can act as the human orchestrators in the middle of a highly automated machine.
— Denise Persson, CMO, Snowflake
The CMOs in our research are following four principles that break from traditional marketing org design:
Principle 1: Win the Human Side of AI First, Then Unlock Its Full Power
The shift to an AI-native marketing organization requires active leadership to overcome the natural resistance it creates. Webflow's Yalif notes that AI adoption is fundamentally a "human change management" effort, which is why they established an OKR for every employee to have their own "agentic chief of staff" and build AI fluency. At Nutanix, "every single marketer... is in the process of being certified to be AI proficient". To make this work, PagerDuty's CMO emphasizes the need to actively manage the "existential fear" of job security by providing "psychological safety" so teams feel comfortable failing fast and experimenting.
— Amy King, CMO, Relias
Principle 2: Build a Unified Data Foundation
AI personalization, intent-based targeting, and autonomous journey orchestration all depend on the same prerequisite: unified, contextualized, activation-ready data. Most marketing organizations are attempting to build AI-powered programs on top of legacy, disconnected CRM, MAP, and analytics stacks. But as Keene notes, the ultimate magic wand for modern marketing is simply "clean data, integrated data". At Amplitude, it took a year and a half to "connect all of the data sources across all of our systems," but it resulted in near 100% accuracy for measuring pipeline ROI by channel.
Principle 3: Organize Around Buying Journeys and Customer Experience, Not Channels
The traditional marketing organization — digital, demand gen, content, events, product marketing, comms — is a channel-centric structure that makes coordination difficult and attribution opaque. Today's CMOs are dismantling channel-centric org charts and rebuilding around how buyers actually move through a decision. The point isn't alignment between separate functions. Take this opportunity to redesign how your teams align to the new customer journey, consider: (1) merging brand and demand into one team responsible for building influence and capturing in market buyers, (2) build a customer education and experience team that engages buying groups across the entirety of the customer lifecycle, and (3) establish product engagement team that focuses on product usage in product experience that drives usage and adoption.
Principle 4: Building the Peer Network as Competitive Advantage
One of the most consistent pieces of advice in our research: leverage peer communities. The pace of change in B2B marketing is now so high that no individual CMO can track, evaluate, and implement every relevant development. As Shay Mowlem, CMO of Contrast Security warns, today's complex market challenges are "very hard to solve in a backroom with your own internal team alone".
The CMOs who navigate best are those with strong peer networks where signal is separated from noise through lived experience. Morris validates this, noting that by leaning into your network, you gain access to "a whole bunch of brains who are thinking about all these problems" who can surface actionable ideas faster than you could on your own.
However, the structure of that network matters. Vantive Head of Marketing Amy Holtzman specifies that busy executives need "non-taxing, real peer-to-peer connections," deliberately avoiding groups overrun by consultants.
Build the Organization and Capabilities for the Next Decade
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What to do?
Be honest about whether current leaders can grow into these capabilities or whether you need to hire. The answer shapes your next six months of talent decisions.
TIME FRAME
Next 30 Days
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What to do?
Create a one-page operating framework for how marketing works in the future. Discuss new expected skill sets, role and responsibility changes. Vet it with your C-Suite partners to align with their team changes and update how teams work, where work is offloaded to agents and future strategies for continuous AI innovation.
TIME FRAME
Next 60 Days
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What to do?
Audit the connection between your CRM, MAP, intent data, and analytics stack. Assess whether your current stack can get you there or whether the legacy tools themselves are the constraint.
TIME FRAME
Next 90 Days
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What to do?
Identify three to five peer CMOs in non-competing companies who are navigating the same shifts. Join a regular exchange forum (like The B2B CMO Project.)
TIME FRAME
Next 6 months
Most B2B CMOs are stuck in a vicious cycle. Without C-suite credibility, you can't secure long-term brand investment. Without brand investment, building pipeline depends entirely on capturing the 5% already in-market, which gets more expensive every quarter. Without pipeline results, you can't prove marketing's value in terms the CFO respects. And without that proof, you never earn credibility. The typical response (more MQLs, more attribution reports, more demand gen volume) only tightens the trap.
The CMOs featured in this report — from Zoom, Snowflake, PagerDuty, Nutanix, Salesforce, Sprout Social, and others — broke out by attacking the cycle at multiple points simultaneously: earning trust through business fluency, reframing metrics, investing in brand, building AI visibility. When those reinforce each other, the cycle reverses. Credibility unlocks brand investment. Brand investment builds pipeline. Pipeline results prove marketing's value. And that proof deepens credibility further
The question is where to enter the cycle given where you are today.
Every imperative includes a detailed action agenda, so the question is where to start. Look for the constraint that, if addressed first, would unlock the others:
Most CMOs will recognize themselves in more than one of these. Pick the one that, if solved, would make the others easier.
The following senior marketing leaders contributed insights directly to this report through primary interviews:
Secondary Research and Data Sources
• McKinsey: The Power of Partnership — How the CEO-CMO Relationship Can Drive Outsize Growth (2023)
• McKinsey: The Changing Role of the CMO and What It Means for Growth
• Forrester Research: B2B Marketing Decision-Maker Benchmarks (2025–2026)
• Gartner: CMO Spend Survey and Strategic Dysfunction Research (2025)
• HubSpot: 2026 State of Marketing Report (1,500 global marketing leaders)
• Jon Miller: 11 Predictions for B2B Go-to-Market in 2026 (Chiefmartec, January 2026)
• G2 / Sydney Sloan: 2025 B2B Software Buyer Behavior Report
• Renegade Marketing: State of Marketing Leadership 2025 (CMO Super Huddle Data)
• Brand vs Demand Benchmarks (Benchmarkit, 2025)
The B2B CMO Project was founded by Jon Miller (co-founder of Marketo and CEO of Phave) and Sydney Sloan (former CMO of SalesLoft and G2) because the CMO role is too important to let erode and too hard to navigate alone. The Project is where senior B2B marketing leaders come together to sharpen their thinking, share what's working, and connect with peers who understand the challenge. It combines primary research, a curated peer community, executive dinners, and candid podcast conversations to give B2B CMOs the frameworks and peer relationships they can't get from conferences, consultants, or other communities.
Learn more and join the community at b2bcmoproject.com/contact-us
Our Partners
The B2B CMO Project is supported by partners who share our commitment to elevating B2B marketing leadership: G2, Webflow, Phave, Goldcast by Cvent, 2X, LinkedIn, Demandbase, Sendoso, and CHEQ.
What is G2 AI Custom Research?
G2 AI Custom Research is a custom buyer-insight research service that combines AI-led qualitative interviews with G2’s proprietary behavioral data from over 100 million software buyers to deliver fast, decision-ready reports tailored to specific go-to-market, positioning, messaging, and competitive strategy questions. Learn more here.
What separates the best B2B CMOs from the rest? The best B2B CMOs operate as business leaders, not just marketing leaders. They own market positioning, shape company strategy, and earn influence in the C-suite by connecting marketing activity to long-term enterprise value. Where average CMOs optimize for short-term pipeline metrics, the best CMOs build brand equity, drive category creation, and become indispensable to sustainable growth.
How are B2B CMOs proving strategic value to the C-suite? The B2B CMOs who are earning genuine C-suite influence are speaking the language of the business, not just marketing. They present marketing's impact in terms of market share, revenue growth, and competitive positioning rather than MQLs and campaign metrics. They bring customer and market intelligence into product, pricing, and corporate strategy conversations, making them a source of insight that CEOs and CFOs rely on.
What does it mean for a CMO to be a business leader, not just a marketing leader? A CMO who operates as a business leader takes ownership of market strategy beyond the marketing function. Rather than executing tactics handed down from above, they shape the direction of the company through deep market expertise, customer insight, and competitive intelligence. They are as comfortable in a board presentation as they are in a campaign review, and they measure their success by the growth of the business, not the performance of a channel.
How are the best B2B CMOs moving beyond MQL-driven marketing? The best B2B CMOs are shifting their focus from lead generation to market creation. Rather than optimizing for form fills and MQL volume, they are investing in brand, category positioning, and buyer trust — building the kind of market presence that means their company is the first call when a buyer is ready to purchase. They are replacing short-term attribution models with measurement frameworks that capture marketing's contribution to long-term pipeline and enterprise value.
What skills and capabilities do B2B CMOs need in 2026? B2B CMOs in 2026 need a combination of strategic business acumen and modern marketing capabilities. The most critical include financial literacy and P&L understanding, AI-powered insight and automation, brand and category creation, cross-functional executive leadership, and the ability to demonstrate marketing's impact on long-term enterprise value. As AI handles more tactical execution, the CMOs who thrive will be those who master the uniquely human skills of market shaping, narrative building, and authentic relationship development.
Is the CMO role dying? No, but it's being redefined. 34% of Fortune 500 companies no longer have a C-suite marketing leader, and only 32% of CEOs trust their CMOs. The problem is self-inflicted: a decade of reporting MQLs and cost-per-click trained the C-suite to see marketing as a cost center. The B2B CMO Project's research with 50+ senior CMOs found that the ones holding and expanding their influence have made a specific shift: they operate as business executives first, report in the language of revenue, and own commercial outcomes alongside the CRO and CFO.
How do I build trust with my CEO as a CMO? Pipeline is permission. Deliver on your short-term commitments first since that earns the political capital for everything else. Beyond that, the B2B CMO Project's research found three consistent patterns: surface problems before anyone asks (the CMO who flags a miss before the CFO finds it builds more trust than the one who only reports wins), learn every peer's P&L challenges before proposing how marketing can help, and become the executive who owns the customer voice.
How do I convince my CFO to invest in brand? Frame it as a financial lever, not a marketing initiative. A strong brand reduces CAC, shortens sales cycles, and improves win rates. The data supports you: in a survey of 168 B2B tech companies, 73% of CMOs said brand makes demand gen more efficient. But only 28% could prove it with numbers. Build a composite brand health index and track its correlation to pipeline 90 days later. Even one quarter of that data changes the conversation.
How is AI changing the B2B CMO role? Buyers now use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to research vendors before engaging sales, so AI visibility is becoming as important as search rankings. And AI is taking over campaign execution and personalization, which frees CMOs to focus on what AI can't do: positioning, relationships, and experiences that stand out. The B2B CMO Project's research found that leading CMOs are hiring orchestrators who manage AI agents rather than traditional campaign managers, while investing in AI literacy across the whole team.
What should replace MQLs? MQLs drove bad behavior. Under pressure to hit targets, marketers loosened thresholds until any webinar attendee qualified, sales stopped trusting them, and the metric became a liability. Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and The B2B CMO Project, has proposed a three-tier replacement: Hand-Raisers (explicit requests for sales contact), Marketing Qualified Accounts or Buying Groups (evidence-based judgment that an account is in-market), and Marketing Engaged accounts (ICP accounts engaging but not yet showing buying signals). Each tier has its own conversion rate and engagement approach.
