The State of the B2B CMO

Successful branding starts with understanding the product and the consumer. By focusing on product-level differentiation and addressing customer concerns, businesses set the stage for effective and relatable campaigns that resonate with their audience, ultimately driving engagement, loyalty, and long-term business growth. “You have to start at the bottom and build the story from the product out. That’s what we did. We asked: what are the product barriers? We started there and used all of the emotive resonance of the brand to help unlock and overcome those barriers.”

In B2B marketing, where products are often perceived as difficult to understand, clear and simple language can go a long way. “We spent a lot of time unpacking the barriers to our products. You’ve really got to lean into the complexity, and our job as marketers is to make that simple. Start using more everyday language — that’s where you can put all of your uniqueness.” Simplifying jargon-heavy concepts can break down barriers to understanding and make it easier for everyone on the buying committee considering your product to understand its value.

As AI levels the playing field for content creation, brand differentiation becomes increasingly important. “Content that used to be a premium is now the cost of entry. Everything’s going to look pretty much the same. So the role of brand is going to be increasingly more important.” Companies need to re-discover the emotional aspects of their brand — purpose, values, and unique points of view, and bring them to life for buyers as true differentiating factors that create a memorable connection extending the actual product.

Where to get started? Everyone is looking for a foothold to begin using AI in their own business. “The hardest question I get is: what are the top three use cases? There’s just not a good answer because it can do anything. You have to try and identify what you need — what are the best kinds of problems personally for you to solve with AI? The best kinds of problems to solve with AI are the ones where you have the most unique point of view.”

It’s very exciting to watch as AI spins new creative concepts out of nothing more than a prompt. That said, there’s a complex alchemy to meaningful creative work. Instead of relying on AI for net-new generation, use it for a use case where it offers an immediate benefit: feedback. Using AI as a feedback tool allows you to retain creative ownership while refining work. “I have found a much more fruitful way to get people engaged with AI is to recommend that they use it for feedback on their own work and their own writing.” This approach allows individuals to enhance their creativity and output without feeling overwhelmed (or overtaken) by the technology. Prioritizing feedback allows teams to gradually incorporate AI into their workflow while maintaining creative control and driving quality improvements.

The most talented members of your team are invariably bogged down with enormous amounts of work that is only tangential to their real superpowers. When integrated systemically, AI can help scale the expertise of these top performers by super-charging their output and removing the friction that wastes their time. “The outcome can be that you can amplify the effectiveness of that person by five or ten times. And that can have [...] downstream effects into […] the organization and everything else.” By creating systems around individuals who are highly skilled, marketing organizations can amplify their impact and efficiency.

The pandemic accelerated digital adoption across every industry. B2B marketing was also transformed. “B2B marketing is having its moment, especially over the past few years since COVID. At that time, everyone had a moment of panic, wondering how to reach audiences when they weren’t just in the office. But at its core, B2B is still about people. As a result, everyone shifted to digital and virtual engagement, and that has persisted even as people return to offices, work, and life.” As digital marketing has become a central part of B2B CMOs’ go-to-market, there’s an enormous amount of transformation happening and the companies that have invested in marketing automation, CRM, CDPs, and enabling data flow for actionable insights are reaping the benefits.

There is rapid ongoing consolidation that’s impacting the cost of media. “Several media companies have been buying up smaller publishers, and DSPs are buying smaller DSPs. As rates come down in the financial markets, consolidation will speed up because it’s cheaper to acquire than to build. Less competition means higher prices, so media budgets will likely increase, especially in B2B since we’re all targeting the same C-suite executives.” Reduced competition leads directly to higher media costs. As these acquisitions continue, the media buying landscape becomes flatter, with advertisers having to navigate relationships with fewer, larger conglomerates.

Aligning account-based marketing (ABM) and demand generation strategies creates a holistic approach to customer acquisition and engagement. “DemandGen and ABM go hand in hand — they’re like twin siblings and really need to work together. DemandGen is about prospecting for new business, while ABM focuses on people you already know. The journey over the last few years with first-party data has been all about moving people from unknown to known. Once someone is known, you can start using ABM because you have that information. Frankly, any B2B company that doesn’t invest in an ABM strategy is five to ten years behind where they should be. That said, relying solely on an ABM strategy for your known touchpoints without prospecting for new revenue is a missed opportunity.”

TIME is an iconic and universally known brand that needed to re-imagine its relationship with its current customers. “Whether people experience TIME digitally, socially, or at our events, there’s a sense of aspiration, inspiration, and a feeling that being among these people means something — it signifies that I’ve made it in some way. We wanted to tap into that sense of community and explore the communities we’re not currently serving. So, we approached it by asking: who do we want to serve that we’re not reaching? Younger people, people of color — identifying these communities. Then, what’s the editorial vision that feels like TIME, and how do we activate and bring that to life in a way that feels fresh? It’s about shifting the perspective so that people feel they can truly be part of the brand, rather than just seeing it on a newsstand or a cover on the wall.” By taking the time and space to earnestly listen to their community, TIME found a clear way to not only provide their audience with what they were looking for, but also to package new experiences for brand partners.

Innovation doesn’t always require a larger budget or a bigger team; often, it’s about rethinking the assets at hand. Even with limited resources, TIME demonstrated that creativity could thrive by leveraging existing teams. “We couldn’t increase our resources, but we could use those resources in a different way. And we figured the best way to do that was to get specific about different tentpoles (like) climate, health, AI [...] that we knew would resonate.” By focusing on these high-impact topics, TIME was able to create new offerings such as TIME 100 AI, TIME 100 Health, and TIME 100 Climate — all without significant budget implications.

Keep the CFO excited! Creative success isn’t achieved in isolation; it must resonate both externally and internally by showing clear benefits for all stakeholders. “I’ve tried to figure out what’s the win for every single stakeholder that has nothing to do with what the win is from a marketing perspective.” By achieving the necessary internal buy-in, TIME’s creative initiatives not only aligned with broader business goals, but also played a key role in engaging employees, driving retention, and meeting financial performance targets.

During a business’ transformation, CMOs must “design, fly, and build the plane at the same time.” There’s no safety net. Operations need to run smoothly while change takes place. “That’s the art — finding meaningful wins that become the seeds of transformation while swapping engines out.” Transformation is a process, and it’s important to generate a steady cadence of strategic wins that not only solve immediate challenges but also create the momentum needed to push forward larger organizational shifts. These wins act as proof points that can secure buy-in from stakeholders, making it easier to introduce more complex changes down the line — ensuring both short-term success and long-term transformation.

The longevity of a brand like MetLife requires consistency and resilience. While markets and strategies may shift, there’s a deep throughline of culture — values, mission, and core identity — that provides stability and enables a brand to endure. When you can tie that culture to the brand’s unique heritage — that becomes a brand that can last, well, over a century. “MetLife has a Heritage Room, the original boardroom from the Metropolitan Life Tower, and when you look at it, you see that brand archeology is essential for building a brand. Consistent branding relies on understanding that history. MetLife has been through this amazing 156-year journey, and it’s really interesting to dig into that history.” By understanding the story of your brand and all the rich and meaningful details of it, you are able to continually refresh the way you communicate, while retaining what makes you unique.

Short-sighted emphasis on lower-funnel metrics is a common issue in B2B marketing. It comes at the expense of creativity and brand and over time costs businesses enormous amounts of money by making buying cycles longer, and burning through opportunities. “It’s irrational to believe that everybody wants to buy now […} investing in a brand campaign increases mental availability across buying situations and makes either the sales job or the marketing conversion faster, cheaper, [and] better.” While it’s difficult to quantify the immediate financial returns of top-of-funnel initiatives, investing in campaigns to keep your brand at top of mind ensures buyers are more likely to choose you when they’re ready to make a decision, making the sales process easier and reducing long-term acquisition costs.

AI is revolutionizing market research in B2B marketing by making collecting and analyzing insights significantly easier and faster, reducing the time and cost barriers that have often limited B2B marketers. “You can do segmentation 100 times in a day [...and] AI helps you do that much faster […] You can think about what are the needs and then what’s the financial value of all those needs that can rank them from top to bottom.” AI’s ability to uncover hidden patterns and analyze the financial value of specific customer segments enables marketers to prioritize high-value opportunities and tailor campaigns more effectively. This increased accessibility and precision ensure that B2B marketing teams can leverage AI to gain deeper, faster, and more accurate insights, driving more competitive and effective marketing strategies.

The concept of mental availability was pioneered by The Ehrenberg Bass Institute’s (EBI) Byron Sharp. For the past fifteen years it’s been the foundation of how sophisticated B2C brands use marketing to build consideration at the “category entry point.” Through the efforts of LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, these concepts have been slowly making their way into B2B. “There are three revolutions right now: B2B, AI, and the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. I ask people, ‘Have you heard of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute? If so, raise your hand.’ And nobody raises their hand. You know, apropos of mental availability. Ehreneberg Bass has a huge mental availability problem [...] Practitioners like us have to link all these core concepts to financial value.”

Measurement is a tool to optimize performance — therein lies the challenge. When choosing the right attribution model, it’s impossible to optimize without identifying what performance means to your organization. “What are you using attribution for? Are you using attribution to drive conversions, optimizations, or increase engagements? All three answers have a different way to look at attribution.” For example, a last-touch model might ignore the role of paid media in building brand awareness, even though awareness ultimately accelerates the B2B sales cycle.

Accurate, comprehensive data plays a crucial role in creating effective attribution models. This realization has never been more important given the changing landscape of B2B data. “Your attribution model is only as good as the data driving it. You can have the most sophisticated technology, but if your data isn’t accurate, the results won’t be either.” Right now, many companies don’t have a strong understanding of where their data comes from, which makes it impossible to develop strong attribution models or accurate segmentation.

Account-based experience, or ABX, is the most powerful way to unify marketing with sales, allowing both teams to engage customers holistically. “We call it account-based experiences because both sales and marketing have a role to play. It starts with speaking the language of the account. Sales has been chasing marketing alignment forever and marketing has been chasing sales alignment forever. There’s no perfect solution to it. A couple of ways we’re doing it is with joint planning — looking at our ICP and the market that we want to go after in a very similar way, and aligning measurement — we talk about the same metrics and have very clear handoffs between sales and marketing. Ultimately, sales and marketing are trying to do the same thing, which is to drive revenue and growth. It doesn’t need to be a competition, it should be a collaboration, because one without the other does not really succeed.”

It’s a real challenge to empower teams to be successful in the wake of “marketing fracking,” where tasks have become broken down into small, technology-driven activities. While data-driven platforms provide granular insights, information overload can fragment efforts. “We don’t need all the data, just the right data.” Marketers must focus on actionable insights without losing sight of human intuition. There’s still “a place for guts, taste, and feel” in decisions. “Don’t lose your humanity among the tech; you still need people with human qualities to make great work.”

CMOs are more likely to communicate the impact of marketing if they can shine a light on what the marketing team knows about customers. It’s not — “oh, they opened this email or we had this many impressions.” The key is to go beyond metrics and the parlance that marketers are so used to speaking among one another. “The number one advice I always give people is talk business talk, don’t talk marketing talk.” The impact of marketing must be “conveyed and communicated in a way that the rest of the organization at a senior level can understand what role they play and how they add value to this matrix approach that we’re taking to market.”

In B2B there’s been a proliferation of powerful new digital solutions, from ABM platforms, intent data, marketing automation, GenAI and more. Technology platforms’ capabilities have increasingly blurred together. “I don’t want 99 different marketing vendors to deal with, but I do want those vendors that are best at what they do and that’s generally not the person that does everything.” It’s important to identify what job needs to be done by your technology partner, and make sure that’s what it’s being used for.

CMOs can’t achieve their goals without aligning with their leadership team, particularly the CFO — and achieving that alignment requires empathy. “The number one thing is to understand the business and you’re not going to do that by having conversations with yourself and only with the marketing team. So the best way to do that is really to figure out what is important to your key business partners and figure out how you can partner with them to unlock what’s possible.” When forged with empathy, these partnerships not only provide insights that inform creative marketing initiatives but also ensure that the marketing team’s efforts are aligned with broader business goals.

Without stakeholder alignment, marketers are playing defense, which doesn’t allow the space for innovation. B2B must adopt a growth mindset — the era of set-it-and-forget-it strategies is over. “The reality is that getting your stakeholders comfortable with that test and learning model is what is essential. Because what gets you here does not get you there. And you very quickly can see that strategies that worked 12 months ago are not strategies that are necessarily going to continue to work in the same way.”

Today’s B2B CMOs are asked to be creative leaders, data scientists, MarTech experts, and everything in between. In such a marketing landscape, developing a clear strategy that allows teams to focus on the right initiatives is crucial for driving meaningful business impact. “It comes down to prioritization […] the number one thing that B2B CMOs need to do and need to think about is focus and where they’re going to put that focus.”

If you’re only relying on trends, the signal you think you’re seeing is probably the same one that every other CMO is already chasing. Without paying close attention to the data, and making optimizations in real time, you’re likely paying a premium for media that the rest of your competitors are using. “The number one thing that’s really important in B2B as a CMO is just breaking through the clutter. And the minute there’s a good idea that people recognize, it becomes obsolete. That cycle is getting faster and shorter. It’s just another reason why you just have to have that data at your fingertips to be really able to jump in and be fast reacting to take advantage of those windows of opportunity.”

“The mirror image of the measurement side is the challenge of fragmentation on the execution side. It’s really hard to execute and take advantage of all these amazing channels. There are always new channels emerging, and you need to understand them — the creative, the copy, all those aspects that will suit each channel best. And that’s why there’s great value in agency partners who can help with execution.”

Unifying sales and marketing has been a holy grail for B2B CMOs for decades. It’s challenging when the two sides of the growth organization speak a different language. Finally, with account-based measurement, the CMO can offer a unified look at what marketing is doing in the language of the sales team by using the same ID as their beloved CRM: the account. “Our clients need to connect the dots by ingesting data from all these different tools, enriching that data with account signals. It makes it easy to visualize and understand how all those tactics work together to move customers through their journey and get them to a point where the sales team is ready to engage, close, and upsell them.”