Lessons Learned From Interviewing 50 B2B CMOs
The Gist:
- Strategic differentiation matters. Building a B2B brand effectively involves finding and leveraging unique differentiators. Top CMOs emphasize the importance of innovative strategies to stand out in a crowded market.
- CEO collaboration is key. Successful B2B branding is greatly enhanced by strong collaboration between CMOs and CEOs. Building a B2B brand requires integrating leadership into brand strategies for greater impact.
- Embrace experimentation. For effective branding, adopting an experimentation mindset is crucial. CMOs recommend testing various approaches and adjusting based on data to build an adaptable brand.
What does it take to build a brand as a B2B company? What does it mean to be customer-centric in a world where your customers are other enterprises? And how can business leaders succeed in a role where every B2B brand adopts similar tactics to get in front of their customers?
In early 2021, I set out to answer these questions by launching an interview series with chief marketing officers (CMOs). I wanted to understand whether every B2B brand faced a unique challenge in finding their story and building an audience, or if there were common themes that could serve as best practices for CMOs and marketing leaders in growing organizations.
Two years and 55 interviews later, what surprised me the most wasn’t the different approaches these marketing leaders took to tackle their industry-specific challenges. Instead, I was most surprised by how the wisdom of the CMO isn’t just about storytelling and driving the pipeline. There’s a lot to learn from successful CMOs about building a B2B brand and disrupting the status quo.
Building a B2B Brand Requires More Than Following the CEO’s Strategy
The reality for today’s CMOs is that they’re on a short leash. A recent report from Spencer Stuart found that CMOs had an average tenure of just 4.2 years in 2023, the shortest average tenure in the C-suite.
In my conversations with CMOs, the key to longevity involved managing the relationship with the CEO and company founders. But a successful CEO/CMO relationship is not cultivated through the CMO trying to align their work with the objectives of their CEO by any means necessary. Rather, successful CMOs viewed themselves as business owners, identifying opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and taking responsibility for revenue and EBITDA.
Beyond just moving quickly, the CMOs I spoke to recognized the existential need to think differently. Often, early-stage companies can only gain momentum by taking away market share from their more established competitors, and that means finding real, obvious points of differentiation.
I saw one of the brightest examples of this approach in my conversation with Kipp Bodnar, the CMO at HubSpot. They were entering a crowded CRM category where the undisputed, thousand-pound gorilla in the room was Salesforce. Rather than try to play by Salesforce’s rules — a game they would have been destined to lose — they innovated by adopting a bottoms-up, product-led growth motion and having a free pricing tier to capture the SMB market. It’s a valuable lesson for anyone in the C-suite: Look beyond your individual business unit and identify the disruptive strategies that will drive the company forward as a whole.
Related article: Marketing Leadership Strategies: Lessons Learned in My First Year as CMO
Approach B2B Branding Like a Media Company and Treat Your Leadership as Brand Assets
For CMOs, C-suite relationships aren’t just a matter of company politics. CMOs need to build trust with their CEOs and company founders in order to deploy them as assets. Founder brands are essential to gain attention and shape industry opinion around market trends and technology innovation. Investing in this type of thought leadership can have a force-multiplying effect by helping others to find their voice and become ambassadors for the brand.
Colin Fleming, previous EVP Global Marketing at Salesforce, mentioned that Marc Benioff is still very involved in the brand story and narrative of Salesforce and ensures that they tell a coherent and consistent story for the vision of the business to all stakeholders, including investors, journalists, employees and customers.
While effective CMOs find and promote marketing assets from within the company, the most ambitious take it upon themselves to build and scale marketing channels from the ground up. The role of earned media is declining with high customer acquisition costs, and CMOs are filling the vacuum by creating their own media sources.
A brand that can build an audience for a newsletter, podcast series or even their own media publication is able to reduce their long-term customer acquisition cost. Previously, companies relied on other people’s stages — for example, trade show booths and sponsorships — to build awareness. Forward-thinking CMOs are finding creative ways to generate that attention in-house and bring their audience directly to them as a source.
One memorable example of successful B2B branding came from Tom Wentworth, CMO at Recorded Future. Instead of trying to gain attention from cybersecurity outlets, they created their own publication called The Record in 2020. They hired respected journalists from the Wall Street Journal and NPR, and while the vertical is completely independent of the marketing organization — an important feature to maintain objective journalistic integrity — the benefit to brand awareness is massive. The Record has now established itself as a leading cybersecurity news outlet, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers each month.
Related Article: How to Win in the Year of Brand Trust Crisis
Why Experimentation is Crucial to Building a B2B Brand
The number #1 recipe for disaster that almost all CMOs shared is applying the same playbook that worked for your previous company to another one. Experimentation is a key strategy when building a B2B brand. The number of factors that go into determining channels and spend depends on the ACV, sales cycle, GTM motion (PLG, SLG, hybrid) and more.
Investing heavily into field events and ABM strategy might work well for $30K+ ACV products, but it’s probably not the right channel for products that are $30/month. For example, investing heavily into paid search when your category is very early could be worse off compared to evangelizing your company in industry events.
The real way to scale your marketing is to partner with your CFO to determine the budget that you are going to spend on measurable demand gen activities and be very rigorous about monitoring pipeline generated per cost spent in the channel. This will enable you to clearly see where you can tweak your budget as well as meaningfully defend your spend across channels.
This is easier said than done. Jon Miller, one of my interviewees and previous CMO of Demandbase, wrote an excellent overview on attribution and how to define the right budgets.
Related Article: Unlocking Marketing Budgets: Strategies for Success
Brand-Building Strategies for the Future of B2B
For B2B companies, particularly those selling SaaS products, the biggest trend of the last five years has been a change in the buying motion. CMOs were the first to recognize the change. Today just 3% of B2B buyers fill out forms to identify themselves and start the buying process from scratch. The rest talk to their peers, consult communities and go over software review platforms to form their shortlist. By the time they enter the buying process, 95% of the purchasing decisions are subconscious. It’s now mission-critical for brands and CMOs to build awareness before a buyer even begins their journey.
How has this change in buying motion affected the marketing organization? For many CMOs, a substantial portion of their budget is now committed to experiments — testing different approaches that will make their brand look more human and stand apart in their category. In my interviews, many CMOs at high-growth companies said they allocate roughly 70% of their budget to direct demand gen and 30% to harder-to-measure brand building.
One great example of this approach came from my conversation with Melissa Rosenthal, chief creative officer at ClickUp. The company really embraced the concept of humanizing their brand by investing in social channels and B2C-style video commercials that make their message stand out. One of their campaigns, “Returning to Work,” featured six videos that humorously addressed the awkward situations employees might encounter when returning to the office.
This focus on experimentation and educated guesses should be embraced throughout B2B organizations. In a fast-paced market that’s only accelerating as a result of AI, fortune will favor those willing to take risks.
Building a B2B brand in today’s dynamic market demands innovative strategies and a commitment to ongoing adaptation. The insights from these CMOs provide a roadmap for achieving success.
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