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.