Episode 8
Winning the Bigger CMO Mandate: Insights From Hundreds of B2B SaaS Marketing Leaders
When you look at the CMO role across hundreds of B2B tech companies, what themes emerge these days? In this episode of The Get podcast, host Erica Seidel talks with Matt Selheimer, VP and Research Director for B2B Marketing Executives at Forrester.
You'll hear about the top themes that have emerged in The Get this season. And you'll get a sneak peek at new Forrester research dedicated to CMOs.
Learn about:
- How to classify marketing leadership roles: is the CEO looking for a supporter, a promoter, a partner, or a driver?
- How changes in tech and buying behavior can be a catalyst for marketing leaders to claim a broader role and bigger budget
- Advice to CEOs who have failed at hiring CMOs
- How CMOs who create a continuous learning organization are the ones who will be the most successful
- Why marketing leaders need to get beyond "polishing the pebbles on in-market intent signals" and instead invest to be the preferred vendor earlier on, to avoid being used as negotiating leverage against the preferred vendor
- How increasingly, "your understanding of your buyers, your customers, and the markets you're operating in is your competitive differentiator"
- Why so few CMOs are at the point of firing whole teams in favor of AI
- How to avoid 're-org fatigue' while still responding to changing buyer behaviors
Memorable Quote:
"What I tell our clients, and CMOs in transition, is: make sure there's a really good fit here for the purpose of marketing. That what you see as the purpose of marketing and what your CEO and the board see as the purpose of marketing is aligned. If you need to do education, that's the time to do the education… and expand the aperture of how they think about marketing. If you don't get the CEO resonating with that, then that may not be the place that you want to go join, as an example. But if you are already in a function, already in a company as a CMO, what we're telling all of our clients is, now's a great time to recalibrate the purpose of marketing."
00:00 Introduction to The Get Podcast
00:17 Guest Introduction: Matt Selheimer from Forrester
01:32 High-Level Themes in SaaS Marketing
01:46 AI's Role in B2B Buying
02:16 Disciplined Experimentation in Marketing
03:03 Resurgence of Brand and PR Roles
03:32 Matt Selheimer's Background and Fun Fact
06:33 In-Depth Discussion on AI and Generational Shifts
10:05 The Importance of Testing and Experimentation
13:25 The Role of Brand in Modern Marketing
17:22 Advice for CEOs on Hiring CMOs
27:29 Marketing Organizational Design
36:09 Favorite Interview Question
37:25 Conclusion and Closing Remarks
The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money’ variety, rather than the ‘make it pretty’ variety, contact Erica at erica@theconnectivegood.com. You can also follow Erica on LinkedIn or sign up for her newsletter at TheConnectiveGood.com.
The Get is produced by the team at Simpler Media Productions.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Transcript
Welcome to The Get, the podcast about recruiting and
Speaker:leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.
Speaker:I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
Speaker:This season we're looking at how SaaS marketing organizations are changing
Speaker:in both seismic and subtle ways.
Speaker:My guest today is someone you will learn a ton from.
Speaker:I'm speaking with Matt Selheimer from Forrester.
Speaker:He's VP and Research Director for B2B marketing executives.
Speaker:So he gets both a broad and a deep look into the trends in B2B SaaS marketing.
Speaker:Through all of his research and all of his advising, he's talking to dozens,
Speaker:if not hundreds or thousands, Matt can fill in the blanks on marketing leaders
Speaker:and gets all of these data points.
Speaker:I always have a soft spot in my heart for Forrester because I am
Speaker:a former Forester person, as well.
Speaker:So I'm excited to have him join.
Speaker:He has had CMO and VP marketing roles at companies like Alert Logic
Speaker:and BMC software, and ITinvolve.
Speaker:And he has a background previously spanning consulting, sales, and product
Speaker:marketing just as well as marketing leadership before he came to Forrester.
Speaker:Today we're gonna talk about some themes that have come up so far on
Speaker:The Get podcast, and I'd love to get Matt's take on them as well as what
Speaker:he's seeing in general in his research.
Speaker:So this is gonna be fun.
Speaker:Matt, welcome to the show.
Speaker:Thanks, Erica.
Speaker:I'm glad to be here.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:Again, I love talking to Forrester people because a soft spot in my heart.
Speaker:So I am thrilled to hear you riff on some of the things
Speaker:that we've been seeing so far.
Speaker:I'm just gonna recap some of the very high level themes from the podcast episodes
Speaker:that I've done so far this season.
Speaker:Then would love to get your reactions to them, as well as diving into some
Speaker:of the research that you've been doing.
Speaker:One theme is that AI is now part of the buying committee.
Speaker:I've talked to people who have said, oh, I'm ready for situations where
Speaker:ChatGPT told me I should talk to you.
Speaker:And somebody who said, oh, ChatGPT, or actually AI chatbots
Speaker:in general are part of my personas.
Speaker:I'm not just marketing to individuals, I'm marketing to chatbots, and I'm
Speaker:thinking about them as personas.
Speaker:So that's one theme.
Speaker:I'm gonna go through a couple others, and then you can react.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Another one is this focus on disciplined experimentation over scattershot testing.
Speaker:So this idea of not being a mile wide and an inch deep with testing, but
Speaker:having a rapid prototyping approach with micro experts, hiring micro
Speaker:experts to focus on specific channels, and maybe micro influencers to really
Speaker:get into specific audiences that are going to respond to marketing messages.
Speaker:So this idea of microsegmentation has come up, this idea of pairing strategic intent
Speaker:with hyper experimentation has come up.
Speaker:I think part of this is the do more with less domain.
Speaker:As part of that, there's this renewed focus on discoverability.
Speaker:I think we might see a resurgence of brand and PR roles with shifts towards citations
Speaker:and building context for buyers through what has been traditionally PR motions.
Speaker:So those are just three things, probably poorly articulated, but I would love
Speaker:to hear you give a little intro on you and a fun fact and then react a little
Speaker:bit to some of those things that I've thrown out there and see does this jive,
Speaker:does this gel, and can you add on it?
Speaker:But why don't you say a little bit more about you?
Speaker:So there's a book that I read a couple years ago, Erica, called Range.
Speaker:It's a counterpoint to Gladwell's Outliers.
Speaker:I don't know if you've read it, but one of the things that the author
Speaker:talks about is that having a range of experiences can actually be more
Speaker:beneficial than just having one, highly specialized area of expertise.
Speaker:In addition to being a twenty, twenty-five-year-plus marketing leader
Speaker:and having to spend some time in sales and business development roles
Speaker:and things like that, I started my career actually as a systems engineer.
Speaker:So I have a technical background, which served me really well as a product
Speaker:marketer and as a CMO because I could talk the same language with the product team.
Speaker:I could resonate with the buyer and the messaging that we were trying to
Speaker:produce for more technical buyers.
Speaker:In addition to having been an engineer, I'm an archeologist.
Speaker:I have a PhD in Roman archeology, and I work as a professional
Speaker:archeologist, publish research as a professional archeologist in my spare
Speaker:time when I'm not doing marketing.
Speaker:And people always seem really interested in the archeology side of me when I say,
Speaker:oh, I'm a cybersecurity CMO, or I advise CMOs, but I'm also an archeologist.
Speaker:They always wanna talk about the archeology side 'cause it's fun.
Speaker:But I specifically study Roman cities.
Speaker:And if you think a little bit about like how we work as humans, we
Speaker:build on top of what's come before.
Speaker:That's the way cities in many cases are.
Speaker:Even if you build a brand new city, green field, over time it becomes organic.
Speaker:New layers get built on top of it.
Speaker:So my systems engineering background that resonates with, but also my marketing
Speaker:background and experience because marketing operates much the same way.
Speaker:We build on what's come before, the systems, the processes, the perceptions
Speaker:of what marketing does, marketing's value, all of these things are cultural
Speaker:aspects, if you will, and related aspects.
Speaker:So I find that the archeology side of my brain and the marketing
Speaker:side of my brain are not all that different from one another.
Speaker:So that's a little fun fact about me.
Speaker:That's great.
Speaker:I love that.
Speaker:And it's also, companies are built, you know, layer on top of layer.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And not just teams and not just marketing strategies.
Speaker:It's so funny to think that sometimes the thing that you did that was your
Speaker:first job is actually very telling.
Speaker:I had a career coach who said, okay, Erica, let me get to know you.
Speaker:What was your first job?
Speaker:And I said, I was scooping ice cream and working in a store.
Speaker:And she was like, well, what would you have done differently
Speaker:if you were the manager?
Speaker:And I talked about interfacing with customers in a different
Speaker:way and the product setup.
Speaker:And she was like, yes, you're marketing oriented because that's what you're
Speaker:saying, you're not talking about the operations of it all, for instance.
Speaker:It's very interesting for people who are in career transition or in
Speaker:a kind of career reflection moments.
Speaker:Sometimes it helps to look back and to say, what are those
Speaker:themes, like you've articulated so well with the archeology stuff.
Speaker:If you can remember the themes that I threw out there, any reactions?
Speaker:Make sense, not make sense?
Speaker:What are your thoughts?
Speaker:So the three things you've laid out are big, meaty topics.
Speaker:We could probably do a whole podcast on each one of those,
Speaker:so I'll try to be brief.
Speaker:AI is absolutely transforming the nature of buying, and we may be not at the
Speaker:world yet where it's let my bot talk to your bot, but there's definitely
Speaker:a trajectory in that direction.
Speaker:Every year, Forrester does what we call our B2B Buyer's Journey Survey,
Speaker:typically has 15, 16,000 respondents to it across industries, across
Speaker:company sizes, across geographies.
Speaker:We believe it's the most robust B2B buying survey that's conducted annually.
Speaker:In the most recent survey data, we're absolutely seeing that AI use in
Speaker:the buyer's journey is ubiquitous.
Speaker:90% plus of people are using AI as part of buying now.
Speaker:So it's gonna go probably close to a hundred percent,
Speaker:and it's already above, 90%.
Speaker:But what was most interesting to us when we were looking at the data was the range
Speaker:of usage of AI across the buying journey.
Speaker:One hypothesis we had was, it's probably gonna be more
Speaker:common in the discovery phase.
Speaker:People are trying to find potential vendors to work with, but what we
Speaker:found was that it was the number one self-service information source in
Speaker:the discover phase, in the evaluate phase, and in the commit phase.
Speaker:So it's completely pervasive now across the buying process.
Speaker:We're in prediction season now at Forrester, so we haven't quite
Speaker:published our predictions yet.
Speaker:But one of the sort of draft predictions I put forward, which didn't end
Speaker:up making the cut, 'cause there's always that debate, but one of the
Speaker:draft predictions that I put forward was, are we gonna see next year that
Speaker:marketing operations needs to step in to organize the AI inputs into purchasing?
Speaker:Because if one buyer persona is off there using an AI tool for information and
Speaker:another is using another and so on and so forth, what rationalization of these
Speaker:different AI inputs needs to happen?
Speaker:Do we trust Co-pilot more than we trust Gemini, for example?
Speaker:Or do we trust ChatGPT more than we trust Grok or Meta AI or whatever AI LLM
Speaker:might be being used by particular buyers?
Speaker:There's bias in responses.
Speaker:Studies have shown that there can be gender biases in the way AI talks to
Speaker:people, as well as other kinds of factors.
Speaker:So I think there is potentially, well, this is what my AI said.
Speaker:Well, this is what my AI said.
Speaker:Somebody's gonna have to rationalize that.
Speaker:That's a second order challenge that maybe we're not quite seeing yet, but maybe we
Speaker:will see as we look ahead to next year.
Speaker:But there's no doubt that the nature of B2B buying is changing.
Speaker:It's not just AI, though.
Speaker:It's also there's a generational shift happening in B2B buying.
Speaker:I'm Gen X, but Millennials and Gen Zs are now the majority
Speaker:of buying personas in B2B.
Speaker:They may not be the number one economic buyer yet but they are the
Speaker:largest population within the buying group and most B2B buying scenarios.
Speaker:They work differently.
Speaker:They think differently.
Speaker:I was at an event with some client folks last week and one of the
Speaker:things that we talked about was the notion of Facebook is for old people.
Speaker:You don't really see Millennials and Gen Z on Facebook.
Speaker:The watering holes for Millennials and Gen Z are different.
Speaker:They're maybe more likely to go to Reddit to ask for input in
Speaker:their buying purchase, than to, say, go to LinkedIn as an example.
Speaker:So how are you thinking about your content?
Speaker:How are you thinking about your brand, your messaging, your channels,
Speaker:as it relates to this generational shift that's happening in B2B buying?
Speaker:So that's topic one.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Or at least a quick riff on topic number one.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Topic number two, you talked about testing.
Speaker:As a practitioner CMO, I always used to try and achieve
Speaker:what I call the 85/15 rule.
Speaker:I could hit the goals that I needed to hit with 85% of my resources, and I would
Speaker:reserve the 15% as my flex budget, my flex resources, and those 15% ensured that
Speaker:I would have room for experimentation.
Speaker:And if nothing came out of that experimentation, I could still
Speaker:hit my targets with the other 85%.
Speaker:Now, did I always get to 85/15?
Speaker:Maybe not.
Speaker:Maybe it was 90/10, or 95/5 if I was coming in as a new CMO.
Speaker:But you always need to have some portion of your resources allocated
Speaker:to testing and experimentation.
Speaker:But more than that, in the world that we're operating in now and the volatility
Speaker:that we're operating in right now, we firmly believe and we're telling this
Speaker:to our clients on a regular basis, that your understanding of your buyers, your
Speaker:customers, the markets you're operating in is your competitive differentiator.
Speaker:I know that sounds kind of obvious, maybe, and I can bring in the archeology
Speaker:side of my brain here as well.
Speaker:The group that you study, the audience you're marketing to, you need to know them
Speaker:better than your competitors know them.
Speaker:That's gonna help ensure that you're producing the right resonating
Speaker:content that's going to engage them.
Speaker:People are going to conversational AI tools and they're putting all
Speaker:kinds of information into them as part of those conversations.
Speaker:They're putting demographic information, firmographic information, psychographic
Speaker:information, and then, the LLM is trying to figure out, okay, based on
Speaker:these inputs in this conversation, what do I suggest and recommend?
Speaker:Well, if you don't have content that is indexable and ingestible by the
Speaker:LLMs around those different parameters, then it's not gonna recommend you.
Speaker:If somebody's in a healthcare organization that's a billion dollar
Speaker:company that operates only in the United States, do you have content that maps
Speaker:to those parameters, as an example?
Speaker:If not, why would you expect the LLM to recommend your organization or
Speaker:suggest your organization as someone that that individual should talk to?
Speaker:So we're gonna see an explosion in content.
Speaker:We need to see an explosion in content in order to be able to deal with
Speaker:this sort of zero click change in the B2B buying "search" landscape.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that means you gotta test.
Speaker:That means you gotta experiment.
Speaker:Back to that point, we don't know what we don't know.
Speaker:The only way to know is to do, and to learn.
Speaker:The CMOs who can create a continuous learning organization are the ones
Speaker:that are gonna be more successful.
Speaker:In fact, I was talking with a
Speaker:brand and communications leader
Speaker:two weeks ago who had a research team underneath her, and I was told
Speaker:that she had to fire that entire research team, that there wasn't
Speaker:budget any longer for research.
Speaker:What a big mistake, what a massive mistake.
Speaker:That research team is more important now than ever before.
Speaker:So now she's trying to figure out, okay, I don't have these resources any longer.
Speaker:How do I stay in touch with the market and understand what's going
Speaker:on in the market now that I no longer have this research team?
Speaker:Of course, AI can be of help there, but are you gonna trust
Speaker:your entire research to what comes out of a conversational AI tool?
Speaker:That sounds like a risky strategy to me as a CMO.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That's debatable.
Speaker:And then the third one brand, we are seeing a resurgence in brand interest.
Speaker:It's interesting how brand goes in cycles.
Speaker:Right now, there's this weird dichotomy going on that we're seeing as we're
Speaker:looking at data and talking to clients and non-clients alike, there's a
Speaker:recognition that more brand awareness is needed, but there is a reluctance to
Speaker:commit to long-term brand investment.
Speaker:Because it's hard to prove the ROI and in the current volatile
Speaker:environment, it's like, gimme pipeline, gimme pipeline, gimme pipeline.
Speaker:It's harder to show the path from brand investment to pipeline.
Speaker:But what we're seeing, back to buying behavior shifting, is we're
Speaker:seeing more decisive buyers now.
Speaker:We haven't quite published this statistic yet, so I'm giving a little
Speaker:bit of a forward-looking view here to something Forrester hasn't released yet.
Speaker:But we are crunching our recent buyer journey data around what do buyers have
Speaker:in mind when they're starting their purchasing process, in terms of vendors?
Speaker:And we see that most buyers have a preferred vendor in mind.
Speaker:They may have one vendor and that's their preferred vendor, or they
Speaker:may have multiple vendors they're considering and they've got one that's
Speaker:preferred, but most buyers have a preferred vendor, and what we're seeing
Speaker:in the data is that more than 50% of the time that preferred vendor wins.
Speaker:That's huge.
Speaker:That's a huge shift in how marketers need to think about marketing and the role of
Speaker:brand because if you're sitting around waiting for in-market intent signals,
Speaker:which is what we've been trying to do.
Speaker:We've been polishing the pebbles on in-market intent signals and using tools
Speaker:around that for the last five or so years.
Speaker:And it's helped us, but there's the 95/5 rule.
Speaker:There's other ways this gets expressed, but ultimately, most
Speaker:buyers are not actively in market.
Speaker:So if they have a preferred vendor when they start their purchasing
Speaker:process and you wait for them to show large amounts of intent signals,
Speaker:you're probably getting in too late.
Speaker:You're more likely gonna end up being used as negotiating leverage
Speaker:against the preferred vendor, which is not a good place to be.
Speaker:That's an expensive business model.
Speaker:That means poor conversion rates, low win rates, high cost of acquisition.
Speaker:So what we're telling our clients is they
Speaker:actually need to bond brand and demand.
Speaker:They need
Speaker:to stop thinking about brand investment separately, and demand investment
Speaker:separately, and think about how the two are synergistic to one another.
Speaker:And they also need to stop thinking about brand awareness as the only thing that
Speaker:is measurable from a brand standpoint.
Speaker:There's perception, how accurate do people understand what you do as a business?
Speaker:If you're a new business, they may not have heard of you, or they may have, but
Speaker:they may not know really what you do.
Speaker:There was the funny thing that happened with the Coldplay concert.
Speaker:I don't know if you saw the viral little video that they put out with Gwyneth
Speaker:Paltrow after, um, an astronomer put out.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:What a great opportunity.
Speaker:You got all this inbound traffic, use that to clarify what you do.
Speaker:Improve brand perception, not just awareness.
Speaker:Then after perception comes sentiment.
Speaker:How do people feel about your brand?
Speaker:That allows you to, then, build and show preference, and then
Speaker:ultimately build loyalty and advocacy.
Speaker:What we are really seeing and what we're challenging our clients to think about
Speaker:is how do brand and demand, like I say, work together more synergistically?
Speaker:If you just put your dollars into demand, you are not realizing the
Speaker:impact of more decisive buyers and how brand investments can give you lift.
Speaker:Not just lift in your demand programs, but lift for sales,
Speaker:lift for partners, investors, recruiting and retaining employees.
Speaker:There's all these other ways that brand drives value in
Speaker:addition to attracting new logos.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:This is a great overview.
Speaker:I wanna skip to talking about advice to CEOs who have failed at hiring CMOs
Speaker:because we've talked around this a little bit that often the impact of
Speaker:marketing has felt in the short term and in the long term, but a lot of CEOs and
Speaker:investors, they want the pipeline, the leads, and there can be this focus on
Speaker:short-term to the expense of long term.
Speaker:I think that's why some CMO, CEO matches don't work so much, and the alignment
Speaker:is, I guess, the number one word before you make one of these matches.
Speaker:I think another thing is this expectation of doing more with less.
Speaker:One of my podcast guests said, I will not do more with less.
Speaker:I will just prioritize differently.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Those are some ways to think about CEO and CMO partnerships
Speaker:flourishing rather than failing.
Speaker:But what's your advice?
Speaker:If you could pick one thing about advice to a CEO who has had a mis-hire in a CMO?
Speaker:I'm gonna answer that question, but I'm gonna first give the CMO's perspective.
Speaker:I was talking with a CMO client just a couple days ago and I asked
Speaker:her, what's top of mind right now?
Speaker:What's keeping you up at night?
Speaker:And she said, I'm trying to survive the second budget cycle.
Speaker:And I said, tell me what does that mean?
Speaker:She goes, well, a new CMO can typically survive the first
Speaker:budget cycle because they're new.
Speaker:But the second budget cycle is the one that really is the make or
Speaker:break moment for a new CMO because you've been there long enough.
Speaker:You're expected to be able to put forward a solid well thought through
Speaker:plan and then deliver against it.
Speaker:A big problem that we see is mis-set expectations between the CEO and the
Speaker:CMO as part of the hiring process.
Speaker:I think a lot of this comes back to CEOs don't really know what they're hiring for.
Speaker:Yes, they put a job description together and they put all the things in the
Speaker:job description, but what they don't really put in the job description
Speaker:is, how do I expect marketing to contribute as part of the C-suite?
Speaker:Do I expect marketing to be a coequal partner with sales
Speaker:and product driving growth?
Speaker:Marketing is shaping growth strategy and segmentation strategy
Speaker:as much as sales leader is.
Speaker:Marketing is providing insights to guide product roadmap and
Speaker:driving the brand message back to deliverables on the roadmap that
Speaker:fulfill the promise of the brand.
Speaker:Is marketing in that partnering mode or is marketing a support function?
Speaker:Is marketing the butler to sales?
Speaker:Like, hey, gimme more events, gimme more webinars, gimme more leads.
Speaker:Or is marketing the butler to product, like, hey, you got a new release?
Speaker:Okay, we'll do a launch plan.
Speaker:In our research, we classify four purposes for marketing.
Speaker:There's marketing as a support function.
Speaker:There's marketing as a partnering function, as I mentioned.
Speaker:There's also marketing as a promoting function, and
Speaker:marketing as a driving function.
Speaker:When you're in the support zone or you're in the promoting zone,
Speaker:you are thinking activities first.
Speaker:You're thinking, how do I drive short-term productivity?
Speaker:If you're in the support zone, short-term productivity for sales,
Speaker:as an example, and if you're in the promoting zone, it's short-term revenue.
Speaker:The challenge of being in the support zone is that's not a very nice place to be if
Speaker:you really wanna be a business leader.
Speaker:If you're content with being an operator and either reporting up
Speaker:to sales or being subordinate to sales from a political standpoint,
Speaker:then fine, the supporting zone.
Speaker:But most marketers I talk to don't really wanna be in the support zone.
Speaker:The promoting zone sounds attractive, but the challenge of being in the
Speaker:promoting zone is that you're only as good as the last promotions you've done.
Speaker:I call that the hamster wheel or the treadmill.
Speaker:It's just constant.
Speaker:You just have to promote, promote, promote, promote.
Speaker:The partnering zone is a better place typically for a CMO because
Speaker:they're acting as a business leader.
Speaker:They're working on growth strategy jointly with the sales leader and
Speaker:the product leader and the CEO.
Speaker:They're also probably working with the customer success leader, and
Speaker:they have a hand in driving the segmentation and the targeting.
Speaker:They're not just accepting the segmentation handed to them from
Speaker:the sales leader and the CEO.
Speaker:The driving zone, everybody likes to think of that as the best place to be
Speaker:or like the ideal state, but it's not always necessarily the ideal state.
Speaker:If marketing is in the driving zone, that means marketing's calling the shots.
Speaker:That may make sense in certain scenarios, in certain segments.
Speaker:You may have a certain segment where self-service buying, digital
Speaker:commerce is how they wanna buy.
Speaker:So marketing might need to own that and drive that.
Speaker:Whether that's on your own website, where you're standing up, an
Speaker:e-commerce or marketplace site, or whether that's through third party,
Speaker:marketplaces with distributor partners or with the hyperscalers, et cetera.
Speaker:But marketing is driving that motion.
Speaker:Or marketing is feeding product requirements back and saying,
Speaker:product, you need to go build this.
Speaker:That can sometimes be a difficult place to position yourself in because
Speaker:products might be very resistant to that.
Speaker:Sales might be very resistant to that.
Speaker:You're also putting yourself out there on a plank.
Speaker:You're saying I'm gonna be the growth driver for the company, so the
Speaker:accountability is on you, you, and you.
Speaker:So we generally suggest that if you're sitting in the support
Speaker:zone, that moving to the partnering zone is the next best place to be.
Speaker:Yes, you can move to the promoting zone, but like I said, the challenge
Speaker:there is it's just that constant hamster wheel or treadmill.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Let me go back to your question now that I set that context.
Speaker:The mismatch is often when the CMO comes in thinking that they're gonna
Speaker:be a driver or they're gonna be a partner only to find out that the
Speaker:reality is they're a support function.
Speaker:The CEO may have told him a great story, but the culture in the organization
Speaker:is marketing is a support function.
Speaker:You hear these kind of pejorative expressions.
Speaker:One of our clients that we interviewed for some research recently told
Speaker:us that she found out that when she wasn't in the room, she was
Speaker:referred to as "The PR Lady."
Speaker:Ooh.
Speaker:So she quit.
Speaker:She was like, this is a culture that I'm just not gonna be able to be successful
Speaker:in, because it's gonna be too difficult for me to convince all of my peers to see
Speaker:me differently than the way they see me.
Speaker:So she literally opted out of the organization and left the organization.
Speaker:She didn't try to - she did not to
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:- evolve the-
Speaker:She decided I don't wanna deal with this.
Speaker:I don't want the headache of it, and I'm gonna go find another job, and
Speaker:so I'm just gonna twiddle my thumbs.
Speaker:That's a bit harsh, but obviously she was still trying to advance the
Speaker:business, but she's like, I am not going to try and change the culture of how
Speaker:marketing is viewed in this organization.
Speaker:I'm gonna go work somewhere else.
Speaker:So that's one thing we definitely see CMOs do is they opt out.
Speaker:That's one of the reasons why the tenure is also short.
Speaker:The tenure isn't short just because CMOs are getting laid off.
Speaker:The tenure is also short 'cause CMOs are saying, this is an organization
Speaker:that's not compatible with how I see marketing and how I want to run marketing.
Speaker:So what I tell our clients is, obviously we're talking to people
Speaker:who are already in the CMO role, but sometimes they're in a transition, too.
Speaker:I tell them, look, make sure there's a really good fit here
Speaker:for the purpose of marketing.
Speaker:That what you see as the purpose of marketing and your CEO and the board sees
Speaker:as the purpose of marketing is aligned.
Speaker:If you need to do education, that's the time to do the education.
Speaker:Educating the CEO on this is how you should be thinking about marketing,
Speaker:and don't think that marketing's just about new logo acquisition.
Speaker:Marketing can play a role also in expansion, but also in retention
Speaker:and renewal, and expand the aperture of how they think about
Speaker:marketing and the role of marketing.
Speaker:If you don't get the CEO resonating with that, then that may not be the place
Speaker:that you want to go join, as an example.
Speaker:But if you are already in a function, already in a company as a
Speaker:CMO, what we're telling all of our clients is, now's a great time to
Speaker:recalibrate the purpose of marketing.
Speaker:We have all these advancements in technology that are happening.
Speaker:We have all of this more empowerment around buyers that's happening.
Speaker:We have some pretty gnarly dynamics going on in the C-suite right now.
Speaker:Let's be honest, sales is kinda struggling a bit to figure out what its existence
Speaker:is gonna look like in this new world too.
Speaker:And product is trying to deal with the rapid pace of evolution as well.
Speaker:Use these what might look like pressures to your advantage.
Speaker:Go have the conversation with your CEO.
Speaker:Because of more empowered audiences, this is how we need to think
Speaker:about the purpose of marketing.
Speaker:Because of the advancements in technology, this is how we need to
Speaker:think about the purpose of marketing, and really use this 2026 planning
Speaker:cycle to recalibrate the purpose of marketing, the scope of marketing.
Speaker:And then that drives a different conversation around resources.
Speaker:It breaks the cycle of we're gonna look at last year's budget and do a little
Speaker:incremental up, little incremental down because it recalibrates the conversation
Speaker:to what do we want marketing to do here-
Speaker:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:-Before we get into the budget discussion.
Speaker:Agree or disagree, it's easier to calibrate ahead of joining
Speaker:a company versus once you're in there with perceptions set?
Speaker:I think it's easier when you're joining a company during the hiring process.
Speaker:When I think back about the times I've shifted marketing or worked
Speaker:to shift marketing, if I didn't have the understanding from the
Speaker:CEO and I going into me joining the company, it was much harder to shift.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I love those perspectives on the different framings of what kind of
Speaker:marketing leader a company is looking for.
Speaker:And often the company's looking for somebody that, they've bumped
Speaker:down marketing, oh, it used to be a CMO and now it's a VP.
Speaker:But they still want the person to be able to be the partner.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:So that's where most CEOs fail.
Speaker:The pithy soundbite comment is the CEO fails when they hire a driver
Speaker:marketer or a partner marketer and they put them into a support role.
Speaker:Yeah, it's like having a Ferrari, but using it to go to the grocery store.
Speaker:But only driving it in your neighborhood.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And never taking it out on the Audubon.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Cool.
Speaker:That's awesome.
Speaker:Now let's talk about marketing org design.
Speaker:I was talking to Wanda Cadigan who runs marketing for Cloudinary, and
Speaker:she had this great concept about in a team you're gonna have Swiss Army
Speaker:knives and you're gonna have scalpels.
Speaker:There are the generalists and the specialists, and then you're
Speaker:gonna have enhancements or AI team members, however you think of that.
Speaker:Your thoughts?
Speaker:I like that analogy of Swiss Army knives and scalpels.
Speaker:That resonates with me.
Speaker:One challenge we have in marketing is that we've developed so much specialization
Speaker:in marketing over the last twenty years that we've siloed ourselves.
Speaker:A good example of this is how program budgets get allocated.
Speaker:Here at Forrester, we track budget benchmarks for B2B, and we look at how
Speaker:do people organize their program's budget by function or what we call by family?
Speaker:And we still see it's about 90% by function, 85, 90%
Speaker:depending upon the survey.
Speaker:And so it's basically the CMO divvies out the program dollars to
Speaker:each one of their direct reports.
Speaker:That reinforces siloed behavior just from the start.
Speaker:I've got my budget to spend.
Speaker:Instead, what we say is programs should be organized based on integrated campaigns.
Speaker:And yes, there's probably some outta campaign stuff you need to do too,
Speaker:so put some money aside for that.
Speaker:But in terms of the bulk of the program dollars, that should be campaigns.
Speaker:It should be aligned to audiences and themes, and each campaign should
Speaker:have a component of reputation programs, brand programs, demand
Speaker:programs, customer engagement programs, and enablement programs.
Speaker:So as you bring a group of marketers together to say, okay, we have X amount of
Speaker:dollars to go spend around this audience.
Speaker:Lemme give you two quick examples.
Speaker:We're going into a new market.
Speaker:That's a part of our growth strategy.
Speaker:We're not gonna be very well known.
Speaker:It's a new market.
Speaker:So we gotta lead with brand and reputation.
Speaker:We don't wanna put too much demand investment in there 'cause it's gonna
Speaker:be inefficient for us to do that.
Speaker:So we wanna start with more brand investment and then ratchet up the
Speaker:demand and investment over time.
Speaker:We probably don't need to do very much investment around customer engagement.
Speaker:It's a new market.
Speaker:But for those initial lighthouse customers, we sure wanna do
Speaker:customer engagement 'cause we want to turn those into advocates.
Speaker:And it's a new market, so we gotta invest in enablement programs for our marketers
Speaker:and our sellers and our partners.
Speaker:Compare that to a cash cow business, you probably don't need to do as much
Speaker:brand programs, reputation programs 'cause you're hopefully well known.
Speaker:But maybe you do need to invest because people have
Speaker:poor perceptions of your brand.
Speaker:Maybe they think of you as what you used to be, or they have
Speaker:bad sentiment around your brand.
Speaker:So you gotta calibrate that.
Speaker:But you need to do a lot more demand 'cause it's a cash cow business.
Speaker:So the way you grow market share is by stealing customers from your
Speaker:competitors, but then that also means you need to invest more in customer
Speaker:engagement 'cause you gotta keep your customers retained and happy.
Speaker:Otherwise your competitors are gonna steal them.
Speaker:But you don't need to do a lot from a enablement standpoint
Speaker:'cause it's a core business, and your team probably understands
Speaker:how to sell 'em to those markets.
Speaker:While that's not org design, per se, to your question, how we think about
Speaker:our campaigns and how we work together and how we divvy out budget absolutely
Speaker:crosses over into organizational design.
Speaker:So what we'd like to see and what we advocate to our clients is moving more
Speaker:towards a pod model or what we call a crew model, where you're bringing the
Speaker:right resources, the right specialists, the right scalpels together, using that
Speaker:analogy, along with some Swiss army knives as appropriate, but you're organizing
Speaker:them in a crew that has a target audience, that has objectives, that has a budget
Speaker:that's shared, that can be allocated across those different program families.
Speaker:But using the crew analogy, you have a coxswain at the front of the boat.
Speaker:And that coxswain is calling the pace and keeping everybody in line and
Speaker:making sure we're all rowing together.
Speaker:It's not just an unfettered pod where it's left to its own devices.
Speaker:The coxswain is making sure that we're moving towards
Speaker:those particular objectives.
Speaker:What I love about that model is it doesn't require a reorg.
Speaker:We hear from clients quite regularly that they're under reorg fatigue.
Speaker:I can think of a few companies that I know of that they seem to reorg about
Speaker:every twelve to eighteen months in marketing, and I wonder how can they
Speaker:get anything done reorging that often?
Speaker:If you've got reorg fatigue in your organization, then the pod or crew
Speaker:model can be an effective way to be more audience centric and be more
Speaker:strategic while not having to go through a big HR reorganizational approach.
Speaker:It's interesting what you were initially saying about how marketing leaders have
Speaker:traditionally said, oh, you're this person, you get this much budget, you're
Speaker:this person, you get this much budget.
Speaker:Hey, I've done it.
Speaker:Yeah, and I think it's probably because, oh, we wanna get you to be like a P&L, a
Speaker:mini P&L leader, build GM type of skills.
Speaker:But I see your point, how that could
Speaker:- It's, it's easier.
Speaker:It's easier.
Speaker:And budget cycles are, there's always pressures to plan.
Speaker:There's never enough time to plan properly.
Speaker:We're humans, and sometimes we just take the easy way out, okay, you get this much,
Speaker:you get this much, you get this much.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Now I wanna go back to you, you used a car analogy about a Ferrari earlier.
Speaker:So, I use the car analogy when it comes to org design.
Speaker:One of the questions we get asked a lot is can you send me some sample org charts?
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:I try to politely tell clients, no, I'm not gonna send you sample org
Speaker:charts because it's like asking me what kind of car should they buy?
Speaker:I could tell you should buy Ferrari.
Speaker:You should buy minivan.
Speaker:Both of those could be completely wrong.
Speaker:So what we tell our clients is, let's start with your business objectives.
Speaker:What are you trying to achieve as a company?
Speaker:And then what are the marketing objectives associated with those business objectives?
Speaker:Which by the way, gets back into the purpose conversation
Speaker:we were just talking about.
Speaker:Once you've defined your marketing objectives, what
Speaker:resources do you have available?
Speaker:Can you realistically achieve those objectives with the
Speaker:resources that you have available?
Speaker:It's only then that you can really start to build the org chart.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Looking at sample org charts before you've thought through company objectives,
Speaker:marketing objectives, resources, you could design the perfect org chart, but
Speaker:it's not relevant to what your business is actually trying to achieve and the
Speaker:resources that you have available.
Speaker:So we always like to guide clients through that process.
Speaker:The other thing we find with a lot of our clients is, and this is a
Speaker:habit of executives generally, it's not just limited to marketers, is
Speaker:we spend so much time thinking about the reorganization that when it comes
Speaker:time to announce it, we are fatigued already about it as the leader.
Speaker:Because we've been planning this for maybe a few months before the announcement,
Speaker:and so we finally announce it and we're like, [deep sigh] catch our breath.
Speaker:We finally got this organizational announcement out.
Speaker:Guess what?
Speaker:That's when the communications need to actually ramp up because now you've gotta
Speaker:manage that change in the communication.
Speaker:So one of the things we really try to guide our clients on is the reorganization
Speaker:doesn't stop at the announcement.
Speaker:The reorganization continues for a period of time afterwards.
Speaker:And the success of the reorganization is more dependent on that than it is on
Speaker:the quality of what you've announced.
Speaker:It's like a product launch.
Speaker:We have so much more we could talk about, but I am excited for people to
Speaker:check out the research that you've been doing and to chat with you further.
Speaker:And thank you again for joining me, Matt.
Speaker:Yeah, I would suggest to people find me on LinkedIn.
Speaker:I post Forrester research fairly regularly.
Speaker:It may be a blog or a short snippet 'cause our full reports are only accessible to
Speaker:clients, but we do try to make at least some key aspects of our research available
Speaker:outside of the paywall, so to speak.
Speaker:And all of us at Forrester have bios, as well, on our Forrester websites.
Speaker:So you can see our blogs from those bios, and you can see our
Speaker:research we're writing as well.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Thank you so much, Matt.
Speaker:You're welcome.
Speaker:Pleasure being here.
Speaker:That was Matt Selheimer, VP and Research Director for B2B
Speaker:marketing executives at Forrester.
Speaker:Thanks for listening to The Get.
Speaker:I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
Speaker:The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and
Speaker:leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.
Speaker:We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today's top
Speaker:marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
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