The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan

Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Marketing

Welcome to The B2B CMO Podcast, a show for marketing executives who are redefining what it means to be a strategic leader. Join Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan every week as they talk with the very best Chief Marketing Officers who are navigating the modern marketing playbook and positioning themselves as strategic leaders. Each episode, we unpack what it really takes to lead through complexity, earn trust at the strategy table, and shape the future of growth. We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth. For more marketing leadership resources, visit [b2bcmoproject.com](http://b2bcmoproject.com/).

  1. 12h ago

    Build Marketing Around Proof, Not Pitches with Lena Waters

    Lena Waters is a marketing executive and advisor who specializes in the inflection point where product-led growth meets enterprise scale. She has built and led global marketing teams across growth, demand, and brand at companies including Grammarly, DocuSign, Responses, and Lookout, and most recently served as CMO at Notion. Across those roles, she's operated both enterprise and product-led growth motions and developed a point of view on how the two can reinforce each other rather than compete. Lena joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to share her controversial take: stop trying to persuade your buyers and start giving them proof instead. In this episode, she breaks down why she'd rather put a marketing dollar into product experience than a brand campaign, and how that thinking took her from DocuSign to Grammarly to running go-to-market at Notion. Lena walks through how she merged product-led growth with enterprise sales without treating them as competing motions, why she thinks MQLs are measuring the wrong thing, and the three blunt questions every CMO should ask their CEO before taking the job. We also get into why she thinks the AI-native marketing team problem isn't a talent problem at all. Jump Into the Conversation: (00:00) Where PLG meets enterprise scale (01:40) The CMO who resisted becoming a CMO (03:51) Selling the pony: An origin story in positioning (07:54) What "strategic" actually means in the AI era (10:06) Repositioning Notion from note-taking to context platform (12:44) MQL vs. MQA and letting the data kill the old metric (15:00) When brand spend is just rented attention (20:47) Community compounds, awareness evaporates (23:14) How Notion measured a narrative change (25:51) Three questions every CMO should ask their CEO (33:13) The AI-native team is a permissions problem, not a talent problem (36:24)Why speed beats consensus Key Takeaways Replace persuasion with proof.  Lena argues that much of traditional B2B marketing has been designed to persuade prospects before they have meaningful experience with the product. MQLs often measure whether someone consumed a whitepaper, webinar, guide, or event and then translate that behavior into assumed buying intent. Product experience provides a different signal: someone has used the product, experienced its impact, and potentially built a dependency on it. The strategic question becomes how much value you can let customers experience before asking them to buy.PLG and enterprise don't have to be competing motions. Lena's experience owning both enterprise and product-led targets changed how she thought about growth. Individual product users can build durable brand affinity, while small teams and developers can become a front door to the enterprise pipeline. She doesn't argue that every company needs a traditional PLG model. Instead, she asks how wide a company can open its front door—through a free experience, API access, a usage-based tier, hands-on proof of concept, or another way for customers to experience value before the contract. Build brand assets that compound. Lena distinguishes between attention that disappears when spending stops and evidence that keeps working for the company. Community, original research, customer advocacy, and the stories customers tell about a product can create value long after the initial investment. Rather than asking a CFO to simply “fund brand,” her approach is to show how those assets keep returning value and use a combination of quantitative and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate whether the company's narrative is actually changing.AI-native marketing starts with permission, not the org chart. Lena pushes back on the idea that AI transformation is primarily a talent problem. Before debating new roles or hiring more generalists, she asks whether marketers actually have access to the CRM and product data they need to execute. She also argues for moving away from teams organized around individual channels and toward one shared department outcome. AI can dramatically increase production, but that advantage disappears if the company keeps the same slow approval structures around the work. Standout Quote “If you can help somebody experience the product before they buy and they already know what you are before they arrive, then the funnel stops doing the persuading that we've been trying to do all this time. And the product and your company reputation do it first.” — Lena Waters Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenawaters/  Mentioned in this Episode Scott Olrich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottolrich/  More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcast

    Build Marketing Around Proof, Not Pitches with Lena Waters

  2. 6d ago

    Inside G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report with Alexandra London, CMO of G2

    Alexandra London is the Chief Marketing Officer at G2, the world's largest and most trusted data source in B2B software, serving more than 200 million annual software buyers. She joined G2 to lead marketing into the AI era, building growth engines designed for acceleration, accountability, and long-term value creation.  Alexandra joins Sydney Sloan to unpack the findings of G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report: The Evaluation Maze: how 82% of buyers have sourced a software recommendation from an AI chatbot, what separates getting cited from winning the answer, and why 49% of buyers had a CFO veto a software purchase that had already been approved. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and G2.  Jump Into the Conversation: (00:00) Meet Alexandra London (01:28) Why the Buyer Behavior Report matters to CMOs (03:57) The new research timeline only takes hours instead of weeks  (05:20) How to win the answer, not just get cited (06:02) Marketing to the human and the agent at the same time (08:57) The new data point: 49% of CFOs vetoed an approved purchase (10:27) Why nobody wants to sign a three-year deal anymore (12:27) Token maxing and bringing the CFO along the journey  Episode Takeaways The shortlist is now built before you know the buyer exists. 82% of buyers sourced a software recommendation from an AI chatbot in the last 24 months, and review sites and AI chatbots are now the top sources influencing which vendors make that shortlist. Research that used to take weeks to months is now happening in hours.Getting cited is not the same as winning the answer. Being mentioned is table stakes. What matters is whether your brand is the recommendation the buyer acts on, and whether your own content is what shaped how the model describes you.Your content has two readers now, and one of them recrawls every 90 days. The models recrawl, re-understand, and repopulate on roughly a 90-day cycle, which means stale content quietly becomes a stale answer. Open your site and content to be crawled, and run an AEO tool that benchmarks prompts, citations and performance at scale rather than treating it as a one-time optimization pass.Awareness is not the finish line, evaluation is the bottleneck. Discovery compressed, evaluation did not. Buyers still have to compare and validate, and they need first-party comparison content alongside third-party reviews to build the internal business case they are the ones defending.49% of buyers had a CFO veto a purchase that was already approved. CFOs are scrutinizing tooling ROI, watching AI consumption costs, and pushing back on multi-year contracts. If the CFO is not your financial buyer, add them to the buying group anyway through late-stage brand and paid social, so they recognize your name before the contract reaches their desk. Standout Quote "Now you have to speak to both the human and the agent, because they're both crawling and they're both understanding your site and pulling data in real time." — Alexandra London Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandralondon/G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/ Mentioned in this Episode G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, The Evaluation Maze: https://sell.g2.com/2026-buyer-behavior-reportG2's announcement of the report findings: https://company.g2.com/news/buyer-behavior-2026G2's acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/g2-to-acquire-capterra-software-advice-and-getapp-from-gartner-302673901.htmlKim Storin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin/ More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/  Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/  Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/  More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    Inside G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report with Alexandra London, CMO of G2

  3. Aug 31

    Define the Message and the Roadmap Follows with Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo

    Jamie Domenici is the Chief Marketing Officer at Klaviyo, the autonomous B2C CRM. Since joining in 2023, Jamie has guided the company through its IPO and championed Klaviyo's repositioning from ESP to the CRM built specifically for B2C brands, earning recognition as a category leader in Adweek's AI Power 50. She previously served as CMO at GoTo, leading the company's rebrand from LogMeIn, and spent a decade at Salesforce in marketing and customer success leadership. Jamie joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to talk about what B2B marketers can learn from B2C's obsession with owning a number and personalizing at scale, how she rebuilt Klaviyo's category story starting from a single bad billboard, and why she's turning content editors into content engineers as AI reshapes her team. (00:00) Meet Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo (02:16) From aspiring politician to marketing ops to CMO (05:40) Why a CMO's closest partners are sales and product (08:28) Own a number, and what else B2B can steal from B2C (11:56) Bringing a point of view to the CEO's keynote (14:14) The IPO test, can your message fit on a t-shirt (16:27) The bad billboard that started a category (18:45) You know a category landed when customers say it back (19:51) Selling brand to a board that doesn't care about brand (22:04) AEO becomes its own line item next to SEO (25:47) Content editors become content engineers (31:36) Invisible AI and what comes after autonomous  Episode Takeaways Customer proximity drives strategy. Stay close to customers consistently, not just at major milestones. Ongoing conversations helped Klaviyo understand what customers actually needed, sharpen the narrative around where the company was headed, and make a much bigger strategic call about the category it wanted to own. Marketing should position where you’re going, not just where you are. Marketing shouldn’t simply describe the company as it exists today, sometimes the job is to define the category you believe the company can grow into before the market defines it for you. Klaviyo took that risk by moving beyond the ESP label and claiming the B2C CRM position before the product fully caught up. That clearer, bigger story gave the market something to understand and pushed the product roadmap and organization to align behind the vision. AI should become invisible in the workflow. The next phase of AI will be less about adding another tool marketers have to actively use and more about embedding AI directly into how the work gets done. The goal is for AI to operate within the workflow without becoming visible to the customer. Own a number. Marketers should have clear accountability to a business outcome, whether that’s growth, pipeline, or another measurable target. Owning a number isn’t just about proving marketing’s value, it changes how marketing operates as a strategic part of the business. Standout Quote“Sometimes you touch so many things that it feels like you don't own anything, but in fact, you're the glue that brings it all together.” - Jamie Domenici Guest LinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdomenici/Klaviyo Website: https://www.klaviyo.com/ Mentioned in this EpisodeBetty Hung: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betty-hung-b19ba0a0/  Stephanie Buscemi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniebuscemi/Thimaya Subaiya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thimaya/ Sara Varni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saravarnibright/ Shannon Duffy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonduffy/Sarah Franklin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahfranklin/Emma Chalwin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmachalwin/ More from The B2B CMO ProjectWebsite: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    Define the Message and the Roadmap Follows with Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo

  4. Aug 27

    Quick Fire Advice to Uplevel Your AEO with Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist of Webflow

    Guy Yalif is the Chief Evangelist at Webflow, the agentic web marketing platform helping developers, designers, and marketers build and optimize sites for both human visitors and AI answer engines. Before Webflow, Guy co-founded and served as CEO of Intellimize, a machine learning personalization company Webflow acquired, and spent more than two decades at the intersection of ad tech, martech, and CMO leadership at companies including Yahoo and Twitter. Guy now leads Webflow's AEO practice and talks with hundreds of CMOs every quarter. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and Webflow. Guy joins Sydney Sloan to unpack the data behind one of the most urgent shifts in B2B marketing: why 69% of B2B buyers have already chosen a vendor based on what an LLM recommended, what's actually different about optimizing for AI answer engines versus classic SEO, and the specific technical moves that got six of Webflow's product pages more than half of the company's new AI citations in two weeks. Episode Takeaways Word-of-mouth's replacement is arriving faster than most CMOs are tracking. Buyers have long used peer recommendations as the fastest, most trusted way to build a vendor shortlist. LLMs are now filling that role, faster and available all the time, and 69% of B2B buyers have already picked a vendor because of what one recommended.Most brands are barely visible inside their own category's AI answers. Across a maturity assessment of roughly two thousand company sites, the average mention rate was just 16%, the link-back rate was 6%, and share of voice against competitors was only 15%. Even when a brand does get mentioned, only about a quarter of the answer reflects its actual positioning.Structure, not volume, is the highest-leverage AEO fix available right now. Webflow added FAQ blocks and schema markup to six of its highest-traffic product pages. Within two weeks, those six pages, out of a quarter million on the site, accounted for more than half of all the new AI citations Webflow earned.AEO needs an engineer and a marketer in the same room, which is exactly why most teams don't do it. Schema markup is metadata a machine can read that a human can't see, and building it well takes technical and marketing expertise together. That's a structural gap, not a knowledge gap.The AEO team is not the SEO team, it’s a broader mandate. Content responsibility sits with product marketing, technical work touches engineering, authority touches brand and PR, and measurement covers analytics. Good AEO looks like SEO with cross-functional buy-in that reaches the board, not a specialized side project run by one agency.“We as CMOs have been using word-of-mouth as the fastest, most trustworthy source of how to tackle a new problem, think about a new space, or come up with a vendor shortlist. And while the LLMs don't equal the trust you and I have, for example, they are faster, and they're available all the time.” — Guy Yalif Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gyalif/Webflow Website: https://webflow.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Vivian Hoang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivianhoang/ More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    Quick Fire Advice to Uplevel Your AEO with Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist of Webflow

  5. Aug 21

    How to Justify Brand Spend in the Dark Funnel with Kimberly Storin

    Kimberly Storin is the CMO at Zoom, the AI-first work platform for human connection. Kimberly leads Zoom’s brand, communications, product marketing, enterprise marketing, and regional marketing teams. Previously, she was Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Zayo, and also spent time as a consultant with Deloitte. Kimberly joins Sydney Sloan to discuss how to build your brand in the era of the dark funnel, how to fight for end-user mental availability, and why B2B marketers need to leverage some of the key learnings from B2C marketing around creative. Episode Takeaways Kimberly's B2B brand-building framework has four components: Be Found, Be Present, Be Believed, and Be Preferred. This model helps sales leaders, GMs, and the CEO understand why 75% of GTM effort must happen before a buyer ever raises their hand, since B2B buying now happens almost entirely in the "dark funnel."Vet leadership's view of strategy before accepting a CMO role, not after. For example, Kimberly Storin talked to 50 customers and presented a hypothesis-level 30/60/90 day plan before accepting the Zoom CMO job, using the board's reaction as a litmus test for whether they'd actually let her bring market insights to the table. When evaluating new roles, treat the interview process as a strategy audit, not just a culture check.Fight for communications to sit inside marketing's remit. Organizations that treat communications as a strategic lever of marketing rather than a separate function, because it lets the CMO shape narrative at both the corporate and go-to-market level. Marketing leaders should push to consolidate brand, comms, and demand under one strategic view rather than let them fragment across silos. Standout Quote “I believe that owning that narrative and really understanding marketing as a reputation driver as well as a brand and pipeline driver is the right strategic view.” - Kimberly Storin Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin/ Zoom Website: https://www.zoom.com/  More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    How to Justify Brand Spend in the Dark Funnel with Kimberly Storin

  6. Aug 11

    Building the Case for Brand as a New CMO with Latané Conant

    Latané Conant is the Chief Market Officer of Parloa, AI agents that turn customer conversations into lasting loyalty. Prior to Parloa, she led both global sales and marketing teams in both CMO and CRO roles at 6Sense, Appirio, and Ariba. She wrote the book No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls. Latané joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss how being a sales leader can make you a more empathetic marketing leader, why benchmarking and research are key to building the business case to invest in marketing, and what you can do as a marketing leader to upskill your team and attain outsized results. Episode Takeaways Win the stage, not the deal. Marketing leaders should map their specific sales process stage-by-stage and ask "what needs to happen to win this stage," rather than focusing only on closing. By treating each stage as its own objective, it lets marketing provide targeted "air cover" instead of generic support, at the right time.Pre-socialize big asks individually before the board meeting. Rather than pitching a major brand investment cold, secure CEO or CFO support first, then bring specific, but not overly prescriptive, pillars to the board. Bring enough detail to justify the spend without inviting a free-for-all of opinions on every channel or influencer choice.Formalize AI accountability with quarterly benchmarking. Centralize AI enablement function so you can benchmark every function's AI usage each quarter, and have team members report progress against what's "possible" in their QBRs. This creates structured pressure to actually adopt AI tools rather than treating them as optional.Redesign org growth curves around AI leverage, not headcount. Rather than rebuilding a large functional team from scratch, instead hire one senior leader per function with the expectation they operate with heavy AI assistance. Output can now scale without linear headcount growth. Standout Quote “ I don't believe in making small plans.” - Latané Conant Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/latane-conant/ Parloa Website: https://www.parloa.com/  More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    Building the Case for Brand as a New CMO with Latané Conant

  7. Aug 5

    AI Won't Save Bad Marketing, Creativity Will, with Kyle Lacy

    Kyle Lacy is the Chief Marketing Officer at Docebo, an AI-First LMS for Enterprise Learning & Skills. Kyle led global content marketing at ExactTarget before its acquisition by Salesforce, helped build Lessonly from the early days through its $300 million acquisition by Seismic, and went on to serve as CMO of Jellyfish. Kyle joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss why AI can’t replace human creativity in marketing, why modern CMOs need to think about their personal brands, and why sales and marketing really don’t belong under each other.  Episode Takeaways Keep marketing and sales as separate organizations unless you have an exceptional CRO. Folding marketing into sales often strips out the creative and brand elements marketing exists to deliver, since sales is mostly science while marketing involves taste and creativity.Collect concrete "surprise and delight" stories as evidence for marketing's non-pipeline value. These proof points resonate with executives even though they can't be attributed in a pipeline report. Marketers should proactively document these moments (LinkedIn buzz, unsolicited CEO/investor mentions) as a standing evidence file, not something they scramble to recall in a budget meeting.Match your AI investment to workflow automation, not wholesale system, team, or function replacement. For example, Docebo's tech stack "doesn't look that much different" than before AI, the big changes are in automating existing manual workflows like lead routing and content production, and they hired a dedicated AI operations role specifically for marketing rather than relying solely on a central AI team.  Standout Quote “ When everybody has the same tools, your only competitive advantage is you're human.” - Kyle Lacy Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy/Docebo Website: https://www.docebo.com/  More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    AI Won't Save Bad Marketing, Creativity Will, with Kyle Lacy

  8. Jul 27

    Pipeline Gives Permission to Invest Big on Brand with Jennifer Johnson

    Jennifer “JJ” Johnson is the Chief Marketing Officer at CrowdStrike, the Agentic Security Platform; unified and built to secure the AI revolution. Jennifer has been a CMO for more than a decade, leading global marketing strategy and execution, and building high-performance teams for some of the fastest-growing and most trusted brands in cybersecurity. Before joining CrowdStrike, she led both Amplitude and Tenable to successful IPOs as their CMO, along with leading Coverity to a successful acquisition. Jennifer joins Co-Hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss how to build an AI transformation center of excellence in-house, why focusing on pipeline gives CMOs permission to invest in big picture brand strategy, and the operating timeline methods of the clock and the stopwatch.  Episode Takeaways Leaders with consulting DNA, not just marketing chops, make great candidates for driving AI transformation. For example, Jennifer brought in someone from Boston Consulting Group's Go-To-Market practice specifically because she needed change-management expertise, not just tool knowledge. Peers should look for candidates who understand both marketing function and structured process transformation; the technology piece is the easy part.Tackle AI transformation one workflow at a time, end-to-end. Rather than boiling the ocean across every marketing function, pick one process, execute it completely, build a playbook, and then repeat.Treat "pipeline is permission" as the operating principle for earning strategic latitude. Consistently hitting core pipeline numbers is what earns a CMO credibility to pursue brand investments, category creation, or other "non-trivial" bets. Successful execution funds strategic ambition, not the reverse.Build brand budgets in parallel with demand, never as an afterthought. Brand and demand leaders should each build their own plans and asks independently; demand should never get "first pick" of budget with brand receiving leftovers, which leads to underinvestment in brand.Balance "calendar" moments with a "stopwatch" rapid-offense capability. Predictable moments (product releases, major conferences) anchor planning, but CrowdStrike also runs a rapid-response content engine reacting to real-time market signals and competitor moves; treating both cadences as complementary, not competing, priorities. Standout Quote “ I think every CMO needs to have someone in their leadership team that is accountable for driving AI transformation.” - Jennifer Johnson Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjcmo/ CrowdStrike Website: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/  More from The B2B CMO Project Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

    Pipeline Gives Permission to Invest Big on Brand with Jennifer Johnson
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Welcome to The B2B CMO Podcast, a show for marketing executives who are redefining what it means to be a strategic leader. Join Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan every week as they talk with the very best Chief Marketing Officers who are navigating the modern marketing playbook and positioning themselves as strategic leaders. Each episode, we unpack what it really takes to lead through complexity, earn trust at the strategy table, and shape the future of growth. We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth. For more marketing leadership resources, visit [b2bcmoproject.com](http://b2bcmoproject.com/).

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