The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan

Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan
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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/).

  1. 2d ago

    The Business Hat Every CMO Needs in the Boardroom with Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp

    Jessica Shapiro is the Chief Marketing Officer of LiveRamp, where she has led the company into the data collaboration category since joining in 2022. Before LiveRamp, she ran marketing at SAP Concur, held marketing leadership roles at Icertis, launched Starbucks VIA at Starbucks, and spent eight years at Microsoft. In this episode, Jessica joins Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller to share how she earned the right to reposition the LiveRamp brand by fixing the demand waterfall first and cutting cost per opportunity in half. She explains what it takes for a new category to stick, and why she sees governance and agent autonomy as additive instead of in conflict. Jessica also walks through the offsite where her whole team built their own AI agents, and how LiveRamp now brings one combined brand number to every board meeting. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Jessica’s path from pre-med to marketing (03:51) Curiosity and perseverance as marketing superpowers (05:36) Wearing the business hat as a strategic CMO (07:29) Why the CRO relationship comes first (09:11) Earning credibility before repositioning the brand (13:03) Building the data collaboration category at LiveRamp (16:56) Setting expectations for category creation with the board (19:20) Balancing data governance with agent autonomy (22:49) The ups and downs of LiveRamp’s AI transformation (27:05) Measuring brand with a composite score (29:15) What brand metrics to bring into the boardroom (30:23) Gratitude, mentors, and key takeaways Episode Takeaways Earn the brand conversation with pipeline first. When her CEO told her not to start with a repositioning, Jessica rebuilt the demand waterfall, put attribution on everything, and took cost per opportunity from $6,000 to $3,000. That credibility is what got her back to the brand.Build the category story from what customers actually say. Customer interviews showed people knew the LiveRamp name but each described the company differently, and that gap became the case for the data collaboration story.Tell one category story in different versions. Customers hear time savings and protection, and the board hears a bigger TAM. Every version has to ladder up to the same place.Treat governance as what lets agents move faster. Jessica sees autonomy and governance as additive. When the right data and governance are built in, agents have guardrails and can do their work with less friction.Give the board one brand number they can follow. LiveRamp blends share of voice, message pull-through, AI visibility, web traffic, and AEO/GEO into a single trend line, introduced as a spotlight topic and reported at every board meeting. Standout Quote “I feel like the CRO and CMO need to be locked at the hip. If we do not share the same goals and the same vision, everything falls apart.” — Jessica Shapiro Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicamshapiro/LiveRamp Website: https://liveramp.com/ Mentioned in this Episode RampUp by LiveRamp: https://www.rampedup.us/Play Bigger: https://www.playbigger.com/Icertis: https://www.icertis.com/SAP Concur: https://www.concur.com/Brady Brewer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brady-brewer-64a2034 Elena Donio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenadonio/ Scott Howe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schowe/  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

    The Business Hat Every CMO Needs in the Boardroom with Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp

  2. Oct 26

    Building a Movement Instead of Chasing Demand with Katrina Wong, CMO at New Relic

    Katrina Wong is the Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, where she has led brand, demand, and communications. Before taking on the CMO role, she started her career as a consultant at PwC. She later on became Divisional CMO and VP of Marketing at Twilio Segment and held marketing and go-to-market leadership roles at Hired, Zuora, Salesforce, and SAP.  In this episode, Katrina joins Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller to share how New Relic repositioned its category as intelligent observability and turned that into an AI story told chapter by chapter. She explains why she reports new business and post-sale pipeline separately in a consumption business, and why one marketing team owns both. Katrina also walks through how her marketing engineering and AI team rebuilt reporting on Gemini, the 85 agents running competitive intel every morning, and what happened when an agency sent her team 200 variations to review. Jump Into the Conversation(00:00) Katrina’s path from consulting to marketing (05:21) Being a strategic CMO and redefining observability for AI (09:13) Telling the AI story like chapters of a book (11:48) How marketing proved AI modernization to the board (14:18) Separating new business and post-sale pipeline (16:21) Customer hackathons and the link between engagement and revenue (18:01) Building a trusted BI layer with vibe coding (20:53) Humans in the loop and the problem of too much AI content (23:18) Gemini gems for sales and 85 daily competitive agents (25:12) The pillars of a superhuman marketing team (27:05) Gratitude, mentors, and key takeaways Episode Takeaways Take a bold stance on your category before someone else sets it for you. New Relic repositioned observability as intelligent observability, was first to claim it, and Gartner recognized the company for its AI vision the following year.Tell your AI story in chapters. Chapter one explained why AI matters in observability. Chapter two named the problem: code volume growing beyond human scale. That led to the brand campaign, Welcome to the Superhuman Era.Measure pipeline the way your business makes money. In a consumption business, new business pipeline is a leading indicator, but revenue comes from usage. New Relic tracks both, and one marketing team owns both.Keep humans in the loop, even when AI can produce more. When an agentic agency sent back 200 variations, Katrina's team realized more output wasn't the answer if no one could review it.Remove the bottlenecks between marketing and the field. Gemini gems for competitive and value selling replaced last-minute Slack asks, and 85 daily agents now draft most competitive updates before a human fact-checks them. Standout Quote "Sometimes the move to be strategic is to take a bold stance and see if it pays off." – Katrina Wong Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinawong11/ New Relic Website: https://newrelic.com/  Mentioned in this Episode Zuora: https://www.zuora.com/Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com/Tien Tzuo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tientzuo/ Sue Barsamian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suebarsamian/Carilu Dietrich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carilu/ Tom Hartman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hartman/Jennifer Covington: https://www.linkedin.com/in/covingtonjennifer/  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 a Movement Instead of Chasing Demand with Katrina Wong, CMO at New Relic

  3. Oct 19

    Snowflake’s CMO Reinvents Her Playbook Every Year. Here’s How.

    Denise Persson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company. With over 10 years in the role, one of the longest CMO tenures in enterprise tech, she has helped take Snowflake from roughly $1 million in revenue to more than $4 billion. She now leads a marketing team of about 700 people responsible for 40 to 50% of the company's growth, and this year marks her 30th in tech marketing. Denise shares why a new CMO's first team is the leadership team, not the marketing org, and why she throws out her own playbook every year. She also walks through how Snowflake's brand team became its most AI-forward function, how her morning brief replaced waiting on dashboards, why Snowflake moved its SDRs back into sales, and why her team is already working next quarter's pipeline two quarters out. Denise shares the one thing she says builds brand trust above all else: consistency. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Welcoming Denise Persson, CMO of Snowflake (01:56) From Commodore to 30 years in tech marketing (05:52) Why the CMO's first team is the leadership team (10:47) Throwing out the playbook every year (14:49) Moving marketing from AI fluency to agentic workflows (19:22) Growing 40 to 50% without adding headcount (21:35) Replacing dashboards with a daily AI brief (24:25) Why Snowflake moved SDRs back into sales (25:59) Fixing a soft quarter two quarters out (29:53) How AI adoption differs across regions (32:02) Why consistency builds brand trust (36:03) Closing gratitude and the leaders who see potential first Episode Takeaways Treat the leadership team as your first team. Denise says the day you become CMO, you are a business leader. That means understanding finance, having empathy for the sales craft, partnering with product, and bringing data and customer proof, not opinion, when you push a point of view.Rebuild your playbook every year and hire for your gaps. Over 10 years at Snowflake, Denise has thrown out her playbook annually. Her survival tactic is self-awareness: know your strengths, then hire people with the superpowers you don't have.Move AI from individual experiments to your top three workflows. Snowflake's top marketing AI user sits on the brand team, which is now building an agentic workflow so regional marketers can self-serve campaign assets instead of waiting 5-10 days.Work pipeline two quarters out. There is no magic campaign that fixes a soft quarter in a long sales cycle. Denise's team uses signals to see a weak quarter six months early, then drills down to territories as small as eight reps to find what's in the red.Build brand trust through consistency. Denise points to McDonald's and Coke as proof that trust comes from never delivering surprises. Her challenge now: keeping the brand consistent when anyone in the company can generate their own branded content. Standout Quote "When you get that CMO role, you need to understand that that’s the day you are a business leader." — Denise Persson Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisepersson/ Snowflake Website: https://www.snowflake.com/  Mentioned in this Episode The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.tablegroup.com/topics-and-resources/teamwork-5-dysfunctions/ Frank Slootman: linkedin.com/in/frankslootman Maria Pergolino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariapergolino/ Latané Conant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/latane-conant/ Demandbase: https://www.demandbase.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

    Snowflake’s CMO Reinvents Her Playbook Every Year. Here’s How.

  4. Oct 12

    Leading the Market Through AI Disruption with Demandbase CMO Rachel Truair

    Rachel Truair is the Chief Marketing Officer of Demandbase, the pipeline engine for AI go-to-market trusted by some of the world's leading B2B enterprise brands. Rachel joined Demandbase in January 2026 after more than two decades in B2B marketing leadership, including CMO roles at Simpro Group and Cart.com and senior roles at Adobe, Confluent, Oracle, and 3M. In this episode, Rachel chats with Sydney Sloan to look at AI disruption from the customer's side of the table. She shares what Labs by Demandbase is seeing in ChatGPT-referred traffic to B2B websites, why the real opportunity sits with the 95% of buyers who aren't in market yet, and why she may be the first Demandbase CMO to actually run her team on Demandbase. Rachel also makes the case that software should prove its own ROI, and explains how thinking like an investor helps CMOs split their AI bets into separate efficiency and growth stories for the board. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and Demandbase, the pipeline engine for AI go-to-market.  Episode Takeaways Assume your buyers are researching somewhere you can't see. Labs by Demandbase found a roughly 300% increase in ChatGPT-referred traffic to B2B websites over the last year, which means a big share of discovery now happens before a prospect ever lands on your owned properties.Get the data foundation right before you scale anything with AI. Rachel's version: you avoid running off a cliff by standing on a flat surface. If your data isn't unified and you don't know which signals actually matter, AI just helps you scale the wrong things faster.Market to the 95%, not just the 5%. When everyone has access to the same in-market data, the advantage goes to the teams that use signals, buying groups, and context to reach buyers before they start an evaluation.Point AI at the spreadsheets, not the storytelling. Rachel saw AI-generated creative fall flat, and believes the better use is taking reporting, attribution debates, and campaign friction off marketing's plate so teams have more time for creative work.Bring AI to the board as an investor would. Rachel splits her AI initiatives into an efficiency story (time savings, headcount savings, program spend) and a growth story (pipeline and revenue), measures each on its own terms, and reinvests savings from one into the other. Standout Quote "The work that marketing does that's really valuable is the creative, it is the content, it is the storytelling. It's the reason we all got into this to begin with." — Rachel Truair Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/racheltruair/ Demandbase Website: https://www.demandbase.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Mojo by Demandbase: https://trymojo.ai Labs by Demandbase: https://www.demandbase.com/resources/labs/ The Prompt, Rachel Truair's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prompt/id1372690438 Kelvin Gee, Forrester: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelvingee Forrester: https://www.forrester.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

    Leading the Market Through AI Disruption with Demandbase CMO Rachel Truair

  5. Oct 5

    Turning Customer Pain Into Strategic Marketing with Cindy Zhou, CMO at Imprivata

    Cindy Zhou is the Chief Marketing Officer of Imprivata, the simple and secure access management platform used by roughly 90% of U.S. hospitals. Before Imprivata, Cindy built her CMO track record at KnowBe4, LogRhythm, and in senior marketing roles at IBM and Verizon, making this her fourth cybersecurity company as a marketing leader. Cindy chats with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan about her new role to unpack how she built her 30-60-100-day plan, why she believes CMOs need to operate as business executives first, and why she has already told her team to stop talking about MQLs. Cindy also walks through how she prioritizes with her CEO and CRO, why she is tying her customer marketing team's KPIs to retention and churn instead of lead volume, and how KnowBe4's InfoSec team tried to break her first AI SDR before she would let it near a real customer. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Welcoming Cindy Zhou, CMO of Imprivata (02:31) How Cindy went from product management to marketing (07:49) What it means to be a strategic CMO (10:05) What she brought from past roles into Imprivata's C-suite (11:36) Seeing the market beyond industry silos (14:17) How to earn the strategic CMO seat (19:51) Moving beyond MQLs and tying priorities to strategic metrics (22:12) Investing in retention and customer marketing (27:41) How to build brand in an AI-disintermediated world (29:48) AI SDRs and AI teammates, governance, and human-in-the-loop (32:01) Closing gratitude, mentors and board members who shaped her career Episode Takeaways Treat marketing as a business-executive function, not a departmental one. When Cindy evaluates a new opportunity, she starts with market dynamics and the financials (NRR, GRR, growth rate) before she gets to a marketing plan, because 'chief market officer' only works as a title if you actually understand the market.Look past the vertical to find the universal pain underneath it. Imprivata's brand is deeply rooted in healthcare, but Cindy makes the case for expanding into manufacturing and public safety by pointing to a pain point every industry shares: nobody wants to deal with passwords. She backs this up with real customer stories, like a casino cage worker locked out of a login for 45 minutes, to show how the same root problem shows up everywhere, just wearing a different industry's clothes.Use your CEO's and CRO's own words to build your first 90 days. Cindy's tip for new CMOs: go back and listen to the sales kickoff keynote, then build your plan around the problems leadership already said out loud they want solved. Parroting it back makes the plan easier to align on.Replace MQLs with metrics tied to retention and growth. Cindy has moved her customer marketing team's KPIs away from lead volume and toward NRR, GRR, and churn signals, arguing that in a private-equity-backed business, those numbers matter more to the board than marketing-sourced pipeline.Stress-test AI SDRs before they ever talk to a real customer. At KnowBe4, Cindy had her InfoSec team try to break the AI SDR with off-topic and legal questions before launch, and the program is still built to route uncertain questions to a live human rather than risk a wrong answer. Standout Quote "We’re business executives first, that’s the way to really think about it. We just happen to have responsibility over marketing.” — Cindy Zhou Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyzhou/Imprivata Website: https://www.imprivata.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Mark Logan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-logan-894977/Betsy Atkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsy-atkins-a36b114/Shanti Atkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanti-atkins-602b493/Brian Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/privacy-policy/Penn Entertainment: https://www.pennentertainment.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

    Turning Customer Pain Into Strategic Marketing with Cindy Zhou, CMO at Imprivata

  6. Sep 25

    Why Your Marketing Org Chart Is Already Obsolete with Dom Colasante, Founder of 2X

    Most CMOs are trying to solve an operating model problem with a job posting. Dom Colasante is the founder of 2X, and he has spent the better part of a decade helping B2B companies run marketing, sales, and customer success as one system. Following 2X's acquisition of KnownWell, he is betting the company on what he calls the human agentic go-to-market model. This model involves expert teams and AI agents fused so tightly you cannot tell which is which. In this rapid-fire conversation, Dom joins Sydney Sloan to explain why asking the same people to own both strategy and execution suboptimizes both, how to sort every piece of go-to-market work into three buckets, and why the single most common mistake he sees right now is a CMO hoping one expensive hire will rewire the whole function. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and 2X.  Jump Into the Conversation: (00:00) Why 2X is betting on human agentic go-to-market (01:57) Why the go-to-market org chart is finally breaking down (02:36) What happens when one team owns both strategy and execution (05:46) Inside the human agentic operating model and the KnownWell acquisition (07:52) Why every workflow should have both human and AI in it (09:22) Door one versus door two and why growth beats efficiency (12:13) The three buckets of go-to-market work (15:14) Where to start and the honest talent conversation (17:46) The mistake CMOs are making with the single go-to-market engineer Key Takeaways One team owning both strategy and execution suboptimizes both. Strategy shrinks to what that team can personally execute, and execution never gets the full best practice treatment because the same people are busy thinking. Dom's fix is specialization of labor, with the two groups still on one team and the integration point on collaboration rather than day-to-day work.Once you split them, the marketing, sales, and CS silos stop mattering as much. Execution across all three is largely the same motion, and so is strategy across all three. Find a buyer, activate a buyer, or get a buyer to love the product more. That is what makes the converged org chart workable.Deconstruct the work into three buckets before you touch the org chart. To succeed, you need to divide your work into three different categories: what you must be the best in the world at, what you delegate to a partner to execute using best practices, and what you automate through systems. The work you personally own should account for only 10% to 20% of your total workload, and mastering that critical slice is what creates leverage and drives the success of everything else.The efficiency framing is the wrong ask. Given a choice between halving cost for the same output and holding cost while doubling output, Dom's read is that nearly every CEO takes the second door. Pitch the human agentic model as a growth argument, not a cost argument.An agentic operating model is a discipline, not a person. Hiring one go-to-market engineer runs a six-month search, produces someone who needs a team around them, and often ends in turnover a year later with the goal unmet. The same $250K buys tech, partners, expertise, and projects together. Standout Quote "When the same group of people, the same individuals, the same department is doing both strategy and execution at the same time, it sub-optimizes both." - Dom Colasante  Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domeniccolasante/2X website: https://2x.com/ Mentioned in This Episode KnownWell (acquired by 2X): https://knownwell.com/Lisa Cole: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacole01/ 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

    Why Your Marketing Org Chart Is Already Obsolete with Dom Colasante, Founder of 2X

  7. Sep 23

    Rebuilding Marketing Automation for the AI Era with Jon Miller, Founder of Marketo and Phave

    Jon Miller is the co-founder of Marketo, where he helped invent the marketing automation category and take the company public. He later co-founded Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase, where he served as CMO. He's now the founder and CEO of Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform built to replace the very category he created. In this partner episode, Sydney talks to Jon about what's actually broken in the marketing automation playbook he wrote fifteen years ago. They look at why B2B buying committees now make most of their decision before a seller ever gets involved, what real personalization looks like when it's built on AI context instead of more content, and how his customers are migrating off legacy platforms like Marketo without flipping a switch overnight. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Why the marketing automation playbook Jon built doesn't work anymore (02:08) The blind spots baked into legacy marketing automation systems (04:10) The assumption in "marketing automation" that has to go (05:04) Real personalization starts with context, not more content (07:47) Moving from industry-level segmentation to person-level context (09:05) Why speed became marketing's biggest constraint (10:18) Replacing the Marketo "high priest" with a CMO who can build campaigns directly (12:19) How Phave customers migrate off Marketo without flipping a switch overnight (14:07) Using AI agents to make platform migration painless Episode Takeaways Retire the marketing automation model built for a linear funnel. Jon argues the core assumption baked into platforms like Marketo (capture the lead, score it, nurture it, hand it to sales) breaks down against buying committees of 6 to 16 people who've made most of their decision before anyone raises a hand.Real personalization is about timing and offer, not content polish. Getting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time is roughly 80% of the job. Personalizing the actual content is the last 20%, and AI should be used to reason the first, not just generate more of the second.Treat platform migration as a trust dial rather than a cliff-edge switch. Jon's team avoids forcing an all-or-nothing cutover by letting customers transition at their own pace. Moving off Marketo, users can continue running campaigns the traditional way, go fully autonomous, or land anywhere in between based on their comfort level.AI should remove operational bottlenecks, not replace marketing judgment. Freeing CMOs from needing a dedicated platform specialist to translate every campaign idea gives marketers back the time for the creative, human work AI still can't do. Standout Quote "It's ironic, almost, that AI is actually going to make our marketing more human, not less." — Jon Miller Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ 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

    Rebuilding Marketing Automation for the AI Era with Jon Miller, Founder of Marketo and Phave

  8. Sep 17

    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
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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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