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. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. Jul 23

    “Write for Humans, Optimize for Agents” with Chris Koehler

    Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer of Twilio, the platform for conversations in the AI era. Chris has over 25 years of experience in leading marketing, sales, and product teams across companies like Adobe, Box, and E-Trade. Lately, he's been chasing a question Jon Miller happens to care a lot about: what happens to discovery, to personalization, and to the CMO's mandate itself in the age of AI.  Chris joins Jon to discuss his four-pillar framework for strategic marketing, how his marketing team is approaching the seismic shift from SEO to AEO, and why the future of GTM belongs to teams bold enough to reimagine their workflows entirely, not just optimize them. Episode Takeaways Eliminate marketing jargon such as MQLs, SQLs, or marketing-qualified pipeline from executive and board communications. Focus on speaking in terms of revenue, profitability, and growth coverage. CMOs should translate all reporting to C-suite language and save marketing metrics for internal scorecards, where they belong.CMOs need to own the revenue number alongside the CRO. If sales misses the revenue target, that's marketing’s fault too. Marketing teams shouldn’t blame sales or product; instead, frame marketing as a co-owner of pipeline and revenue. GTM leaders should build formal shared accountability structures with their CRO rather than treating revenue as someone else's problem.Treat AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as a company-wide imperative, not solely a content team task. AEO isn't just an extension of SEO, it requires every team to rethink how content is structured, formatted, and prioritized for both human readers and AI agents. GTM leaders should run a company-wide AEO education session to get ahead of executives sending panicked "we're not showing up in ChatGPT" messages.Pipeline is the path, not the destination; so stop celebrating it as a win. Delineate clearly between pipeline (a means) and revenue (the goal), and frame everything through the lens of revenue outcomes. Write for humans and optimize for agents. AI agents are not a new persona, they act on behalf of humans, so the content you create still needs to serve human intent, just formatted and structured for how AI models surface and cite information.  Standout Quote “ At the end of the day, we're selling to humans, and it's relationships and building trust. So let's have some fun with that.” - Chris Koehler Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckoehler/ Twilio Website: https://www.twilio.com/en-us  Mentioned in this Episode Stephanie Carullo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniecarullo/  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

    “Write for Humans, Optimize for Agents” with Chris Koehler

  8. Jul 8

    Leading Marketing Change at a 140-Year-Old Enterprise with Chris Bontempo

    Chris Bontempo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Johnson Controls, a global leader in thermal management, mission-critical building systems, energy efficiency, and decarbonization. Prior to joining Johnson Controls, Chris worked his way up at IBM from an Analyst to become the Chief Marketing Officer, IBM Americas. He’s especially passionate about how AI changes the marketing operating model and how marketing can own market intelligence to shape strategy. Chris joins Jon Miller to discuss the exact frameworks he uses to win C-suite trust, defend the marketing budget with the CFO, and turn agentic AI into a genuine competitive advantage. Episode Takeaways Marketing must own the "voice of the customer" function, not just demand gen. back into the company, and being an energy supplier to the ecosystem. Representing the voice of the customer back into the business is what earns marketing a seat at the strategic C-suite table.CMOs should focus on the real business conversations, it's whether marketing, sales, product, and services collectively drove a revenue outcome. CMOs need enough financial acumen to defend budget in "secured revenue" terms with the CFO, not lead-volume terms.Accept a certain amount of chaos as the price of AI experimentation. 100% success means you aren't taking enough risks. If every AI pilot succeeds, they aren't pushing hard enough. Leaders should explicitly normalize this with their teams so people aren't punished or discouraged when early AI pilots fail.Shift the unit of work from "the tool" to "the workflow," using agentic frameworks to orchestrate multiple tools. Move away from evaluating individual platforms and instead map full processes and let agents determine which tools to invoke. Pair marketing AI engineering talent directly with field marketers, sellers, and service teams to rapidly prototype these workflows together. Standout Quote “ You have to be able to hang with your CFO in the conversation around secured revenue.” - Chris Bontempo Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-bontempo/ Johnson Controls Website: https://www.johnsoncontrols.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 Marketing Change at a 140-Year-Old Enterprise with Chris Bontempo
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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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