Huddlers in the News

“The pressure to do more with less is not new. It is the expectation that AI can 10x productivity that is killing me,” lamented a CMO from a PE-backed SaaS company. Yikes.

10x Pressure Is The New Problem

The mandate to do more with less has been around forever. What feels different now is the assumption that AI makes 10x productivity not just possible, but mandatory. That is a heavy lift.

Before AI, I would have said a leader has three fundamental jobs:

1. Set the vision
2. Build the team
3. Allocate resources

Those jobs have not changed. But the speed and scale at which decisions compound absolutely have. AI enables teams to produce, analyze, and experiment faster. It reduces friction in starting projects and lowers the cost of iteration. That sounds like pure upside.

Until the time saved simply gets filled with more work.

Geoff Woods, in his book The AI-Driven Leader, makes a bold claim in Chapter 12 that leaders can indeed 10x the impact of every employee. I (hesitantly) agree with the spirit of it. Leaders should absolutely understand these tools well enough to unlock step function gains.

10x Impact Is Not 10x Output

If every marketer produces 10x more content, does the brand get 10x stronger? If every team runs 10x more campaigns, does revenue grow 10x faster? Or do we just create 10x more slop?

This is where leadership gets real.

When AI creates capacity, leaders make a choice. Do we increase volume, increase quality, increase experimentation, increase learning, cut staff, or as unlikely as it sounds, just create breathing room? Many organizations default to volume.

That is how AI leverage quietly turns into AI exhaustion.

The goal should not be 10x labor. It should be 10x leverage. Faster insight to decision. Sharper positioning. More strategic focus. Better judgment applied to the right problems. That requires restraint.

The Leadership Challenge Now

For CMOs, especially, AI makes it easier to push stuff into the market. More content. More touchpoints. More “activity.” Maybe even more products. The danger is not doing too little. It is flooding the market and your team with too much. When everything accelerates, clarity erodes.

Acceleration without clarity is a recipe for burnout.

Leadership has not fundamentally changed. But leaders now have to design how humans and machines work together. They have to decide what stops, not just what starts.

That is the uncomfortable part.

I will be digging into this with Geoff Woods on Friday, February 27 at 1 pm ET. We will explore what 10x impact really means, what it does not mean, and how leaders can unlock AI without crushing their teams.

If you would like an invite, send an email to SUPPORT AT CMOHUDDLES dotcom with the subject line: AI-Driven Leader.

This conversation is not theoretical anymore.

Are you seeing AI create leverage in your organization, or just more work?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 506: Positioning as a Growth Lever

Feature-and-function decks aren’t winning anymore.

In this episode of Renegade Marketers Unite, Drew sits down with Bob Wright (Firebrick) to break down how B2B CMOs can use positioning to drive growth, shorten sales cycles, and stand out in crowded markets.

They unpack why product-first stories fail, how to get to “one voice” across the company, and what it really means to own a key business problem that buyers care about.

In this episode:

• The three biggest positioning mistakes: product-first thinking, misalignment, and no owned problem
• Creating urgency when “do nothing” is the real competitor
• Why “why you, why now” matters more than “how it works”
• When and how to rethink positioning after PLG, acquisitions, or expansion
• How to stand out in a world of AI sameness
• Building positions that sales actually uses

If your messaging is drifting into “blah blah blah” territory, this episode will help you reset around problems, not products.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“Help, the blame game with Sales is starting, and my job is on the line,” shared a rattled CMO at a $100M martech company. Nothing says Valentine’s Day like unrequited love.

Instead of sending flowers, I ruminated. Yeah, I did. After all, this CMO had done a lot right. They sharpened the strategy and ICP, rebuilt the demand-gen team at light speed, and filled the pipeline with more high-quality leads than the company had ever seen.

And yet… revenue wasn’t following.

Follow-up was inconsistent. CRM data was muddy. Rejection reasons were vague. Sales was under pressure. Marketing had the metrics. The tension was rising.

If you’ve been a CMO for more than a minute, you know this story.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: there is no such thing as a successful CMO who “just fills the pipeline.” If Sales doesn’t close, everyone loses. Including you.

Even when it’s not your fault, it’s still your relationship to fix.

So what can you do before this turns into a messy breakup?

Stop Defending Leads. Start Diagnosing Conversion.

Winning the metrics argument only widens the divide. Sit down with Sales and look at stage-by-stage conversion. Where are deals stalling? What objections repeat? Shift from “Why aren’t you following up?” to “How do we win more together?”

Get Closer to the Front Lines

Listen to sales calls. Read rejection notes. Sit in pipeline reviews. Often, the issue isn’t lead quality. It’s messaging gaps, unclear positioning, slow response times, or reps chasing the wrong deals. Fix the system jointly.

Co-Own the Close

Marketing can’t stop at demand gen. Use AI to analyze call transcripts for objection patterns. Build dynamic AI-compiled battle cards. Arm reps with persona-specific first-call narratives and proof points. Make it easier to act than to ignore.

Align on One Scoreboard: Revenue

MQL is a marketing word. Revenue is a company word. Build a shared revenue model with Sales leadership. Agree on what “qualified” really means and what conversion rates are required to hit your plan.

Create a Joint Win Before the Breakup

Pick one ICP, one segment, or one campaign. Launch a 60-day “Revenue Reset” sprint with Sales leadership. Meet weekly. Adjust messaging. Tighten targeting. Improve follow-up discipline. Track pipeline progression, not just lead volume.

Because at $100 million, you’re much more than a lead engine. You’re a revenue architect.

On Valentine’s Day or any other day, the CMO who survives isn’t the one who proves Sales wrong. It’s the one who helps Sales win.

Questions For CMOs

Have you ever inherited a full pipeline and a broken close rate? What did you change first?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 505: Making Reputation Measurable (and Defensible)

Many CMOs face the same dilemma: You’re asked to prove “brand,” then told brand tracking is too expensive. So you invest in analyst relations, adjust PR, navigate layoffs, or shift strategy without a reliable way to show how those moves affect market perception. 

RepuTracker was built to solve that problem.

Developed for members of the CMO Huddles Leader program, RepuTracker provides a monthly, evidence-based view of your company’s reputation so you can see whether it’s rising, slipping, or holding steady, and why.

In this episode, Drew is joined by Taran Nandha (Growth Natives) to demo the RepuTracker beta. They show how the tool tracks reputation month to month across multiple signals, then get practical about how to read the output, explain it to leadership, and see whether your moves are showing up in the market.

In this episode:

• How RepuTracker turns scattered public signals into a monthly reputation score with trends and competitor benchmarks.
• What it measures across key dimensions: Power of voice, awareness, engagement, perception, and employee sentiment.
• How sources and weighting work behind the scenes across dozens of platforms.
• How to use trendlines and recommendations to move from “we dipped” to a clear next step.

Plus:

• Why direction over time matters more than one noisy review or spike.
• How to sanity-check dips using internal context and profile audits.
• What could come next, from deeper source auditing to tracking visibility in AI search and LLM references.

If you’re curious how RepuTracker works, what signals it pulls from, and how to interpret the output month to month, this episode is the walkthrough.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“We’re founder-led, and all the execs are still players, not coaches,” shared the new CMO at a $75M services company, “Oh, and they’ve never had a marketing leader.” Sound familiar?

Fortunately, this CMO knew all of this going in and was prepared for the challenge. Many are not. And when they’re not, the results are not pretty.

I’ve heard versions of this story too many times. The role looks exciting. The growth curve looks promising. The CEO seems open. Then, two weeks in, you realize the executive team is full of brilliant doers who have never been asked, or forced, to lead at altitude.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can’t be a successful CMO in a company where leadership is optional.

Step 1: Vet The Executive Team

CMOs are great at diligence on the market, the product, and the pipeline. Some are less rigorous about vetting the people they’ll be leading alongside. Before you say yes, ask how decisions are made, what actually gets delegated, and when the exec team last invested in its own development.

If everyone is still playing their old functional position, the CMO role quietly becomes fixer-in-chief. That’s not leadership. That’s burnout with a title.

Step 2: Move From Players To Coaches

This is delicate terrain. Telling a founder or CRO they need to “level up” is a great way to shorten your tenure. Instead, frame the shift as a company growth issue, not a personal failing.

One practical move is to adopt a shared operating system, such as OKRs or EOS. Systems depersonalize the change. Suddenly, it’s not your opinion. It’s how scaling companies operate.

Step 3: Normalize Leadership Coaching

Elite performers have coaches. Executives should too. Bringing in a leadership coach isn’t therapy. It’s leverage. As a CMO, you don’t have to champion this alone, but you can help the CEO see it as an investment in scale.

Step 4: Be An Impact Player

In my conversation with leadership advisor Liz Wiseman at our 2024 Super Huddle, she talked about the difference between multipliers and diminishers. Multipliers make others smarter and more capable. Diminishers, often unintentionally, create dependency by rescuing instead of enabling. [By the way, I highly recommend that every CMO or want to be CMO read both of Liz’s books, “Multipliers” and “Impact Players.”]

At the risk of redundancy, a CMO can only succeed as a leader if the other execs lead as well. If you’re the only one coaching while everyone else is still playing, you’ll be a cultural aberration and end up as the proverbial rejected organ.

And that’s an icky place to be.

Questions For CMOs

So I’m curious:

• When you’ve taken on a CMO role, how much did you vet the exec team, not just the mandate?
• And if you’ve been in a founder-led organization, what actually helped leaders make the shift from players to coaches?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 504: Intentional AI Adoption

AI is now a standing agenda item. It shows up in QBRs, board packets, and 2026 budget plans with a big expectation stamp on it. CMOs are being asked to operationalize it fast, prove value in workflows, and keep risk, governance, and tool sprawl under control.

To get specific about what to prioritize next, Drew brings together Guy Yalif (Webflow), Andy Dé (Lightbeam Health Solutions), and Kevin Briody (DisruptedCMO). Together, they focus on how CMOs can move from scattered experiments to intentional AI adoption across people, process, and technology, and what it takes to make AI a trusted part of how marketing runs.

In this episode:

• Guy shares an AI fluency maturity model and explains why the shift to operational excellence is a change management challenge.
• Andy breaks down agentic AI and workflow automation with examples from CI, outbound, RFPs, content, and AEO, using “why, what, how, so what.”
• Kevin focuses on the people and platform side, from job anxiety and culture to vendor shakeouts and MarTech-level discipline.

Plus:

• Centering AI plans on people and fluency so it feels additive, not threatening.
• Using councils, fast-track approvals, and guardrails to scale safely.
• Balancing efficiency with human experience and customer acceptance.
• Treating AI tools like core MarTech, with scrutiny around contracts, integrations, and vendor longevity.

If you want your 2026 AI plan to feel like a strategic advantage instead of a collection of pilots, this conversation will help you decide what to run, what to scale, and what to skip.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 503: The Framemaking Sale: Building Buyer Decision Confidence

Most marketers worry about whether buyers trust their brand. Brent Adamson, author of The Framemaking Sale, argues that the actual issue sits somewhere else: Buyers do not trust themselves.

In this episode, Drew sits down with Brent to challenge three big assumptions: That more supplier trust is the answer, that buyers have a neat journey to map, and that customer centricity is always the right north star.

In this episode:

• Why decision confidence matters more than supplier trust
• How shifting from “trust us” to “trust yourselves” reshapes GTM
• How to rethink buyer journeys through the “never again” and spaghetti-bowl lens.
• Framemaking in practice, from nudges and checklists to maturity models.
• The three Es, Establish, Engage, Execute, as a shared marketing and sales playbook.

Plus:

• Escaping the smartness arms race by editing content to reduce anxiety and build buyer self-confidence.
• Turning social proof into a confidence engine, using “other customers like you…” stories.
• Making content supplier-agnostic, helping buyers ask better questions and weigh tradeoffs.

If you want your buyers to trust themselves enough to decide, start here.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

Now that’s a big huddle.

Last Friday night, my wife and I were with my son and his girlfriend in Brooklyn at a way too cool-for-us boomers' Lebanese restaurant. As the mezzes pounced on our table, a text from a colleague called my attention to a mildly absurd milestone:

25,000 followers on LinkedIn.

For context, the largest documented huddle of emperor penguins is around 4,000. So either I’ve assembled six Antarctic mega-colonies… or I’ve spent far too many Saturdays typing into the LinkedIn void about B2B marketing.

Probably the latter.

On one hand, this is a big so what. Followers don’t fix messy org charts. They don’t clean up pipeline math. And they definitely don’t stop CMOs from getting blamed for things they don’t control.

If they did, we’d all be out of jobs.

On the other hand, it’s kind of cool.

Because I know who many of you are.

You’re the CMOs and marketing leaders who actually enjoy debating positioning.

• Who appreciates the distinction and oh so powerful coupling of brand and demand.
• Who recognizes that not everything you can measure matters.
• Who reads a post about frustrations with PE firms and thinks, “Finally, someone said it.”
• Who geek out on B2B marketing not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s hard.

This “huddle” didn’t form because of hot takes or growth hacks. It formed because a lot of us are trying to do serious work in increasingly noisy conditions. We’re comparing notes. Sharing scars. Calling out nonsense. And occasionally laughing at ourselves when things don’t go as planned.

Which, let’s be honest, is often.

So thank you.

+ For reading.

+ For sharing.

+ For commenting.

+ For disagreeing thoughtfully.

+ For sending DMs that start with, “I thought I was the only one.”

I’ll keep showing up (almost) every week with a rant, a story from the huddle, and the occasional penguin metaphor because, yeah, it’s on brand.

After all, 25,000 is a big number. But it’s still just a huddle.

And huddles work best when everyone leans in.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 502: Unlocking B2B Intelligence with AI Workflows

If AI is only helping you write copy, you are leaving real leverage on the table. 

Every marketing team is buried in invisible busywork; a trail of repetitive, manual steps hiding inside every task. So what happens when you take one of those messy workflows, map every step, and rebuild it?

In this episode, Drew talks with Dave Brong (Level Agency) about how CMO Huddles transformed a messy, 10-step post-meeting grind into an automated system that transforms hundreds of conversations into structured insight, searchable intelligence, and real business value.

In this episode:

• How a manual, repetitive workflow became an automated intelligence engine
• How transcripts, metadata, and semantic search unlock institutional knowledge
• The reality: Only ±10% of the system relies on AI (code does the heavy lifting)
• When to use low-code tools vs. engineers for reliability, privacy, and scale

Plus:

• A simple method to audit workflows and spot automation opportunities
• How to balance build vs. buy for AI workflows
• How to amplify human judgment instead of replacing it

If you are tired of manual follow-up, underused data, and AI hype without impact, this conversation is for you. 

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“The big problem was our SDR-generated pipeline collapsed,” admitted a CMO from a $75M SaaS company. “All the other sources of pipeline, including marketing and partners, were on track.” The 14 other CMOs in the huddle leaned forward, appreciating the honesty while squirming, knowing full well this could happen to them.

This is the moment every CMO dreads.

Not because something broke. Things always break.

But because the data finally told the truth.

When The Numbers Get Clear

Here’s what struck me. This CMO didn’t hide behind blended pipeline numbers or wave vaguely at “market conditions.” He had clean, precise source data, which allowed him to see something uncomfortable. The failure was inside his own house.

And he said it out loud.

That’s leadership.

Precision Beats Blended Pipeline

Too many organizations still treat pipeline like a stew. Everything goes in, it tastes fine, and no one asks which ingredient spoiled the batch. But when SDRs are lumped into “sales-sourced,” partners get blended into “field,” and marketing is measured only by volume, you don’t get insight. You get mush.

Precision matters because you can’t fix what you can’t isolate. In this case, isolating the problem led to a much harder, but much more productive, conversation. “The SDRs didn’t make it to booking,” the CMO continued. “So that opened a whole other conversation. And since I run sales development as well as marketing, that was on my plate to resolve.”

That sentence should be taught in CMO school.

First, the diagnosis didn’t stop at pipeline creation. The real failure wasn’t leads. It wasn’t meetings. It was conversion to bookings. That distinction only shows up when you’re tracking the full arc, not just celebrating top-of-funnel motion.

Second, there was no finger-pointing. No “sales problem.” No “handoff issue.” Ownership stayed put.

But here’s the kicker. This insight came too late in the process.

If SDR-sourced pipeline had been tracked weekly with the same rigor as marketing programs or partner deals, the warning signs would have appeared earlier. Conversion rates slipping. Deal velocity slowing. Stages stalling. The collapse didn’t happen overnight. It just wasn’t noticed until the numbers forced the conversation.

Four Moves To Prevent The Next Surprise

• Get ruthless about pipeline source definitions. If you can’t clearly separate SDR, marketing, partner, and field contributions, you’re flying blind.
• Follow pipeline all the way to bookings. Activity metrics are noise. Revenue outcomes are signal.
• Inspect earlier, not louder. Dashboards don’t prevent failure. Attention does.
• Model ownership. When the problem lives in your org, say so. Your credibility compounds fast when you do.

The irony is that this CMO didn’t share a success story. He shared a miss. And every CMO in the room trusted him more because of it.

Sometimes the most valuable data point isn’t growth.

It’s the moment the numbers force you to lean forward and deal with reality.

Written by Drew Neisser