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In a CMO Huddles Studio conversation, Kathie Johnson, Lorie Coulombe, and Allyson Havener explain how CMOs earn influence by leading as business executives first. Their advice: Own more than the marketing plan, build trust before hard conversations, translate marketing into business outcomes, and bring the customer’s voice into executive decisions.
The fastest way for a CMO to lose influence is to sound like a marketer in a room full of business leaders.
That may feel unfair. It is also, inconveniently, true.
In a CMO Huddles Studio conversation, Drew Neisser spoke with Kathie Johnson of Nintex, Lorie Coulombe of Equity Shift, and Allyson Havener, former CMO of TrustRadius, about what it takes for CMOs to lead as true peers inside the executive team.
Their collective message was clear: CMOs earn influence when they stop defending marketing as a function and start helping the business make better decisions.
That means looking beyond campaigns, MQLs, and functional deliverables. It means understanding the growth model, surfacing cross-functional gaps, building trust with peers, and connecting marketing’s work to the outcomes the CEO, CFO, board, sales, product, and customer success teams already care about.
In other words: Put the “Chief” before the “Marketing.”
Kathie Johnson, Interim CMO of Nintex, started with a distinction every CMO should sit with: Strategic CMOs own more than the marketing plan.
They don’t walk into executive meetings only prepared to discuss campaigns, funnel stages, or what marketing shipped last week. They understand the business model. They know where the company wins. They can speak to growth, pipeline, velocity, deal size, retention, product gaps, and customer friction.
Kathie put the mandate plainly:
“We are a strategic member of the overall leadership team. Our lens is across the ship, not just across marketing. Know your business, talk your business, and share that.”
That’s the difference between reporting on marketing and leading as a business executive. The CMO’s job isn’t only to explain campaign performance. It’s to connect customer insight, revenue signals, market perception, sales friction, and product reality into a clearer view of what the company should do next.
She also shared a useful shorthand: “Ship, shipmate, self.” The phrase is memorable because it puts the company first. If a retention issue is hurting growth, that’s not only customer success’s problem. If sales is struggling to tell the story, that’s not only sales’s problem. If product-market fit is unclear, marketing can’t simply hide behind campaign performance.
The CMO’s job is to help surface the business issue without turning it into a blame game.
Kathie described the difference in practical terms. It’s not “your area is dropping the ball.” It’s closer to: With the ship in mind, we may have an issue. Is this important enough for the leadership team to elevate?
That posture is powerful. It says: I’m not here to point fingers. I’m here to help the company win.
Lorie Coulombe, SVP of Marketing at Equity Shift, brought the conversation from strategic scope to executive behavior.
Influence isn’t only about having the right insight. It’s about having enough trust in the room for that insight to be heard.
Lorie’s point was that CMOs need to understand the people around the executive table: What motivates them, what triggers them, how they make decisions, and when a hard conversation belongs in the group meeting versus a smaller one-on-one.
She put it this way:
“Flex your EQ along with your IQ, be prepared, and understand your peers on the leadership team. You’re not meant to be a silent participant on the executive team, you’re meant to work with your peers to commit to the company being successful.”
That is the executive influence equation in one sentence: EQ plus IQ, preparation plus participation.
Many CMOs accidentally train the executive team to see marketing as a service function. They stay in their lane. They wait to be asked. They present updates instead of perspective. Over time, they become the person called after the decision is made, not the person helping shape it.
Lorie’s guidance wasn’t to argue more. It was to build the relationship capital that makes productive disagreement possible.
Her operating principle, borrowed from a prior executive team, was “disagree, but commit.” That’s easy to say and hard to do. It requires judgment. Some issues deserve a full-throated push. Others can be handled in a smaller conversation. And some decisions, once made, need the whole executive team aligned behind them.
For CMOs, the lesson is practical: If you want the right to challenge strategy in the big room, do the relationship work before the big room.
Allyson Havener, former CMO of TrustRadius, pushed the idea even further. Her point wasn’t just that CMOs should collaborate with executive peers. It was that the executive team has to become the CMO’s first team.
“The executive team is your team. Secondarily, the marketing organization. That mentality really helps CMOs excel in the executive room with the board, because you’re truly coming as a business leader and laddering everything marketing is doing into the business.”
That’s a deceptively simple sentence, and probably the center of the whole conversation.
The marketing team still matters deeply. But if the CMO only leads from inside the marketing function, their influence has a ceiling. Executive credibility comes from translating marketing into business language: Growth, market share, customer understanding, retention, sales performance, pricing friction, and company strategy.
Allyson also warned against over-indexing on what she called “engine room metrics.”
Marketers may care deeply about conversion rates, campaign mechanics, attribution models, channel performance, and funnel definitions. That work matters. But executive peers usually care about what those signals mean for the business.
So the CMO has to connect the dots.
If marketing is targeting a new persona, what does that mean for the sales cycle? If objections are rising, what does that reveal about positioning or value selling? If retention is weak, what’s happening in the customer journey? If win rates are lagging, is the problem pipeline quality, pricing, product fit, sales execution, or market clarity?
Allyson’s advice was to start with the business problem, then show how marketing can help solve it.
That’s how CMOs move from “keeper of marketing metrics” to executive peer.
One of Allyson’s strongest points was about customer voice:
“I never walked into our executive offsites or the board meeting without customer voice, without customer data, without anecdotes from the customer.”
That matters because customer voice changes the altitude of the conversation.
A CMO who can say, “This is what we’re hearing from our top customers,” isn’t just reporting on marketing activity. They’re bringing the market into the room.
Data matters. Of course it does. But customer stories often make the data legible. They help executives understand why a message isn’t landing, why buyers are hesitating, why a product gap matters, why sales is struggling, or why the company’s positioning isn’t as clear as everyone inside the building thinks it is.
For CMOs trying to earn more influence, customer voice is not a soft input. It’s executive currency.
Kathie also gave one of the most practical examples in the conversation: Build credibility with the CFO by bringing business data, not vanity metrics.
She described walking into CFO conversations with ROI data, closed-won revenue, pipeline, stage velocity, average deal size, region, industry, and product-line analysis. The point wasn’t to overwhelm finance with a dashboard. It was to show that marketing understood how the business worked.
Kathie’s filter was simple: “I always look at closed-won revenue and pipeline — I never talk about anything before that with the CFO.”
That credibility compounds.
Kathie noted that after doing the analysis, other executives started quoting her data in board discussions. That’s a lovely little CMO victory: Your thinking has legs even when you’re not the one presenting it.
For CMOs: If you want finance to see marketing as an investment lever, don’t lead with activity. Lead with business outcomes.
The through-line across Kathie, Lorie, and Allyson is that executive influence is earned before the moment you need it.
Together, they point to a more mature version of the CMO role: Not campaign owner, not internal service provider, not metric narrator, but business leader with market expertise.
Allyson captured that bigger mandate well:
“A great marketer isn’t somebody that’s just generating demand… they’re really shaping how the market understands you and why you should win.”
That’s a high bar. It’s also the job.
A CMO earns influence by connecting marketing work to business outcomes, surfacing cross-functional issues constructively, bringing customer insight into decisions, and building trusted relationships with executive peers before high-stakes disagreements happen.
Putting “Chief” first means leading as a business executive, not only as the head of marketing. It requires understanding the company’s growth model, customer reality, financial priorities, and strategic tradeoffs.
CMOs should focus CFO conversations on closed-won revenue, pipeline quality, win rates, deal size, stage velocity, investment tradeoffs, and the business impact of marketing activity. Save the engine-room metrics for the marketing team.
Customer voice helps CMOs ground executive conversations in market reality. When paired with financial and operational data, customer insight can clarify positioning problems, sales friction, product gaps, retention risks, and growth opportunities.
CMOs can disagree productively by building trust before conflict, understanding what matters to each peer, separating strategic issues from minor preferences, using customer and business evidence, and committing once a decision is made.