Huddlers in the News

“Retention is everyone’s job,” declared a (now former) CEO from a $150mm SaaS brand when the CMO made a play to “own” customer marketing. This story doesn’t end well. Churn rates rose. Revenue per customer stayed flat. Even net new sales faltered. Mild rant to follow.

If Everyone Owns the Customer, Does Anyone Really Own It?

The spirit of this idea is wonderful. Organizations that focus on their customers, that constantly address their pain points, that remove friction from the buying process and the ongoing relationship outperform those that don’t. Customer-centricity is a beautiful thing. That’s not the problem. The problem is structural.

Who Should “Own” Retention?

Someone in the c-suite. Someone with a budget and a mandate to stay close to the customer. Someone whose bonus depends (at least partially) on decreasing churn rates, increasing revenue per customer, and increasing advocacy. Someone with great listening skills and communication skills. Someone whose neck can be metaphorically choked by the CEO if things go poorly. If it’s a multi-billion dollar company, then a Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer role probably makes sense.

What If the Company Is Under a Billion?

With undeniable bias, I nominate the CMO. They are the best equipped and have the most to gain (or lose) by “owning” (or not owning) retention. The closer CMOs are to customers, the better the marketing output. The better the marketing, the more likely it will attract and retain customers and flywheel-driving advocates. It’s a virtuous circle. And most CMOs have the leadership and communication skills to do the job.

Why Is This So Complicated?

Currently, most B2B companies split customer engagement into multiple departments or at least functional areas. These include onboarding, training (if needed), technical support, customer success (typically a quota-carrying sales role to get the customer to renew and buy more), customer comms, communities, recognition programs, and customer advisory boards. Importantly, all of these areas require unique expertise, which is why they are often split across departments.

What’s Essential Here for the CMO?

Whether they own all of retention or not, CMOs need a direct line to the customer to do their best work. Customer input should inform strategy, messaging, content, media selection, and recognition programs. Stronger customer relationships beget advocacy, including online reviews, testimonials, and case histories. At a minimum, CMOs should be responsible for customer marketing, customer advisory boards, customer advocacy, and communities.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 439: Video Testimonials: Social Proof in Motion

Buyers trust other buyers more than they trust you—that’s just reality.

A great video testimonial is proof, reassurance, and persuasion all rolled into one, but that only happens if people actually see it and act on it. So how do you keep testimonials from collecting digital dust and turn them into a true sales and marketing asset?

That’s exactly what Drew Neisser and Alexander Ferguson, Founder & CMO of TeraLeap, tackle in this episode. From getting customers to say “yes” to crafting stories that resonate, Alex shares the strategies that make testimonials impossible to ignore.

What You’ll Learn

• The biggest mistakes that keep video testimonials from delivering real results.
• Ways to integrate testimonials across sales, marketing, and branding.
• How to measure impact, track conversions, and prove value to leadership.
• The right timing and approach to get more customers on camera.
  

Don’t let your best customer stories go to waste. Catch the full conversation now!

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

“Stop creating marketing plans, just focus on the next 6 months,” ordered a first-time CEO from a PE-backed $90 million services firm. The CMO who shared this story offered a “What can you do?” and, with a crushed soul, returned to work. I cringed. Rant to follow.

Short-Termism Is an Epidemic

This was not an isolated incident. Every week, I speak with CMOs whose organizations focus solely on the current quarter. Most are PE-backed. A few are public. Even fewer could call themselves “Built to Last.” Where’s Jim Collins when we need him? Instead, these companies are being “Built to Sell,” but buyers beware - these short-termers are also short-timers. They don’t have staying or pricing power (more on that shortly).

Short-Termism Inhibits Growth

Forrester reports that enterprise sales cycles extended in 2024 to an average of 18 months. That means that today’s top-of-the-funnel opportunities won’t close until 2027. Not this quarter, not next quarter. 2027! Victory will be determined by the clarity of the brand story over 100 different interactions with the prospect. Each of these touchpoints takes time to think through and optimize.

Take analyst relations, for example. You won’t find yourself in the top quadrant after 3 months of effort. It could take a year or two, but when you get there, it's an invaluable source of credibility. Trade shows are another case where long-term planning is required. You can only optimize event investments with a pre-, during, and post-event plan. This plan also needs to reflect the multiple sources of value (i.e., Closing late-stage deals, strengthening current customer relations and partnerships, introducing your brand to new prospects, etc.).

Short-Termism Limits Pricing Power

I haven’t talked about pricing power in this editorial series, but thanks to my conversations with Chris Burggraeve, I’ve had an epiphany. Pricing power is the ultimate litmus test of brand strength. The stronger the brand, the more it can charge, and the better its margins. Importantly, CFOs understand pricing power. To them, unlike the amorphous notion of brand, pricing power is real. It’s money in the bank. And guess what, pricing power isn’t built in 3 or 6-month sprints.

Pricing power is gained over a long time period by consistently delivering on the brand promise. Warren Buffett famously said: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." You could easily substitute pricing power for reputation in Buffet’s quote.

Short-termism should only apply to the tenure of the CEOs who preach it.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 438: Michael Watkins’ First 90 Days

If you haven’t read The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, what are you waiting for?

This bestselling guide to leadership transitions is a must-read for any executive stepping into a new role, and it’s a staple in the CMO Huddles community.

A CMO’s first 90 days will set the course—either laying the groundwork for success or paving the way for an uphill battle. Drawing on more than two decades of research, Michael Watkins joins host Drew Neisser to share essential transition strategies and reveal the critical mistakes executives make in their early days—and exactly how to avoid them.

What You’ll Learn

• The biggest mistakes executives make in their first 90 days—and how to sidestep them.
• How address the real problems within an organization—not just the ones you’re familiar with.
• The importance of early wins and strategies to resist the “action imperative”
• The critical role of shifting perspectives for achieving long-term success.
  
• The power of process leadership and how to use it to accelerate your impact.
  

Michael also shares insights from his new book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, and why strategy has never been more critical (stay tuned for that episode).

Tune in ASAP!

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

“If you’re going to hire me, this is what you can expect,” explained a 2x CMO to the startled CEO of a $275mm tech company. This CMO got the job. So far, so good. What happens next is an instructive place to start our 2025 state-of-the-B2B-CMO discussions.

Q1: Detective Work

A student of Michael Watkin’s The First 90 Days seminal playbook, our heroic CMO built the cornerstone relationships she’d need to orchestrate big changes. She listened more than she spoke. She addressed a modest problem, demonstrating “decisiveness” without making any premature or consequential mistakes. She assessed her team and revised the org chart. She kept the CEO in the loop with weekly updates and started building a GTM plan aligned with his vision.

Q2: Quick Wins to Buy Time

Though she’d told the board and CEO exactly what to expect her first year, pressure mounted on the CMO to show progress. Having identified a handful of easy fixes like landing page optimization, over-gating content, and surveying employees about the company, the CMO did have a few quick wins to share. However, the research she’d initiated on the big stuff (i.e. overall positioning and strategic differentiation that could drive the product roadmap) was still underway.

Q3: The Pressure Mounts

The product team wants to push out a new GenAI-driven update while Sales struggles to close deals. The CMO knows these are distractions from the bigger issue – high churn rates reflecting low C-sat. The entire go-to-market strategy must be revised, including pricing, product, positioning, targeting, messaging, and customer service. Fortunately, the CMO convened a strategy task force in Q2, and the research results showed a clear path forward. Meanwhile, one of the PE firm's staffers scrutinizes spending by keyword! It’s your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley crazy farm.

Q4: The Relaunch

Having completely rebuilt her team, the tech stack, the KPI dashboard, and the Sales-Marketing relationship and earned the trust of the CFO by delivering on her initial promises, it was “go time.” New positioning. New website. New everything. Importantly, the CMO insisted on pre-launching with employees, creating a short certification program that all needed to complete. With a new promise to the market, the CMO was confident the company could deliver. Anecdotal positivity poured in. So far, so good.

Year 2: Reaching for More

Riding high from a successful relaunch, the CMO took a well-deserved vacation. Her fully staffed team filled in ably. Having delivered on initial expectations, she pondered how her role could evolve to help the company even more. Since customer experience was still below par and without a leader, she threw her hat into the ring. The CEO and board loved the idea, especially since it meant one less senior executive on the payroll.

Have you set (great) expectations for 2025?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 437: Positioning That Sticks: Winning Mindshare

“These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Just like Obi-Wan Kenobi used a simple phrase to shift the stormtroopers’ perception, marketers need to pull off their own Jedi mind trick to capture mindshare for their brands. We call it “positioning.”

In this episode, Drew Neisser is joined by Joe Cohen (AXIS), Sara Larsen (Wolters Kluwer), and Carlos Carvajal (Q2) to discuss the art and science of positioning—how to define, refine, and defend it in a crowded marketplace.

Key Discussion Points:

• Joe Cohen explains how AXIS built credibility in energy transition by backing its positioning with real data.
  

• Sara Larsen shares how Wolters Kluwer got internal teams on board with a major brand shift.
  

• Carlos Carvajal reveals how Q2 overcame skepticism to expand beyond its core market.
  

What You'll Learn:

✔ How to use research to reinforce your brand’s authority.

✔ Why positioning is an internal challenge before it’s an external one.

✔ The role of analysts, customer feedback, and storytelling in shaping brand perception.

From using market research to create authority to ensuring internal teams embrace new positioning, this conversation is all about the strategies that make brands stand out—and stick!

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

“It’s really hard to understand what sourced, what brought people to our product, what we should do more of and less of,” admitted a highly-accomplished 3X CMO from a billion-dollar SaaS company. If this CMO, with a ginormous tech stack and dedicated data analysts, can’t nail attribution, who can? As we enter 2025, perhaps it’s time to reimagine measurement and KPIs.

Multi-Touch Attribution Is the False Prophet (or Profit) of Marketing

Multi-touch attribution starts with a solid premise - that B2B purchase journeys are rarely linear or single-stepped. Instead, they meander. They take time. Like 6 to 18 months. Time for lots of folks to weigh in. According to Forrester’s latest research, these journeys involve, on average, 13 internal roles and 9 outside influencers (analysts, friends, rating sites, etc.).

Let’s just focus on the 13 internal roles. Most of these folks will do their own homework. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume each visits five web pages. That’s 65 touches. Which of those mattered in the final decision? Was it the PR-driven story in a trade magazine or the carefully cultivated analyst’s rave? Or the buyer’s guide the content team crafted and the SEO team optimized? Arguably, all of them, since any one of them had the potential to derail the decision.

Attribution Efforts Tend to Over-Simplify Purchase Journeys

Because every CMO needs to show that marketing is having an impact, many deploy multi-touch attribution. Noted a SaaS CMO, “We use the data that we have to convince leadership to get on board, but I don’t always trust the data because we tend to overemphasize first-touch.” In other words, the CMO offers the appearance of cause and effect, knowing that it will only tell part of the story.

Attribution Efforts Don’t Often Help with Spending Decisions

Marketers, like other departments especially at SaaS companies, aspire to be agile. They want to demonstrate that they can adjust spending to changing market conditions with agility. But this isn't easy. As one SaaS CMO shared, “It’s hard for us to be agile when it comes to marketing decision-making since there’s a lag time between action and result.”

So, What’s a Data-Driven Marketer to Do?

Stop promising direct and short-term cause and effect from specific marketing activities. Sure, that’s what investors and the C-suite want to hear, but it’s a trap without an escape hatch. Stop separating budgets, people, and programs into “performance marketing” or “demand generation” and “everything else.” The implication is that everything else is not performing!

Instead, reimagine your metrics dashboard and commitments. Make sure you are monitoring brand health (awareness, reputation), customer satisfaction (rating, recommendations, referrals, retention), and brand velocity (opportunities, win rate, deal size). Measure trends rather than absolutes. Look at campaign performance, not channel performance.

How will your metrics change in 2025?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 436: Turning GenAI Possibilities into Reality

Gen AI isn’t just a playground for creativity—it’s a tool for real business impact. But while some marketers are embracing the possibilities, others are stuck in experimentation mode without a clear strategy. So how do you go from dabbling to driving real business impact with AI?

In this episode, Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst at Forrester, joins Drew Neisser to break down how CMOs can lead the charge in AI adoption, avoid common missteps, and harness Gen AI to create real business value. Lisa also shares a sneak peek into her session at Forrester’s 2025 B2B Summit, exploring how AI is reshaping marketing, sales, and customer experiences.

What You’ll Learn

• The top mistakes marketers make when adopting Gen AI—and how to avoid them.
• Why Gen AI success requires change management, not just technology.
• How CMOs can go beyond efficiency to drive real competitive advantage with AI.

Want to take your AI strategy to the next level? Tune in!

CMO Huddles members also get a 10% discount to Forrester’s 2025 B2B Summit—use code CMOHUDDLES25 to save!

Register here: https://www.forrester.com/event/b2b-summit-north-america/

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

“Marketing is the one area that’s working,” said the CEO to a perplexed CMO at a $500 million tech company. Normally, this would be a cause for celebration. But it came with a “keep doing what you’re doing” after the CMO had asked for more responsibility. I offered a sympathetic, “ugh,” and we got to work on a plan. As usual, this conversation sparked questions.

What Did the CEO Mean by the Unusual Perception That Marketing Is Working?

In this particular case, the CMO had been on the job for several years, giving the leader time to build both the brand reputation and a demand generation engine. The company had acquired several companies and the CMO had woven together disparate brands into one brand that is now the recognized category leader. The CMO had also built a strong “performance marketing” team and a metrics dashboard such that the CEO could see the impact marketing had on their revenue pipeline.

What’s the Problem Here?

It’s a fair question since many CMOs would dance on their desks for months after hearing those words from their CEOs. In this particular case, the CMO wanted to make a broader contribution to the organization and didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “just the marketing guy.” Yet, by performing the marketing function really well, that’s exactly what happened.

Is This the End of the Story?

Nope. This CMO is not to be denied. Through a series of carefully crafted conversations, this CMO will identify some “problem areas” the CEO wants fixed. Studying these, the CMO will suggest a plan of attack for 2-3 of them, offering to be the catalyst of change but not seeking an extra title. [Read Impact Players or check out my interview with Liz Wiseman to better understand this approach.]

Could This Scenario Have Been Avoided?

Maybe. When a CMO gets hired, it’s often to fix specific marketing-related problems. If those challenges aren’t addressed, full stop. That said, this is an AND scenario, not an OR situation. As leadership sage Michael Watkins explained recently to a huddle of attentive marketing leaders, “You need to shift from being a specialist to being a leader across the enterprise.”

Watkins offered more specifics:

• Broaden your purview: “Represent your function AND take the enterprise-wide perspective.”
  
• Build alliances: “The more senior levels are about building alliances internally and externally. If you’re really going to have an impact, you need to be very clear about whose support is make or break for you.”
  
• Set the agenda: “You need to move from problem solver to agenda setter (for the entire organization).”
  

If you’re interested in hearing the full interview with Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days, mark your calendar for its release on February 28th at https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 435: From Clicks to Conversions

Clicking is easy, converting is hard—let’s fix that. In this episode, Drew Neisser teams up with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze, to take a deep dive into what makes landing pages and home pages truly effective. But this isn’t just theory-Sahil gets hands-on by breaking down the CMO Huddles home page and landing page, highlighting common pitfalls and sharing actionable fixes.

What you’ll learn:

• The biggest conversion killers on landing pages-and how to fix them fast.
• Why home pages need both storytelling and structure to keep visitors engaged.
• How small design tweaks-like better CTAs, cleaner forms, and smarter layouts-can drive big results.

Want to see the pages Sahil critiqued? Check the show notes on https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/ for links to the visual resources.