Huddlers in the News

"Our PE firm just mandated a 30% efficiency improvement," shared a CMO from a $135 million SaaS company. When I asked if this was based on any real-world success story, the answer was a quick, “Nope. It’s just PE being PE.”

I shouldn’t have been shocked, but aghast feels about right. And then it got worse. Three other CMOs at the table said they’d been handed the exact same mandate.

The Efficiency Epidemic

Let’s call this what it is: the efficiency epidemic.

Like most epidemics, it spreads quickly and sounds rational at first. After all, who’s against efficiency? And with AI unlocking new levels of productivity, it feels like the obvious place to focus.

But here’s the problem: efficiency is not a growth strategy.

At best, it’s an enabler of one. At worst, it’s a convenient distraction that gives the illusion of progress while starving the very things that drive revenue. In that moment, I said something I wish more CMOs would say out loud: “If 30% is the answer, what exactly was the question?” No one had one, because the number itself was arbitrary.

Which makes the strategy arbitrary, too.

Efficiency Is Not the Strategy

Now, before anyone accuses me of being anti-efficiency, let’s acknowledge an oldie but goodie: Southwest Airlines. Southwest built one of the most profitable airline models in history through an obsession with operational efficiency, even moving the fueling port to shave minutes off turnaround time.

But that efficiency was never the end goal. It was always in service of the customer—lower fares, more reliable schedules, and a consistently friendly experience that built loyalty over time.

Efficiency wasn’t the strategy. It was the engine. The strategy was customer value.

Which brings us back to today and the real opportunity before us. Imagine if those same PE firms said: take all that AI energy and aim it at the customer, from start to finish.

Make buying easier, demos sharper, onboarding faster, and products easier to adopt. Build better feedback loops, listen more closely to every interaction, and tell more customer stories that make your customers the heroes.

That’s not just a better use of AI. It’s a better business strategy.

Because when you start with the customer, efficiency tends to follow. But when you start with efficiency, you often lose sight of the customer—and eventually, growth.

Start With the Customer

So here’s the challenge for CMOs. Push back, not emotionally, but strategically, and reframe the conversation around what actually drives results.

That 30% number? It’s made up. Your customer isn’t.

But this isn’t a battle you can win alone. It requires alignment across the C-suite, from the CEO to the CFO to the CRO, because the mandate didn’t come from marketing—and the response can’t either.

The companies that win in the AI era won’t be the most efficient. They’ll be the most customer-aligned.

And importantly, CMOs are in the best position to lead this shift, not because of their title, but because they’re closest to the truth [or at least they should be].

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 511: Failing Well Beats Playing It Safe

Too many companies treat every failure the same. That makes people more cautious, more guarded, and less willing to take the smart risks innovation requires.

Amy Edmondson argues that not all failures deserve the same label. Some are preventable. Some come with complexity. Then there is intelligent failure, the kind that comes with thoughtful experimentation in new territory and produces the learning that moves innovation forward.

In this episode, Drew Neisser brings in Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, author of Right Kind of Wrong, to look at what leaders need to do if they want teams experimenting and learning in unfamiliar territory. For Amy, that starts with a clear goal, a bet no bigger than necessary, and the kind of questions that create enough psychological safety for people to share what they’re seeing early. So even when the result falls short, the learning is still useful.

What You’ll Take Away:

• The difference between preventable, complex, and intelligent failure
• Why intelligent failure belongs in new territory
• What makes an experiment smart, small, and worth running
• Why high achievers often need a better frame for failure
• How playing not to lose distorts innovation

What This Asks of Leaders:

• Stop treating every miss as proof someone messed up
• Make the goal clear before the experiment starts
• Keep the bet no bigger than necessary
• Ask questions that invite candor instead of caution

If your team needs a smarter way to think about failure, risk, and learning, this one is worth a listen.

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

"If you piss off one of our salespeople, I will take you out."

That was the suddenly deadly serious warning from Snowflake CMO Denise Persson during a conversation I had with her and former Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan in front of 32 entranced CMOs. It was a mic-drop moment that prompted an immediate question in my mind:

What are your leadership redlines?

We had been discussing how marketing teams should work with sales and what behaviors cross the line. Denise didn’t hesitate. As she explained it, upsetting a salesperson isn’t just a minor offense. It threatens one of the most important relationships inside the company.

A clear redline.

A New Leadership Redline

Great leaders tend to have a clear redline. They know the behaviors they simply won’t tolerate because those behaviors undermine the company. Lately, however, I’ve been wrestling with a different kind of redline.

AI adoption.

After giving employees access to the tools and providing training, how long should leaders tolerate non-usage?

One leadership perspective I heard recently reframed the issue this way: imagine a job candidate saying, “I’m excited about this role, but I should mention that I don’t use electricity or the internet.”

That would sound absurd.

In many ways, AI is quickly becoming the same kind of foundational capability.

During a recent Huddle, one CMO shared that every employee was now being rated on a scale of 1 to 5 for AI proficiency. A one meant non-usage. A five meant someone operating almost like an AI engineer. The goal was to get most of the organization to at least a three. After training, however, staying at a one was a ticket out the door.

When the Redline Gets Complicated

At our Strategy Labs, several CMOs raised a more complicated challenge: employees who object to AI for moral reasons, whether due to energy and water consumption or copyright concerns. Some leaders had tried to present comparative data showing that LLM queries use similar energy to Google searches. But most agreed that if someone holds a deeply principled objection, data alone probably won’t change their mind.

This is where leadership gets uncomfortable. Time for some radical candor?

I love having employees who challenge themselves to use AI in increasingly creative and productive ways. The best marketers I know are experimenting constantly. They are curious. They are learning in public. They are pushing the tools further every week.

My Redline?

Would I hire someone who refuses to use AI at all?

Not a chance.

Leadership requires empathy. But it also requires clarity about the standards that move the company forward. For Denise Persson, one redline is protecting the relationship between marketing and sales.

For many CMOs right now, another redline may be emerging.

Refusing to engage with AI.

So I’m curious. What are your leadership redlines?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 509: The Real Work of Customer Obsession

Most companies say they put customers at the center of their business. Few actually operate that way.

In this episode of Renegade Marketers Unite, Drew Neisser talks with JD Dillon (Tigo Energy), Carlos Carvajal (Anaqua), and Nikhil Chawla (Resilience) about what it takes to turn customer voice into real organizational change.

Together, they unpack what customer-centric leadership looks like in practice—from retention programs and executive briefings to listening to real sales calls and turning customer signals into action across the business.

The result is a more operational view of customer obsession, one where the voice of the customer shows up not just in dashboards, but in meetings, decisions, and everyday habits.

The big idea: Customer centricity becomes powerful only when it shows up in everyday habits—meetings, messaging, and decisions. If you want to move from customer-aware to customer-obsessed, this episode delivers practical strategies you can apply immediately.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why customer obsession must show up in company habits, not just strategy decks
• How marketing leaders are using customer voice to shape planning and priorities
• Why stories and quotes from customers often move teams faster than dashboards
• How narrowing customer centricity to a clear job-to-be-done makes it actionable
• Why customers should appear in all-hands meetings, planning sessions, and executive briefings
• How marketing teams can turn customer conversations into a repeatable growth engine

Three perspectives on Customer-Led Growth:

JD Dillon: Make Customer Commitment Visible

JD shares how combining marketing and customer experience leadership helped Tigo Energy tackle its biggest challenge—retention. One result: the Green Glove Service, a hands-on installer support program that improves outcomes while reinforcing a customer-first culture across the company.

Carlos Carvajal: Build the Customer Habit

Carlos focuses on turning customer listening into a marketing habit. From direct conversations with customers to executive briefing programs that bring prospects into deeper dialogue, he shows how consistent exposure to customer stories strengthens messaging, improves win rates, and builds alignment across teams.

Nikhil Chawla: Focus Customer Centricity on Real Problems

Nikhil argues that “customer centricity” becomes powerful only when teams narrow it to specific problems they can solve. At Resilience, that means combining tools like Gong and AI analysis with integrated data pipelines to shorten feedback loops and surface the customer signals that matter most. 

This Episode Is For 

B2B CMOs and marketing leaders who want to move beyond talking about customer centricity and start embedding customer insight into how their organizations actually operate.

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

"A few staffers are generating slop, because they haven't done any thinking before they prompt," complained a CMO from a Series B tech startup. Having gained the Huddles’ attention, he added, "Then they massage it 77 times to pretend that they're doing work."

Nods of “been there, seen that” ricocheted across the Zoom windows.

I held my tongue for a moment. Then came my questions. Did they have writing skills before they took the job? No. Had they been trained on the tools? Yes. Are there editors helping them understand what good looks like? One. And she’s swamped.

This CMO is hardly alone. Versions of this conversation are happening in marketing departments everywhere as teams race to adopt AI.

And yes, the slop is real.

The Problem Isn’t AI

The deeper issue isn’t AI. It’s writing. AI will not turn bad writers into good ones, and it definitely won’t turn them into great ones. Good writing starts with clear thinking.

My AP English teacher, Mr. Ulander, drilled something into us that has stayed with me for decades: “If you can’t write, you can’t think.” Still true.

We Need More Martys

As an assistant AE at JWT, every conference report and client proposal I wrote was heavily edited by my boss Marty Susz. His edits were so comprehensive that the documents looked like redacted CIA reports. Six months later, the edits were minimal.

Not because Marty got nicer. Because I got better.

Most senior marketers I know had a Marty somewhere in their early careers. Someone who forced us to think harder, write more clearly, and strip away lazy ideas disguised as prose.

Who was your Marty?

Raise the Bar

Here’s the leadership challenge today. AI tools can generate endless drafts, but they can’t fix weak thinking. And if we flood the world with mediocre content, marketing will lose credibility with CEOs, sales teams, buyers, and increasingly with machines deciding what shows up in LLMs.

Slop won’t help with SEO or AEO. Or customers.

So CMOs have a job to do.

It starts with hiring. Critical thinking is hard to teach, but curiosity can be spotted early. Hire lifelong learners who already show writing aptitude and the hunger to improve.

Then set a quality bar. “Good enough” cannot mean “the AI produced something readable.” It has to mean thoughtful, differentiated, and unmistakably on brand.

Bring editors back. Great writers are developed through rigorous feedback, not endless prompt tweaking.

And finally, use AI to reinforce standards, not lower them. Imagine a Brand GPT that checks every piece of content for clarity, originality, and voice before it ships.

AI can accelerate great thinking. But it cannot replace it.

If we want the next generation of marketers to distinguish between slop and substance, we’re going to need a lot more Martys in the world.

Pass It On

So I’m curious… Who taught you to write?

And are you giving that same gift to the next generation of marketers?

Thanks, Marty.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 508: Autonomous Transformation: The Strategy Shift for AI

AI is forcing a leadership choice. You can treat it like a stack of use cases and end up with a lot of motion and a little progress. Or you can start with a clear vision of the future you want, make strategy visible, and use that to align decisions across the business. 

In this episode, Drew Neisser talks with Brian Evergreen, author of Autonomous Transformation, about why the AI conversation so often collapses into tools and use cases, and how leaders can pull it back to vision, outcomes, and the kind of alignment that drives transformation.

What you’ll take away:

• Why optimization can keep you busy while you stay stuck
• How to make a future vision concrete enough to act on
• What “no strategy without vision” means, and how to spot fake strategy
• Why leaders default to scorecards, and how it stalls transformation
• How Brian’s “nindrant” separates “we can do” from “we need alignment”
• Why use case first AI limits gains, and how to shift to value creation

Plus:

• A simple workshop to surface visions before projects
• A clean split between what marketing can do now and what needs CRO and CFO alignment
• How to move AI from tool talk to a value creation leadership conversation

If you are tired of AI conversations that start with tools and end with small wins, listen to this episode for a vision first approach that changes what you do next.

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

I’m exhausted. The good kind.

The kind you feel after winning a three-set singles match. Legs heavy. Heart racing. Brain buzzing with triumphant fatigue.

Four Cities, One Throughline

Four cities. Four Strategy Labs. Four 4-hour workshops followed by 2-hour dinners. Dozens of honest conversations about the biggest challenge of our collective careers: how we adapt as leaders in the AI era.

And the weather tried to take us out.

Boston was supposed to be fully in person. Enter the Bomb Cyclone. Flights cancelled. Snow everywhere. City travel bans. We pivoted to virtual in less than 24 hours, and 10 marketing leaders still showed up and stayed fully engaged for four hours. That alone felt like a small miracle.

New York was next, and we went hybrid because one moderator and one speaker were still stuck in Boston. Two of the thirteen registered CMOs could not make it into the city. Eleven braved the cold anyway and leaned in hard.

Hybrid is never simple, but the energy of the participants carried the day.

On Wednesday morning, light snow delayed our departure by three hours. We landed and went straight to Relias (our host that day), arriving just in time to join nine leaders who were already deep in conversation. No drama, just focus.

Getting to Atlanta was easy peasy. By then, it felt like the universe had decided we had earned a smooth flight.

Why This Worked

Across every stop, what struck me most was this: nothing beats a well-structured, well-moderated discussion among peers. No panels. No posturing. Our sponsors were in the room, sharing invaluable insights, not pitches. [Okay, maybe there were a few moments of pitching, but not the "ooh ick, can we write it up?" variety.]

You can consume endless content about AI org design, copilots, agents, AEO, automation, and positioning. But put 10 to 12 curious CMOs around a table with a real problem and give them space to think together? That is rocket fuel.

Then you break bread. Old friends. New friends. Shared scars. Shared ambition. Laughter that only comes from people who know the weight of the role. And of course, the occasional, "Wow, you're taller than you look on Zoom."

Right now, I am too tired to distill the big insights from 22 hours of conversations. All I know is that the lingering joy is real. Bringing over 40 marketing leaders together to exchange solutions in real time is energizing in a way that is hard to explain unless you have felt it.

A big highlight for me was the final stop in Atlanta. The selfies tell the story better than I can. Big smiles. Smart people. Gratifying exhaustion. [And regrets that I didn't take selfies in the other markets!]

Flocking awesome.

Special thanks to our insight-rich sponsors HG Insights, 1mind, Webflow, Firebrick, Inc., and their awesome representatives Scott Gordon, Nik Koutsoukos, Amanda Kahlow, Guy Yalif and Bob Wright (I'd hit the road with y'all anytime!)

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 507: When Org Design Shapes Strategy

Marketing org design isn’t an HR exercise. It determines whether your team spends the year reacting… or actually executing.

In this episode of Renegade Marketers Unite, Drew sits down with Charles Groome (Insightful) and Heather Adkins (Trimble) to unpack what a 2026-ready marketing organization really looks like.

Spoiler: It’s not built around functional silos.

Instead, they explore campaign-led team structures, mindset-driven hiring, and operating systems designed for speed, adaptability, and accountability.

You'll hear:

• How Insightful uses an effort + outcomes framework to evaluate performance
• Why Trimble reorganized around nine global initiatives instead of functional silos
• The rise of integrated campaign units to tighten alignment
• How to hire T-shaped marketers who blend storytelling and data
• Ways to give teams more autonomy without sacrificing accountability
• How better org design can reduce burnout and increase clarity

If your team structure hasn’t changed in years, your team may struggle to adapt when the market shifts.

This conversation will challenge how you think about structure, talent, and what it takes to build a marketing team that can pivot with confidence.

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

“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/