Huddlers in the News

“I’m really struggling to focus,” shared an enterprise B2B CMO with a staff of 115.

“Tell me about it,” I empathized.

Honestly, I feel it too. I feel it when I can’t see my phone. I feel it when I instinctively check email during a status meeting. I feel it when someone has to repeat themselves in a meeting because my brain briefly wanders into email triage mode.

The Attention Crisis

We are in an attention crisis.

And CMOs may be among the hardest-hit because their jobs reward responsiveness, availability, and rapid context switching. We’ve convinced ourselves this is a superpower.

It isn’t.

In one of the most-cited studies on multitasking, Stanford researcher Clifford Nass found that heavy multitaskers were actually worse at filtering out irrelevant information and slower at switching between tasks. His conclusion was brutal: “Everything distracts them.”

That one hit me hard.

Because I see CMOs walk into meetings every day with Slack open, email open, SMS notifications firing, and LinkedIn blinking in the background like a Vegas casino.

Then halfway through the meeting: “Sorry, can you repeat that?”

I’ve done it too.

But here’s the bigger issue: every time leaders do this, they normalize it.

You are teaching your team that partial attention is acceptable.

You are teaching them that notifications outrank humans.

You are teaching them that being “busy” matters more than being present.

Culture trickles down faster than strategy.

Either be in the meeting fully or don’t go. You can’t do both well.

Focus Has to Be Modeled

One thing I’ve started doing is putting a physical sticky note on my monitor every morning with my top two priorities for the day. Not 17 priorities. Two.

And those priorities need to ladder back to strategic priorities. Your OKRs. Your rocks. Your actual business goals.

Then encourage your direct reports to do the same.

Focus trickles down, too.

A few other practices that help:

• Hide Slack, email, and SMS during meetings
• Block at least 30 minutes daily for deep thinking
• Reserve 30 minutes at day’s end for planning and cleanup
• Protect those blocks like investor meetings

Email and Slack are often knee-jerk time sucks. One trick: batch them.

Try three 15-minute email/Slack blocks a day instead of constant inbox grazing. And create subject-line rules for your team:

• NEED APPROVAL BY 5PM
• PLEASE WEIGH IN BY FRIDAY EOB

That alone reduces cognitive clutter dramatically. I also like the one-minute rule:

• If it takes under a minute, respond right away
• If it requires real thinking, schedule time for it
• If it’s merely interesting, defer it

Attention Is a Leadership Issue

Your calendar is a clear expression of your priorities.

Try to audit your time this week:

How much is reactive versus strategic?

How much is email versus leadership?

How much time is spent on your biggest initiatives versus tiny, annoying fires?

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most executives don’t have a strategy problem.

They have an attention problem.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 517: The New CMO Superpower: System Design

We’ve spent a long time glorifying the “hero leader.” The sharpest thinker. The one with all the answers. The person everyone turns to when it’s time to make the call.

But constant change is pushing a different kind of leader to the forefront. The system designer. A leader who puts more energy into workflows, decision paths, and team rhythm so fewer hard calls boomerang back to them.

In this episode, Drew talks with Dan Lowden (Blackbird.AI), Katrina Klier (Sage Strategy Group), and Chris Pieper (ADP) about why this new model of leadership matters now. With AI reshaping marketing and the pace only getting faster, teams need more than a smart CMO in the middle of everything. They need a way of operating that can keep up.

In this episode:

• Dan shares how his team turns expert insight into a steady stream of high-value content, helping a five-person team operate at scale.
• Katrina breaks down how leaders now need to think across people, tech, and AI while building systems that keep learning and improvement in motion.
• Chris explains how operating rhythms, sprint structures, and team health checks make strong execution more repeatable.

Plus:

• How better operating rhythms turn learning into a team advantage
• Where AI should augment the system
• How to spot work that still depends too heavily on the leader

If you’re a B2B CMO whose marketing team still depends too heavily on your decisions, this episode will help you rethink leadership, system design, and how to build a team that scales.

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

“Our pipeline is almost dry,” shared a B2B CMO from a $275 million SaaS company. I asked, “Let me guess, they stopped spending on brand-building and long-term marketing a year and a half ago?”

“Nailed it,” the CMO sighed.

This was a PE-backed company in year four of a five-year plan. They cut investment to make EBITDA look prettier. Now the bill has come due.

Predictable.

This is a real problem, and not one that PE firms seem eager to acknowledge. If you stop investing in both long- and short-term marketing, it will eventually come back to bite you. The lag may hide the damage, but it doesn’t eliminate it.

Every time.

The Cost of Cutting Too Deep

You can’t cut your way to success. Maybe that’s not an old saying, but it captures the reality most operators learn the hard way. Growth requires fuel, and marketing is one of the primary ways you supply it.

Still, here we are.

We keep having the same argument, trying to prove that marketing isn’t a cost center but a growth lever. CEOs want growth, CFOs want efficiency, and investors want both fast. Marketing sits right in the middle of that tension.

And gets squeezed.

Why do I keep making this case? Because many executives and investors still don’t see how connected this all is. They treat marketing as a line item rather than as part of a system.

That’s the mistake.

Leadership Is a System

In my conversation with Todd Henry, author of The Brave Habit, he framed leadership simply: “There are three things we own as leaders: culture, talent, and work.” Those three aren’t independent—they’re interdependent.

That’s the system.

“When you have a healthy, clear culture, you tend to attract great talent.” And when you have great talent, “you tend to do great work.”

It’s fragile.

Now connect that back to this CMO. When you slash marketing to hit short-term targets, you’re not just cutting spend—you’re putting pressure on the work. You’re also signaling what matters, which shapes the culture.

Whether you intend to or not.

Because, as Todd put it, “When the work suffers, you tend to lose talent, because talented people want to do great work.”

It cascades.

“When you lose talent, it erodes the culture. It becomes a doom loop.” That’s what no spreadsheet captures. The numbers may look cleaner, but the system is breaking down.

Quietly.

Marketing is not an island. It connects to internal comms, external narrative, investor confidence, and the belief system inside your company. When you weaken it, you weaken far more than pipeline.

You weaken momentum.

This Is About Leadership

So yes, we can keep debating budgets. Or we can acknowledge the harder reality.

This is about leadership.

If you break the link between culture, talent, and work, don’t be surprised when your pipeline dries up next. The outcome isn’t random; it’s the system you built.

Cause and effect.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 516: From AI Curiosity to Capability

Marketing teams don’t need more AI tools. They need better habits around the ones they already have.

Experimentation got marketing teams started, but it won’t take them very far on its own. The payoff starts when teams stop treating AI like a side experiment and start using it in ways they can repeat and build on.

In this episode, Drew Neisser talks with Nicole Leffer, one of the most practical voices in B2B AI adoption, about what it takes to make AI use more consistent and scalable. After working with more than 100 companies, Nicole has a clear view of what separates teams that stay stuck in trial mode from teams that build a repeatable advantage.

Three AI Mistakes Marketers Make:

1. Relying on back-and-forth prompting instead of building reusable workflows
2. Underestimating what their core AI tool can already do
3. Falling for hype cycles and constantly switching platforms

What You’ll Learn:

• How to build workflows that save real time
• The hidden cost of tool sprawl
• Where AI security risks are showing up now
• How to build AI capability across the team

If you’re a B2B CMO working to build stronger AI habits across your team, this episode will give you plenty to work with!

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

“Penguins matter!” preached the Penguin-in-Chief of CMO Huddles. (Some people think I go too far with the penguin thing. I’m just getting started.)

They matter ecologically.

Penguins are among the few species that live both on land and in the sea, making them an environmental bellwether. When things go sideways, they feel it first.

And things are going sideways.

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, emperor penguins have now been moved to endangered status, with populations declining as the sea ice they depend on “has hit record-low levels in the past few years.”

Let that sink in.

Why Penguins Matter

“The birds will not be able to survive without sea ice,” one researcher noted, calling for urgent action. This isn’t theoretical. It’s happening.

Which brings me to why penguins matter even more than most people realize.

They matter as a metaphor.

Because penguins have figured out something that most humans, and certainly most CMOs, are still working on: How to survive brutal conditions… together. Scientists call it social thermoregulation.

Penguins huddle.

Not because it’s cute. Because it’s life or death.

When temperatures drop to extremes, they rotate in and out of the center, sharing warmth so no one penguin takes the full hit. The result? A differential of roughly 70° between the outside and inside of the huddle.

Seventy. Degrees.

The Power of Huddling

“It’s cold as hell in our sea-suite,” I joked at last year’s Super Huddle, dressed head to toe as a penguin in front of 100 marketing leaders. But the joke lands because it’s true.

You’re dealing with relentless pressure. Shrinking budgets. AI-driven reorgs. Increasing expectations. Orca-level threats that come out of nowhere.

And yet…most marketing leaders are still going it alone.

Penguins don’t.

They communicate. They coordinate. They rotate. They protect the group so the group can protect the individual.

That’s the idea behind CMO Huddles.

Not networking. Not webinars. Not another Slack group (although we have one!).

A huddle.

A place where experienced leaders step in, warm up, share the load, and step back out stronger. And just so we’re clear…

We’re not animal appropriators.

CMO Huddles donates 1% of revenue (not profit) to the Global Penguin Society, led by the inspiring Jorge Pablo Garcia Borboroglu ("Popi"), who has done more for penguin conservation than just about anyone on the planet. Which makes me wonder…

Hey Pittsburgh Penguins. Hey Munsingwear (Perry Ellis International). You’ve been riding the penguin brand for a while now. Maybe it’s time to huddle up and give a little back? Just a thought.

Here’s Where You Come In

So here are your two calls to action dear reader, on this World Penguin Day:

• If you’re a marketing leader trying to weather your own version of Antarctica, join a community. Preferably one that actually warms you up.
• And regardless of what you do for a living, support penguins by donating to the Global Penguin Society. They could use the help.

Because penguins matter. More than ever.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 515: Differentiate or Die: Winning in a Sea of Sameness

If your brand sounds like everyone else’s, you’re not competing. You’re interchangeable.

Claims like “customer-centric,” “trusted partner,” and “AI-powered” don’t do much when buyers hear them everywhere. True differentiation is bold, precise, and hard to confuse with the rest of the category.

In this episode, Drew Neisser brings together Scott Morris (Sprout Social), Gary Sevounts (Netris), and Lesley Davis to explore what real differentiation requires in B2B. They get into how companies clarify their story, align internally, and carry that differentiation from product to pitch to customer experience.

In this episode:

• Scott explains why strong positioning only works when the product actually delivers on the promise, and how Sprout is building its brand around “social intelligence for breakthrough brands”
• Gary shares how a shift from selling “just another fraud tool” to an “identity trust network” transformed growth, increased deal size, and helped drive a major acquisition
• Lesley breaks down how differentiation shows up in a services business, especially in RFP-driven categories, where the real win comes from understanding the problem behind the problem

Plus:

• Why pipeline without differentiation leads to smaller deals
• How strong positioning starts with customer frustrations
• The difference between bold positioning and empty promises
• Why differentiation only works when the whole company reinforces it

If you're a B2B CMO trying to differentiate your business and make your brand impossible to ignore, this one’s worth your time!

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

I went to the HumanX Conference last week and had a mildly unsettling realization:

I have no idea what half these people are talking about.

It started in the opening keynote. AI as a five-layer cake. One of the layers? Inference. Everyone around me nodded like this was Marketing 101, and I’m sitting there thinking… should I know this?

So I did the only sensible thing. I wandered the floor until I found a booth with “inference” in the headline and asked, “What is that, exactly?” (We’ll come back to that.)

Get Curious on Purpose

There’s something oddly powerful about putting yourself in a room where you don’t speak the language. It’s like traveling to a foreign country where you catch every third word and fill in the rest with context and guesswork. You can either pretend you get it… or you can get curious.

I chose curiosity.

I talked to vendors I wasn’t shopping. I stopped at booths because of tchotchkes I didn’t need. I ran into a couple of fellow Huddlers doing the exact same thing—wandering, absorbing, trying to make sense of it all. One random stop led to a company sitting on a goldmine of HR data that could be wildly useful to CMOs. I would never have found it if I stuck to my “agenda.”

And then there was the sea of sameness. AI-native, AI-driven, AI-powered, AI-everything. Different logos, same language, zero clarity.

Until Sentry’s booth broke through with a single line: “Someone’s gotta babysit the bots.” Finally, a problem I understand. A point of view I can remember. A reason to stop.

Sameness Is Your Opening

That’s when it hit me. If you’re a marketer walking a floor like this, the takeaway isn’t just about AI.

It’s about you.

Go where you don’t understand the language. Ask the question that makes you feel a little dumb, because chances are, you’re not the only one.

And when you see a hundred companies saying the same thing, that’s not a branding problem.

That’s your opportunity.

--

FYI, Inference (in AI terms) is the moment when a trained model actually does something useful, like answering a question, generating content, or making a prediction. Don't ask me to go any deeper - as it was, I needed help from ChatGPT to craft this explanation!

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 514: The Business of Expertise: Why Positioning Beats Talent Every Time

Most marketers believe great work leads to great business.

David C. Baker would disagree.

In this episode, Drew Neisser sits down with The Business of Expertise author to unpack what really separates thriving expert firms from struggling ones. From positioning and pricing power to the myths of growth and creativity, this is a candid, no-BS look at what it actually takes to build a successful expertise-based business.

If you're a B2B CMO trying to sharpen your company’s positioning (and prove marketing’s impact on the business), this one will hit home.

Key Mistakes:

• Staying a generalist instead of narrowing your positioning
• Assuming talent or creativity alone will drive success
• Chasing growth without understanding the tradeoffs

What You’ll Learn:

• Why saying no is the real starting point for positioning and pricing power
• How to tell if you’re acting like an expert or just an order taker
• Why most firms overestimate creativity and underestimate discipline
• What AI is actually changing—and what it’s not
• How to build demand so you’re not forced to take every client

One idea to stick with:

If clients can easily compare you to alternatives, you’re not positioned.

If you want to go deeper, David shares more at punctuation.com—but fair warning, he might tell you to stop reading business books altogether.

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

“I don’t care that much about your companies,” revealed the Penguin-in-Chief while wrapping up 3 Strategy Labs with 36 CMOs last week. “My concern is the transformation story you will be able to tell in one year,” I explained.

Of course, I want their companies to grow. But, ironically, growth alone won’t secure a CMO's seat or their next opportunity. Only transformation does.

If you can lead an organization from here to there, it almost doesn’t matter what happens next. New CEO, new PE firm, new direction. You’re on solid footing because you didn’t just run marketing. You changed the business.

This is that moment.

The Chance to Change the Business

Perhaps for the first time, B2B CMOs have the opportunity to do what B2C CMOs have been doing all along: drive the strategic direction of their companies, not just support it.

And yet, most of the pressure you’re feeling doesn’t sound like an opportunity. It sounds like this: cut 30% and deliver 30% more. Those numbers may be arbitrary. The moment is not. You can respond by making marketing smaller. Or you can use this moment to make marketing matter more.

That starts with positioning.

The CMOs who win now will be the ones who help their companies own a hill. One thing. Clearly defined. Deeply understood. Aligned across the organization. When that happens, you see it everywhere. Win rates improve. Deal cycles shorten. Average deal sizes grow.

Positioning isn’t a messaging exercise. It’s business transformation.

AI in Service of Transformation

Then there’s AI. Not AI for efficiency’s sake. AI in the service of something bigger.

In Seattle, a group of CMOs began discussing a new benchmark: $1M in revenue per employee. Not $250K. Four times the output.

That’s not optimization. That’s a different way of operating.

We also heard from a startup CMO who’s already working this way. No traditional stack. No rigid systems. Just flexible, AI-driven workflows stitched together in real time. Early, imperfect, but directionally clear.

This is where it’s going.

So the question isn’t whether you’ll use AI. It’s how you’ll prioritize it.

AI in service of what? Better customer understanding. More relevant communication. Faster, smarter decision-making. A more empowered team.

And yes, you’ll need to address how your brands show up in LLMs . You’ll need to experiment. You’ll need to push legal and IT to allow access to the tools your teams need. You’ll need to connect dots across the entire go-to-market.

Lead Beyond Your Lane

This is bigger than marketing. It’s GTM transformation.

Which is why this moment belongs to CMOs who are willing to lead beyond their lane. Who can align their organizations. Who CEOs rely on for strategic guidance. Who can turn pressure into progress.

It’s easy to get buried in the day-to-day. The requests. The expectations. The noise.

But great leaders pick a hill. And then they align the organization to take it.

So I’ll leave you with the same thought I shared at the end of those Labs:

What transformation story are you going to be able to tell a year from now?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 513: Humor as a Leadership Tool

Do humor and serious leadership belong in the same room?

Most leaders default to staying “professional” and miss one of the simplest ways to build connection and improve communication.

In this episode of Renegade Marketers Unite, Drew Neisser talks with Jan McInnis about how leaders can use humor effectively—without telling jokes or trying to be someone they’re not.

The conversation reframes humor from something perceived as risky to something practical: A tool leaders can use to make teams more comfortable, conversations more effective, and workplaces a little more human.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why humor can make leaders more human and approachable
• Why humor makes leaders more approachable
• How humor can acknowledge tension without derailing the moment
• When humor helps, and when it can backfire
• How small moments of levity can improve communication across teams

The takeaway: Humor isn’t about being funny. It’s about being human.

If your meetings feel a little too stiff—or your communication isn’t landing the way it should—this episode offers a simple place to start.

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