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Budget planning for 2025 raised five big CMO questions: How the economy will affect growth plans, how GenAI will reshape people, programs, and tech, how AI changes the CMO role, whether the role expands or shrinks, and why in-person connection may become the countertrend to virtual everything. Budget season needs fewer guesses and better debates.
For many CMOs, October is the most important month of the year. Not because of Halloween, though a costumed block party with candy has its charms. October is when CMOs prepare, present, defend, and occasionally emotionally negotiate their budgets for the year ahead.
Our October Huddles on budgeting are typically packed for a reason. Huddlers compare allocations across people, programs, and tech. They swap ratios like marketing as a percentage of ARR or net new revenue. They pressure-test what is conservative, what is bold, and what is merely hopeful with a spreadsheet.
For 2025 planning, five questions stood out. They are still useful for any CMO building a budget under uncertainty, which is to say every CMO with a pulse and a CFO.
The previous two years felt recessionary for many B2B brands. Budgets were down. Sales cycles were up. Fewer deals made it across the line. The original question was whether 2025 would be better, and how quickly growth capital would return as interest rates shifted.
The broader lesson still holds: Build the plan for the market you can defend, then prepare upside bets for the market you hope arrives.
For CMOs, that means having a conservative base plan tied to achievable growth targets and a short list of pre-planned programs ready to activate if conditions improve. Those upside programs might target new verticals, support new products, or test new channels. Ideally, they are not ideas invented in a hallway after the quarter starts strong.
The CMO move: Be ready to pounce, but do not budget as if pouncing is guaranteed.
Most marketing budgets fall into three buckets: People, programs, and tech. GenAI can affect all three, but not always in the clean, CFO-friendly way people imagine.</p><p>Staffing may shift as AI creates efficiencies. Some teams may need fewer people in certain roles, but more experienced people in others. Programs may accelerate as AI helps create sales enablement, content variations, event follow-up, and repurposed assets. But speed without focus creates a new problem: More stuff, less strategy.
Tech may be the biggest budget wildcard. Every platform is rolling out AI features. Some will be useful. Some will be expensive. Some will be the same old workflow wearing a new hat and asking for an upgrade fee.
The CMO move: Audit the stack before adding new AI tools. Shed underused platforms, fund clear use cases, and resist paying twice for capabilities you already own.
Slowly and then all at once, GenAI is touching nearly every part of the CMO role: Content, analytics, martech, process management, decision support, and strategy. Leadership may be next, although let us not outsource judgment to a chatbot wearing a blazer just yet.
At minimum, CMOs should treat LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and tools like NotebookLM as sparring partners. Use them to find holes in arguments, pressure-test plans, identify competitive weaknesses, justify risks, and sharpen options before presenting to the C-suite.
The point is not that AI becomes the strategist. The point is that CMOs can use AI to become better prepared, faster.
The CMO move: Build AI into the way leaders think, not just the way junior teams produce. Strategy is worth testing, but judgment still owns the final answer.
The answer is both. Business-savvy leaders who happen to be marketers are likely to gain responsibility. In CMO Huddles, we ask, “What’s your plus?” As in CMO+. For one leader, the plus may be strategy. For another, pipeline, product, pricing, customer experience, sales enablement, or market expansion.</p><p>If your stated expertise is only demand generation, your remit may shrink. Not because demand gen stops mattering, but because leaders who are perceived as tacticians rarely get invited into the bigger business questions. “Just the marketer” remains one of the most expensive labels a CMO can wear.
The CMO move: Build a differentiated reputation inside and outside the company. Show that marketing is not a department of campaigns. It is a force multiplier across growth, reputation, customer insight, and strategy.
There is always a countertrend. As more work becomes virtual, AI-assisted, and asynchronous, in-person connection becomes more valuable, not less. Teams, customers, prospects, partners, and peers still need time together to build trust and context.
>If your customer advisory board met in person once out of four times, consider making it twice. If a trade show brings your people together, use it as a staff connection moment too. If peer connection keeps your CMO brain from melting into quarterly review soup, budget for that as well.</p><p>We need to break bread together. To bond. To affirm each other’s importance. To laugh. To learn. To debate. To share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Yes, sometimes penguin hats are involved. We contain multitudes.</p><p>The CMO move: Budget for the human moments that make the technical work better.
The original CMO Super Huddle referenced in this newsletter was made possible by sponsors including:
Iterable, Clozd, Seismic, Boomerang, HG Insights, and SalesHood, along with partners including TiE Silicon Valley, Forrester, Bospar, and Spiralyze.
Budget planning works best when it becomes a disciplined debate, not an annual spreadsheet performance. CMOs need a base plan, upside bets, a GenAI point of view, a clear CMO+ narrative, and room for real human connection.</p><p>Budget season is not about guessing perfectly. It is about making choices you can defend when the market, the board, or the CFO changes the weather.
CMOs should include a conservative base plan, pre-approved upside programs, clear stop-start trade-offs, and measurable experiments that can scale if market conditions improve.
GenAI should prompt a review of staffing mix, content production, enablement workflows, analytics, and martech spend. Fund proven use cases before buying new tools.
CMO+ refers to the added enterprise responsibility a CMO can own beyond traditional marketing, such as strategy, pipeline, product, pricing, customer experience, or sales enablement.
>In-person time builds trust, context, and momentum with teams, customers, partners, and peers. As work becomes more virtual and AI-assisted, human connection becomes a strategic counterweight.