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Forrester's Matt Selheimer urged CMOs to adapt to younger buyers, reposition budgets as a portfolio of ideas, measure beyond revenue lagging indicators, partner with Customer Success, structure teams around audiences, and lead GenAI adoption with readiness, governance, and business value in mind. The message: Transform deliberately, not theatrically, and keep planting for durable growth now.
B2B buyers have changed, and not in a tidy “update the persona slide” kind of way. Younger decision-makers expect more transparency, more useful digital experiences, more self-directed research, and fewer vague promises wrapped in enterprise adjectives.
That was the focus of a CMO Huddles Bonus Huddle with Matthew Selheimer, VP and research director at Forrester. His advice was practical and appropriately uncomfortable: CMOs need to adapt marketing strategy, budgets, metrics, team structure, customer engagement, and GenAI readiness for a market that is not waiting around for old playbooks to become charming again.
Here are six moves worth making.
Matt made the demographic shift plain:
“Millennials and GenZ now outnumber GenX and Boomers in management roles,” notes Selheimer.
He added:
“you can’t assume that what’s worked for older buyers is going to work for younger buyers who have different expectations of what good looks like,”
That does not mean every younger buyer behaves the same. It does mean digital fluency, self-education, peer validation, transparency, speed, and useful content matter more than ever. Buyers are less patient with “contact us to learn anything important” experiences and more likely to form opinions before Sales enters the chat.
The CMO move: Audit the buying journey for younger decision-makers who expect usefulness before conversation.
Matt advised CMOs to rethink the budget conversation:
“think like a VC and reposition the marketing budget as a ‘basket of ideas’ with an overall ROI.”
He explained:
“That way, if one or two experiments don’t pan out, you can still deliver in a way CFOs understand,”
This is a much better framing than pretending every individual tactic will perform predictably. Some bets are core. Some are growth experiments. Some are learning investments. Some are brand or customer-value plays that influence future revenue but do not show up neatly as next Tuesday’s pipeline.
The CMO move: Group investments by role, risk, time horizon, and expected return so Finance sees portfolio discipline instead of budget fog.
Revenue and pipeline matter. Of course they do. But they often tell you what already happened, not whether future growth is forming.
Matt put it this way:
“Revenue and pipeline are still important, but they are lagging indicators.”
CMOs should also track signals like brand health, retention, customer engagement, partnership strength, buyer experience quality, expansion readiness, and campaign effectiveness. These measures help reveal whether the system is getting healthier before revenue shows up with a late-arriving report card.
The CMO move: Keep revenue in the story, but add leading indicators that show whether growth conditions are improving.
Churn makes growth harder. This is one of those truths that sounds obvious until a company spends millions filling a leaky bucket and calls it momentum.
Matt warned:
“If you have high churn, it is much harder to drive growth.”
He also challenged marketers to expand their role:
“Marketers need to partner with Customer Success and Sales to create and drive customer engagement programs, not just to gather references and testimonials,”
That is the shift. Customer marketing is not just advocacy harvesting. It is education, adoption, expansion, community, renewal support, and helping customers get more value from what they already bought.
The CMO move: Make customer engagement a growth strategy, not a reference-request workflow.
Matt recommended an audience-centric approach to marketing. That means teams should be organized around the people and markets they serve, not merely internal functions or campaign types.
He offered a useful operating principle:
“Each team needs to be large enough to meet the challenge but small enough to not get bogged down,”
That balance matters. Oversized teams can slow down. Undersized teams can burn out or miss critical expertise. Audience-centric squads can bring together product marketing, demand, content, digital, customer insight, and sales enablement around a specific buyer or segment.
The CMO move: Build teams that can move quickly around priority audiences without creating another coordination tax.
Matt’s GenAI advice was direct:
“This is not the moment to wait and see.”
He suggested that CMOs can lead adoption by starting with readiness and business value:
“CMOs should and can lead GenAI adoption, starting with a readiness assessment and identifying how this tech will drive business value.”
But speed without structure is a fine way to create problems faster. Matt also warned:
“Data readiness is the Achilles heel of most AI initiatives,”
And he advised establishing enablement, governance policies, and vendor safeguards. That is exactly where CMOs should be practical. Identify use cases, define acceptable data use, evaluate risk, train teams, and measure whether AI is improving outcomes, not just velocity.
The CMO move: Move on GenAI, but bring governance, data readiness, and business value along for the ride.
Changing buyer expectations require more than seasonal refreshes and optimistic planning decks. CMOs need to adapt how they understand buyers, fund experiments, measure progress, support customers, structure teams, and lead GenAI adoption.
The best move is deliberate transformation. Not panic. Not theater. Not “we launched an AI task force” confetti. Just the steady work of aligning marketing with how buyers actually buy now.
Younger buyers expect more transparent, useful, digital, and self-directed experiences. They often research deeply before engaging with Sales.
A portfolio approach lets CMOs balance proven programs, experiments, brand investments, and customer initiatives while explaining risk and return in CFO-friendly language.
CMOs should track brand health, retention, engagement, customer value, partnership strength, buyer experience quality, and other leading indicators tied to future growth.
Start with business-value use cases, assess data readiness, create governance policies, train teams, and evaluate vendors carefully before scaling AI workflows.