CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

The tools are faster, better, and cheaper than they were twelve months ago. Teams are using them. Output is going up and everyone is busy telling the story of how AI is transforming their marketing. There’s a few things that I am actually seeing underneath that story that paint a different picture. AI is speeding up execution, I do not disagree with this. But in a business without clear strategic...

It’s an understandable reaction. More input should produce more output. But in most of the businesses I work with, that’s not actually where the constraint is. Leads are coming in. Pipelines look active. Salespeople are having conversations. And still, the revenue number at the end of the month doesn’t match the level of activity. Where are the gaps then? 1 - Lead response time is slow. Research a...

That cost, it’s the time, inefficiency, and missed opportunity buried inside a marketing technology stack that nobody fully understands. Most businesses that have grown to at least $5m in revenue have built their stack reactively. A new hire joined and brought their preferred tool. An agency recommended a platform as part of their onboarding. The founder bought something at a conference because it...

The easy assumption when sales drop and revenue flatlines, is that marketing is broken. You have the wrong channel, the wrong message, the wrong team. So you hire someone new, add another tool, or brief an agency to fix it. Here’s what I actually see when I get inside these businesses. The marketing isn’t broken. The decision-making is. PwC’s 2025 Pulse Survey found that 57% of executives say slow...

In this episode Ant explains why CMO Field Notes exists - and what makes it different from most marketing content you’ll come across. Not advice from the outside. Observations from inside growing businesses, written down and shared clearly. He covers the three areas the show returns to week after week: the decision-making that stalls marketing before it starts, the technology stacks that cost more...