Renegade Marketers Unite

One interested buyer can get an enterprise deal moving. Then the buying committee shows up, each with a question, an objection, or a reason to hit the brakes.   That first bit of interest only carries the deal so far. Finance wants numbers, technical teams want proof, champions need help making the case, and priorities can take a hard left at the worst possible moment. So where should marketing st...

Search visibility has officially outgrown your website.   SEO still has a seat at the table, but now it has a lot more company. LLMs can build answers from sources scattered across the web, including places your buyers might never visit themselves. So where does authority live now? Which prompts are worth chasing? And how do you keep "everything everywhere all at once" from becoming your channel p...

You've got the experience. The interview is where you make it clear, memorable, and unmistakably yours.   Years of stories, wins, lessons, and opinions are great raw material. Then an interview asks you to pull the right one out, fast. That's where answers can sprawl, too much context can take over, and too much polish can make you sound less like yourself. So how do you stay specific, answer clea...

AI is rewriting the CMO playbook fast. And somehow, human judgment is getting more valuable.   Start with what the machines do well. They can crank out content, make sense of scattered data, and turn repeatable tasks into workflows at ridiculous speed. That leaves marketers with a better problem to solve. What should they do with the room they get back ? Could the bigger payoff be more time for ju...

Marketing has no shortage of good ideas . The trouble is, they're all competing for the same budget, people, and attention.   When everything looks important, something has to give . A big growth bet may deserve the full weight of the team. A proven motion might be better off with a template and a handoff. And a perfectly good idea might need to sit in the parking lot for a while. Somebody has to...

Urgency makes shortcuts awfully tempting. Find the problem, make the plan , get moving. But a little more work before the sprint can save a whole lot of fixing later. People, relationships, and processes all have to be ready to carry the speed. Get that setup right, and you can hit the gas with a much better chance of keeping the wheels on.   In this episode, Drew talks with Anne Morriss , co-auth...

Company-wide AI adoption needs a flock leader. Marketing may already have  the  job.   Marketing has a few advantages here. It hears customer friction early, touches  nearly every  corner of the business, and has gotten  pretty good  at doing more with less. That makes it a natural proving ground for new ways of working, with a chance to test what works, prove the value, and give the rest of the c...

Some of the most expensive friction in B2B marketing starts with one question. Can I trust this?   The buying process already comes with enough hesitation. Add a message that burns extra brain calories, a brand promise that shifts depending on where you meet it, or outreach that feels suspiciously automated, and the trust tax starts piling up. Every extra layer gives buyers another reason to pause...

How do you know whether the brave move is to go for it or plant your feet?   CMOs are making that call with short runways, incomplete information, and teams being asked to adapt fast. Comfort can delay  the hard decision . Pressure can push leaders toward false certainty or speed for speed's sake. Brave leadership is more measured, and it gets stronger with practice.   In this episode, Drew talks...

Before you ask for another leadership tip,  check  the glasses  you're  already wearing.   Ty Hammond   doesn't  do tips anymore, which slightly complicates Drew's plan to grab a few quick leadership nuggets. Good thing. When leaders already know the  move  they need to make and  still keep  avoiding it, the blocker is often the  assumption  coloring how they see the moment. If the glasses  say  "...

PE-backed CMOs have to make  marketing make  sense at board speed.   The questions come faster. The comparisons come from portfolio companies that  look nothing  like yours. And no budget line stays "just marketing" for long.   In this episode, Drew talks with  Kevin Ruane  ( Precisely ),  Julie Kaplan  ( Higher Logic ), and  Alan Gonsenhauser  ( Demand Revenue ) about what it takes to succeed as...

Change only looks sudden when you missed the signals.   Rita McGrath gives that  idea  teeth for CMOs leading through AI, org design changes, and markets that refuse to sit still. The signals are usually there.  But in  businesses wired to confirm what already happened, they get drowned out by revenue, pipeline, CAC, and other lagging indicators. Those numbers still earn their seat, but left  alon...

Marketing and comms lose leverage when the story, the proof, and the teams carrying them run in separate lanes.   That's  how strong work gets less mileage than it should. Recognition stays in PR when demand  could   use it . Analyst proof misses the sales motion. Internal messaging sounds  adjacent to  the market story instead of connected to it. Bring the right lenses together early, and the nar...

A stuffed content library can still leave a  salesperson  empty-handed.   Somewhere along the way, sales enablement got mistaken for asset production. Sales asks, marketing  makes,  the asset goes somewhere, and the next thing you know, a seller is five minutes from a call wondering which deck, battle card, proof point, or customer story  actually helps . If the seller  has to  stop selling to fin...

When every marketing decision  has to  pay off this quarter, growth starts losing its owner .   That's  the uncomfortable read from the latest  CMO Survey . Under pressure, CMOs are making perfectly rational moves. Safer bets, tighter proof,  more focus  on the customers already in hand. The danger is what those choices start to signal. If every  case for  marketing comes back to pipeline now and...

Sales has one clean tell for whether it trusts marketing. Timing.   Bring  marketing in  late, and partnership turns into a very polite scramble. The field has moved, the campaign needs context, and sales  is  working leads without the story that made them worth chasing in the first place. Trust grows when marketing stays close enough to hear the objections, spot the stalls, and change the work wh...

The fastest way to break trust between sales and marketing is to let each team bring its own scoreboard.   Marketing can point to MQLs. Sales can point to missed revenue. Everyone can be technically right, and the business still loses. No wonder  Denise Persson  and  Chris Degnan  have little patience for functional victory laps. At  Snowflake , the question was never, "Did marketing look good?" I...

AI just handed every marketing team a bigger gas pedal. Now CMOs  have to  decide what  deserves  the speed .   Teams can now publish, prototype, adapt, and distribute at a pace that felt impossible a few years ago. The advantage comes from knowing where to accelerate, where human judgment matters most, and how to keep the creative spark intact.   A strong idea can travel further than ever. A weak...

AI is moving fast enough to make even the savviest CMO feel one tool, one workflow, and one "wait, you can do that now?" behind. The easy move is to delegate it. Let the eager people experiment. Let the technical folks wire things together. Let the team come back with something impressive enough to call progress. If that sounds like a plan, François Dufour would like a word. In this episode, we re...

The first 90 days have always mattered. Now AI is making them faster, sharper, and a lot less forgiving. In this episode, Drew talks with Paige O'Neill ( Culture Amp ), Scott Gordon ( HG Insights ), and Ali McCarthy ( Asset-Map ) about what it takes to start strong in a new CMO role. They explore how to pressure-test what you heard in the interview process, align quickly with the executive team, a...

Some CMO opportunities look promising right up until you stop asking, "Can I land this?" and start asking, "Can I actually win  at this company ?"   In a market that is warmer than it was a year ago but still unforgiving ,  Hugh Marshall  of  Heidrick & Struggles  argues that CMOs need to approach the search with two-way diligence. The offer matters, but so does knowing whether the company, CEO, b...

The go-to-market model most teams are  optimizing  may be the very thing AI is making obsolete.   Too often, the buyer experience feels like a relay race nobody asked to run. AI is already proving  there's  a faster, straighter path to answers, value, and outcomes, making the old model a lot harder to defend.   In this episode, Drew talks with  Amanda Kahlow , founder of  1mind , about why many of...

The  title is Chief Marketing Officer. The CMOs who  earn  the most influence put  Chief   first.   They're  not in the room just to deliver a marketing update.  They're  there to help the executive team make sense of what matters most, navigate tough decisions, and shape where the company goes next.   In this episode, Drew talks with  Kathie Johnson  ( Nintex ) ,  Lorie Coulombe  ( Equity Shift )...

AI experimentation created momentum. But for CMOs, it's time to move out of the sandbox and into repeatable systems.   In this Drew-on-Drew episode, the conversation shifts from AI experimentation to operational discipline. Drawing on recent conversations inside CMO Huddles and insights from the Imaginarium Summit, Drew explores what it takes to turn scattered AI experiments into a scalable operat...

If your ICP   (Ideal Customer Profile)  is still built on broad categories, instinct, and a little  wishful thinking , it may be more aspirational than operational.   An ICP like that leaves too much room for interpretation. Marketing, sales, and ops start working from different definitions of the right account, and the business keeps chasing customers that look right on paper but  don't  behave l...