Navigating the Great Shakeup: A B2B CMO's Blueprint for Survival and Mental Wellbeing

I've had an exciting and fulfilling career in B2B software marketing for ten years. Many of the companies I've worked for in the past were on a hockey stick growth trajectory while I was there. It was exciting to chase the growth and have the budget and resources to do it. I considered myself extremely lucky that I wasn't affected by any layoffs until earlier this year.

But earlier this year,? like many of you, I felt the ground shift underneath my feet. B2B marketing organizations have been shaken up, and the environment many of us find ourselves in is not one we would have imagined even a couple of years ago. I know firsthand how disorienting and challenging this can be.

Here are some of the trends I'm seeing:

• Budgets and headcounts are being slashed, yet marketing teams still need to hit aggressive lead gen, SQL, and revenue goals. This could feel exhausting as many marketing teams were already stretched before.?
• Lead generation has become tougher and more expensive. Fierce competition in certain software categories has led to incredibly high CAC, often due to the increase in cost per lead/conversion in paid advertising.
• CEOs are focusing on customer retention ("protect the house") and turning attention away from new logo acquisition. Yet many marketing organizations have been organized and focused on new logo acquisition. They need to pivot.
• Marketing tools are sprawling and expensive. Some organizations have too many marketing and sales enablement tools, and some of them are not getting enough adoption to justify their cost.
• While some marketers have embraced AI, other team members still do things as they've always done (pre-AI). They are missing out on opportunities to leverage AI to do better work faster. Yet, due to the proliferation of AI tools, marketers are challenged to figure out what's hype vs. what's truly useful.
• The SDR role is changing; many new AI companies and incumbents like Salesforce are trying to offer prospecting services (AI SDR agents) meant to replace the SDR.
• Some CEOs are deepening investment in channel partners rather than marketing to buyers directly because spending on that channel appears to be lower. This shift can leave marketers feeling out of the loop and unsure of where to focus their efforts.?

What CMOs Need to Achieve in This Landscape

More than ever, CMOs find themselves needing to prove to their CEOs that they deserve to keep their budget, programs, and team members. It’s a heavy burden that can take a toll on anyone’s well-being.?

CMOs I know are looking for ways to control or cut marketing spending (especially paid channels) while still hitting their lead generation goals. They need to find ways to do more with less.?

They recognize that there is a big opportunity to leverage genAI to gain efficiencies and unlock new avenues of creativity. Yet, many marketers don't have enough time to devote to learning and figuring out how best to utilize LLMs in their work. It’s a catch-22 that’s all too familiar.?

Sadly, layoffs have happened; CMOs have had to operate with a leaner team and restructure their team members' roles.

Further, marketing teams are tasked with doing more to support customer retention and expansion. They need to ramp up customer marketing programs and measure their contribution to these goals.

Finally, marketers in 2024 face a novel challenge in trying to break through the noise. As AI SDR agents gain adoption and each marketing platform (e.g., LinkedIn, HubSpot, etc.) provides native AI writing/editing tools, the noise and volume of messages hitting our leads' inboxes only worsens.

How do brands offer valuable information and insights that break through the noise? How can marketers apply their unique insights and intuition to create great work when AI can write "good enough" content?

These questions aren’t hypothetical, they have kept me up at night.?

Of course, CMOs operating in companies of different sizes don't face the same problems. Smaller company and startup CMOs may be most interested in getting marketing programs running efficiently from the get-go by taking advantage of software tools and AI as much as possible to reduce the need to increase spending (or hire multiple new team members). Medium-sized and larger companies are dealing with reduced budgets and resources, navigating noisy markets, and trying to align their marketing teams to support customer retention/upsell.

I've been reflecting on these trends and challenges and talking to my senior marketing professionals in my network about what they're seeing. It is a disruptive time for many reasons. However, it also allows marketers to start doing things differently, building more flexible and resilient organizations, and to regain a sense of control over our work.?

With some time and distance since the layoff, as well as the new perspective I've gained by working for my own AI software company Intersight , I've developed some recommendations for marketing leaders. My hope is that these ideas will not only increase the effectiveness of your marketing programs and team members but also improve your well-being by making your work more manageable and fulfilling.??

Ideas to Improve Marketing Efficiency (and Reduce Your Stress)

I see opportunities for marketing teams to increase their efficiency in several ways. These ideas should make your CEO and CFO happy while ensuring that you and your team members are less chained to your desks.???

1. Improve content creation speed and quality and the repurposing process

While audiences' attention spans can be pretty short, most B2B professionals will continue to engage with thoughtful, insightful, or entertaining content created by brands.

Thanks to AI, marketing teams can reduce the effort spent on content creation (e.g., articles, SEO-optimized guides, emails, social media posts) while retaining the same or better results.

Marketing teams can use sophisticated AI prompts to create thoughtful SEO blog post outlines, conduct background research, and write first drafts (which humans should edit).

A marketer can record a 45-minute interview/podcast with a subject matter expert, export the transcript, and then use AI to generate many derived pieces of content, including LinkedIn posts that link to the original recording, multiple articles, short blurbs promoting those articles, and email copy (shout out to Shawn McGaff ) for showing me his incredibly clever method for doing this).

Once marketing copy has been drafted, a marketer can use copy editing tools like Grammarly to edit their work in a fraction of the time as a human editor.

I've been using ChatGPT as part of my brainstorming and writing process for over a year, and I've also used Grammarly extensively. These tools have helped me reduce the time I spend on content creation by 50% to 80% (depending on the type of work I am doing).

If you’re interested in knowing more details about my processes and AI prompts, feel free to reach out and I’ll be happy to share.?

2. Streamline your marketing tool stack and integrate tools where possible?

I've seen how easy it is for marketing teams to acquire more tools. After a while, the martech stack becomes increasingly difficult to manage, and some tools don't get the user adoption to justify their continued existence.

One of the easiest ways to reduce marketing spend is to evaluate your martech stack, see which ones aren't being used enough, and stop paying for them. With martech vendors constantly innovating, it's likely that you can stop paying for some tools as their functionality is rolled into another platform.

For instance, HubSpot now offers data enrichment natively, thanks to its acquisition of Clearbit. HubSpot now offers Buyer Intent Data for free (in beta) on your website visitors (you can specify which pages you want to track and provide firmographic data on your Ideal Buyers). HubSpot natively tells you which companies you should focus on. With innovations like these, you may be able to cancel subscriptions to other buyer intent data tools.

Additionally, look for opportunities to integrate various tools to work seamlessly together and reduce the time your team members spend on manual tasks.

Ideas to Increase Marketing Precision

When I say precision, I mean two things: 1. Narrowing in on more specific sets of audiences and (2) sharpening the messages used to increase their relevance.

Some brands may get a significant boost (in leads, conversions, and sales ) by sharpening their messaging or repositioning their offerings, especially if they operate in a highly competitive market.

The problem is that the traditional process used for repositioning and rebranding companies is way too slow and expensive.

Traditional process: I've been through an expensive (and slow) rebranding process in the past. The rebranding process started with the hired agency gathering input from company stakeholders (about ten people, including all senior execs), gathering insights from our customers, and an audit of our competitors' websites. Then, the agency moved into draft messaging and conducted more interviews with select stakeholders to review/refine draft messages (in this case, I effectively told them where they missed the mark and what language to use instead).

After another three weeks, they finally delivered a written package of new messages and key findings from their own research. This process took three months. After that, we paid another visual design firm to translate the new brand into a visual identity. This portion of the process took another couple of months. Only once this portion wrapped up we started to redo our website.

While I do think having an outsider perspective (the rebranding agency) was valuable, I don't think the process needed to be nearly as long or as expensive. Fortunately, marketers now have the tools to do this type of work in a fraction of the time. I believe any motivated marketer can complete this process in 4 weeks.?

New AI-powered, efficient process to sharpen your messaging (or re-brand your company)

1. Stakeholders interview: Interview your executives to clarify the prioritized audience segments your marketing team should message.

Your executives should be clear about your ideal customer profile, how that customer persona differs from the previous targeted audience, why they value your offerings, and the strategic value of acquiring such customers for your company. Try to get specific information out of your conversations, such as "We are not sticky enough when we sell into Program Management offices. We really need to help Chief Transformation Officers of Fortune 500 companies adopt us as their strategic command center for managing their business transformation."

2. Sales calls audit: Listen to sales call recordings from closed won deals where the deal was sold to this newly identified ICP. Find out what was said that resonated with the buyers.

You don't have to listen to all of the sales call recordings manually; you can use AI to get key takeaways (and I'm developing a tool that helps companies do this).

3. Competitive landscape audit: Do a competitive landscape audit to understand what your primary competitors are saying. Visit your competitors’ websites and review their marketing and product materials. This can be done much faster than before because you can use ChatGPT or other LLM providers to crawl your competitors' websites and analyze their positioning and claims.

4. Gather customer insights: Extract customer insights (e.g., what your best customers say about your brand and how they are receiving value) from company data sources such as call recordings with customers, case studies, reviews on peer review websites, and customer success stories. Here, you want to confirm what customers value or love about your company and why they purchased your solution(s).

You can significantly speed this up by feeding data files to an LLM and prompting it to look for patterns, insights, and themes in customer language.

5. Synthesize information and generate new ideas for positioning your company/products. Give AI the goals of your rebranding/repositioning project. Provide AI with your current messaging, and ask AI to analyze and further synthesize the key findings from customers, sales calls, and competitive audits.

Then, tell AI to brainstorm new positioning(s) and core messages for your company based on competitive whitespace, insights from your analysis, and information about your Ideal Customer Profile (including their needs, priorities, how their success is measured, challenges, and statements of how you provide value). Finally, ask the AI to evaluate and stack rank its ideas based on their likelihood to resonate with your target buyer personas.

6. Pick winners. Look through AI-generated recommendations, refine your prompts, and loop through this a few times to get more messaging ideas and variety. Select the messaging you like the most and get feedback from key stakeholders.

7. Create a content plan and derivative messaging for the winning theme(s). Once your stakeholders have voiced their opinions, use AI to help you create a content plan based on the new positioning and message. For instance, AI can be asked to generate LinkedIn posts, prospecting/outreach messages, and website copy for various website pages. Ask AI to generate naturally-sounding sound bites and messages for different mediums and buyer journey stages. Compile these into helpful docs for team members.

8. Socialize new positioning with staff. Train your marketing, sales, and customer success teams so that everyone is aligned on the new messaging and agrees to use it in their role.

With the right approach and support from ChatGPT (I recommend the latest o1-preview model), one experienced marketing team member can finish this project in 4 weeks or less (and no more than 40 hours).

Ideas to Increase Marketing's Contribution Towards Customer Retention

It can be disorienting if your team is suddenly tasked with supporting customer retention after spending years organized around new logo acquisition.

When I joined Shibumi after being used to working for marketing teams that primarily focused on new logo acquisition, I found myself suddenly having to pivot my mental model and my areas of work. The company's number one priority in 2023 was "protect the house," meaning we do everything we can to retain our customers (Fortune 500 companies plus large advisory firms) and expand into existing accounts.

I, along with my new boss, build a nascent customer marketing program that would:

• Get more current users to use the newer platform features (many of the users in this case are not decision-makers or economic buyers)
• Help enterprise AEs get deeper into existing accounts to uncover expansion opportunities.
• Find creative ways to generate customer case studies when almost no customer wanted to do official case studies
• Bring customers together by creating high-value events
• Help market the value of strategic services to customers so they would become more engaged and use the software platform more
• Continuously keep Shibumi top of mind for busy customers thinking about other matters

Much of my time and a significant portion of our marketing budget was dedicated to customer marketing. We launched a customer newsletter, dedicated webinars on product and strategic services, and thought leadership for customers. We also helped enterprise AEs host regional events with customers and prospects and ran 360-degree campaigns on prioritized accounts.

We tried to prove the value of this work by tracking customer engagements with individual campaigns, programs, and events and correlating our activities to increases in product usage.

Closing Thoughts

As we navigate this shakeup in B2B marketing, CMOs have a real chance to turn challenges into opportunities. By embracing AI to work smarter, honing in on precise messaging, and shifting focus toward keeping our customers happy, we can not only meet but exceed our goals—even with tighter budgets and leaner teams. It's about being agile and open to new ways of doing things. Those who adapt and innovate now won't just survive the turmoil—they'll come out ahead, proving their worth and setting the stage for future success.

Let's chat if any of this strikes a chord and you're curious about putting these ideas into action. With my 10 years of experience in B2B software marketing and hands-on knowledge of getting the most of AI, I'm here to help you navigate these challenges. There is no pressure—just a friendly conversation to see how we might work together to make your marketing efforts shine. Feel free to reach out anytime!