Huddlers in the News

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 463: CRO: Friend or Foe?

Joelle Kaufman has been both a CRO and a CMO—and she’s here to tell you: if sales and marketing aren’t on the same page, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

In this Huddles Quick Take, Joelle outlines the three most common mistakes CMOs make when trying to align with sales—and how to avoid them. From pipeline goals to budget tension to attribution battles, Joelle shares how CMOs can build better partnerships that actually drive revenue.

What You’ll Learn:

• 3 alignment mistakes that keep marketing and sales at odds
• Why obsessing over MQLs sends the wrong signal
• How shared pipeline goals help unify teams
• The real problem with attribution finger-pointing 

For the rest of the conversation with Joelle, visit our YouTube channel (CMO Huddles Hub) or click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64XHb_E7UT4.

Get more insights like these by joining our free Starter program at cmohuddles.com.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“Help, our CEO wants to increase the reach of our podcast dramatically, but nothing seems to work,” shared a frustrated CMO from a $250mil tech company. We’ve all been there. A senior exec stumbles across a podcast success story—usually one with a massive consumer audience—and suddenly expects your niche B2B show to take off like SmartLess. That’s not how this works. But don’t worry, this post isn’t a rant. It’s a roadmap.

Here are 8 ways to increase the reach (and value) of your podcast—without selling your soul or sacrificing quality: [For a more complete list, visit RenegadeMarketing.com/blog]

1. Nail the Content First

This should go without saying, but far too many shows overlook the fundamentals. Prioritize clear audio, sharp editing, and relevant topics. If you don’t have something unique or genuinely helpful to say, no amplification trick will save you.

2. Define the Right Audience

Success isn’t about volume—it’s about value. My show is for B2B CMOs. Every topic, guest, and soundbite is tailored to their pain points. You don’t need 10,000 listeners if the right 500 are tuning in.

3. Find Your White Space

If your show sounds like everyone in your category, you’re toast. Take inspiration from Jeff Morgan at Elements, who built a category-leading podcast for dentists when no one else had. Specificity breeds loyalty.

4. Choose Guests Strategically

Whether it’s customers (great for relationship building) or well-known thought leaders (great for awareness), your guests should be relevant and share-worthy. Bonus: Guests with large followings often promote the episode—just make it easy for them with ready-to-go assets.

5. Consistency Is Non-Negotiable

Release episodes weekly—same time, same length. Sporadic publishing kills momentum. A reliable cadence builds habits and trust with your listeners.

6. Multiply Your Assets

Record both audio and video. Then slice your content into 90-second clips and quote cards. Share them on LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, newsletters—wherever your audience hangs out. These “micro-moments” extend your reach exponentially.

7. Be a Guest on Other Podcasts

One of the best ways to grow your show is to appear on others that reach similar audiences. Just like being a great interviewer, being a great guest takes prep. Be spontaneous, sure—but also pithy. Give your host room to respond. You’re in a conversation, not a keynote.

8 . Don’t Forget Internal Value

If your podcast builds customer love, sharpens your POV, and trains your sales team—that’s value, even if the external reach is modest. Would you be happy speaking to 800 members of your target audience every month? Most executives would be thrilled. That’s the power of a niche podcast.

Final Thought

Before your CEO asks about “reach,” help them understand the purpose. In niche B2B, a podcast isn’t just a megaphone. It’s a magnet, a relationship builder, and a strategic asset.

What have you done to grow your podcast’s audience?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 462: Building a Better ABM Motion

ABM falls apart fast when teams jump in before locking down who they’re chasing, why it matters, and how it’s all supposed to run. Sales pushes one list, marketing builds another, and no one agrees on who actually matters. No shared ICP? No clean data? Well, no chance. You need a strategy.

Guest host Jon Russo (B2B Fusion) corrals Heidi Bullock (Tealium), Patti Newcomer (Centerbase), and Bindu Chellappan (Corpay) for a breakdown of how they’re keeping their ABM engines running clean. Think pods with purpose, seller-first workflows, and data that matters.

In this episode:

• Heidi on running pods that bring marketing, sales, and CS into one motion
• Patti on aligning across the funnel and why ABM needs ownership
• Bindu on activating firmographic and intent data with shared definitions

Plus:

• Where alignment really starts
• Why trust beats tech every time
• How AI is speeding up the grunt work without losing the signal
• The metrics that actually tell you it’s working

Tune in to learn about what breaks ABM, what fixes it, and how to keep teams pulling in the same direction.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“Hey Drew, I can’t keep up with all the AI stuff; it’s just overwhelming,” shared a CMO at a $450mil tech company. The other Huddlers were relieved to hear they weren’t alone. A fascinating discussion ensued as these CMOs shared what they know, what they don’t, and how they’re sorting through the myriad of options. Here are some of their questions and an aggregation of the best answers.

How Are B2B CMOs Using GenAI Right Now?

Most CMOs admit they are still in the early days of GenAI adoption. Most don’t have a GenAI strategy. Most are creating content more efficiently. For example, those creating podcasts are doing so 5-10x faster by recording, editing, and publishing with just one person using Descript.

How Do We Get Beyond the “Go Play” and “Dabbling” Stage?

Strategy before tools. This means identifying the problems you want to solve, which, when solved, would have the most significant impact on the business. For example, you may need to translate and route hundreds of digital ads into fifty different languages multiple times per year for multiple ad platforms. That’s a lot of variations and the perfect labor-intensive task at which GenAI excels.

Benchmark your time sucks. Ideally, your team will be able to benchmark the current workflows for the most time-consuming projects. Some of these projects can be streamlined easily with one or more existing tools (like the podcast example). Focus on a few of these initially to record some quick wins.

Isolate the big wins: Others may require more complex solutions with API integrations – stuff that you used to have to get IT help with but can now solve with the guidance of AI. You’ll want to create a matrix (potential value, time to solution, complexity of solution) to help shape your priorities.

Training before licenses. Getting licenses for everyone on your team sounds like a great idea until you realize adoption is not universal. Giving them the tool alone does not improve productivity. Training your team together with some specific usage expectations will move things forward. Then, gather monthly to share problems solved and unsolved. Given the speed at which these tools evolve, expect to do training 2-3x per year.

How Important Is It That CMOs Use These Tools Themselves?

It’s imperative. First, every leader should have a folder on their phone's home page with at least 3 LLMs (I have the paid versions of ChatGPT and Claude and the free version of Perplexity). There’s no reason you shouldn’t use these tools multiple times a day to prepare for meetings, think through your ideas, and investigate something personal. Learn the basics of prompting. Better yet, become a master prompter.

Jeff Morgan, CMO of Elements, uses this prompt engineering framework:

S = Specifications

P = Process

A = Authenticity

R = Rules & Regulation

K = KPIs

How are you keeping up?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 461: Pricing Power: Marketing's CFO Currency

Let's face it, most marketing metrics don't travel well to the CFO's office.

Pricing power is different. It's measurable, margin-backed, and proof that your brand is strong enough to charge more without losing volume.

To help make sense of it all, Drew brings in Chris Burggraeve, Founder of Vicomte and author of books on marketing and business strategy. Together, they discuss what pricing power means, how to measure it, and why it's the most powerful way to communicate marketing value to your CFO and C-suite.

In this episode:

• What pricing power means and how to measure it

• Why brand strength drives profit, not just visibility

• How CMOs can align with CFOs through finance fluency

• The tools and mindset needed to link marketing to valuation

• How pricing power bridges marketing metrics with financial outcomes
  

Tune in for a clearer way to connect brand, margin, and market strength.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“It feels like a perfect economic storm,” shared an anguished CMO from a $300mil tech company, adding, “Our buyers are hesitant because of the overall economic uncertainty, new entrants are disrupting our category, we just expanded our product line, and no one knows what will happen to the government funding that benefited our industry,” they detailed. Nodding empathetically, I realized it was time to update my recession playbook with a GenAI-first mindset.

Polish Your Positioning

Ensure your brand is perceived as a "must-have" rather than a "nice-to-have." This involves clearly communicating the unique value and necessity of your product or service. [Use Deep Research to help explore options. And test synthetic research from companies like Evidenza or Subconscious.ai for speedy insights at 50% of traditional research $s]. understand the difference between a good reputation and a poor one.

Sell Your “Speed to Value”

When CFOs become CFNOs, the only “yes” you’ll hear is for those products or services that can deliver a fast return on investment. [Run recorded customer calls through a customized GPT to isolate speed-to-value quotes and context. Identify customers who get value faster and can quickly double down on that segment.]

Call Your Customers

They may be in the same or worse economic turmoil. If they are, make a customer for life by offering better terms on your current contract in exchange for a longer deal and a high-quality testimonial. [Run a Deep Research assessment of their industry seeking insights into how they could outperform competitors in a recession].

Elevate Your Executives

Individuals get 10x the organic reach on LinkedIn than companies yet few brands scale executive thought leadership. [Create a Project on ChatGpt or Claude that includes brand guidelines, past writing by each exec and other parameters. Then, ask the exec to dictate 20-25 minutes of their latest thinking and let your top editor run with it. The goal should be 2-3 thoughtful weekly posts from these execs. Bonus points, if they record vertical videos, a medium LinkedIn is heavily favoring. Breaking news: LinkedIn now allows you to promote individual posts.]

Balance Your Budget

You know your CFO is coming for funds. Get ahead of this. Draft two plans, one at the current budget and one with a 20% cut. Go back through company data from the early days of the pandemic and show the lagging impact of those budget cuts. [Run projections on the impact of budget cuts on pipeline via LLMs. And show how your GenAI tests should yield massive savings in the coming years].

Value Your Visitors

With the dual whammy of declining organic site traffic and fewer buyers in the marketplace, every qualified site visitor must be treated like royalty. This means rethinking your landing page experiences and enabling answers, not navigation. [We are currently testing two LLM-driven tools, Webless.ai on RenegadeMarketing.com and Salespeak.ai on CMOHuddles.com. We'll share results at CMO Super Huddle]

What's in your recession playbook?

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 459: The CMO as Chief Collaboration Officer

Be honest, when you think “CMO,” do you picture campaigns, brand work, or the de facto unifier of a siloed C-suite?

In this episode, guest host Narine Galstian (SADA) leads a conversation with Katie McAdams (Basis Technologies) and Julia Goebel (Komodo Health) on how the CMOs role has grown into a key driver of org-wide alignment. It’s part diplomat, part coach, translating strategy across departments and turning zigzags at the top into coordinated momentum.

In this episode:

• Katie shares how early signals from marketing and sales can shape product strategy before it hits the roadmap
• Julia explains why cohesive brand messaging only happens when product, marketing, and sales move as on
• Narine explores how marketing becomes the connective tissue that keeps cross-functional teams in sync

Plus:

• Why fragile alignment breaks when you skip the relationship-building
• How “agree and commit” clears the clutter when teams clash
• The case for marketers to stop owning just campaigns and start owning outcomes

Tune in for a blueprint on becoming the Chief Collaboration Officer your org needs!

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“Help, our CEO has decided Marketing needs 80% fewer people because of GenAI,” lamented a CMO at a $275M SaaS company. Tempering my outrage for a moment, we tried to laugh off the insanity and then searched for solutions. An untempered rant to follow. Then jujitsu.

First, a few snarky responses to this CEO to clear the air:

• You’re joking, right?
• Why not cut 100% of Marketing and let the bots do the whole thing?
• While you’re at it, why not cut Sales, HR, accounting, and engineering by 80%?
• Which genius guru told you this was a good idea?
• Or did your digital twin recommend this approach? Mine suggested I update my LinkedIn profile.

Rant over. Time for some leadership jujitsu.

Finding the Pony in the AI Panic

My father loved to remind me that if you saw a lot of shit in the paddock, there had to be a pony nearby. My job was always to find the pony. Stay with me.

Like it or not, AI will transform every aspect of business. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t be easy. Many will screw it up, moving too quickly, emphasizing tactics over strategy, efficiency over effectiveness. It will be messy.

The bigger question now is who within the organization will lead that transformation. You can guess who I think could and should find that pony. Hint: It’s not the CEO mentioned earlier.

The CMOs Role in Leading the AI Shift

CMOs are uniquely positioned to grab the reins of this bronco:

• You’re already spending more on tech than any other department
• You were the first to experiment with GenAI
• You know how to run cross-departmental initiatives
• You know how to orchestrate pilot tests
• You know that strategy comes before execution
• You can use both sides of your brand
• You know what matters to your customers
• You have the empathy to help fearful employees gallop through this gauntlet

I could go on.

Change the AI Narrative Before Your CEO Does

So, let’s reimagine the conversation with the CEO, steering it from staff cuts to change management:

CEO: Marketing needs to cut its staff by 80% (because of GenAI)

CMO: I agree with you that GenAI will dramatically improve the productivity of our department. In fact, we could be a model for the whole organization.

CEO: I’m not sure I follow.

CMO: We are currently benchmarking every workflow, from content creation to campaign management, pipeline tracking to sales enablement, and so on. We also have a list of strategic priorities that GenAI can probably help us with.

CEO: That’s nice, but so what?

CMO: With these benchmarks and our strategic priorities in place, we can determine where GenAI could yield the most significant productivity gains. It could also help us be more effective, driving a lot more pipeline and revenue with the same headcount. But first, we need to run some pilots.

CEO: Pilots?

CMO: Yes, by running pilots, we can test our way to success without disrupting everyone at once. Our successes can be replicated across the organization, and others can avoid our failures.

CEO: And you can lead this?

CMO: Damn straight! Let's ride.

Written by Drew Neisser

Listen Here | From Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 458: Sales + Marketing: The Alignment Equation

Nothing scrambles a CMOs brain faster than parsing pipeline math with sales.

Alignment starts with one number, owned together, and a shared path from first touch to closed won. Miss that, and both sides will be pulling their hair out debating what happened to the pipeline.

In this episode, Drew Neisser is joined by Lisa Cole (2X), Dave Bornmann (Higher Logic), and Marshall Poindexter (yorCMO) to tackle the GTM strategy that frays the most nerves: sales and marketing alignment.

In this episode:

• Lisa shares how GTM teams build trust through shared goals, clean data, and dashboards that leave no room for spin
• Dave explains how strong sales relationships gave marketing influence across the full funnel
• Marshall shows how marketers earn trust by speaking sales’ language and showing they’re in it for the same win

Plus:

• Why sales questions your pipeline numbers and how to rebuild trust
• How shared dashboards and definitions keep teams honest
• How to speak sales without losing your marketing lens

Tune in to hear how sales and marketing alignment starts with shared goals and grows from there.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcast/

“My CEO ordered me to never use the word ‘brand’ again,” lamented a CMO from a $75mil SaaS brand. “Then he told me to only spend money on things that drive revenue,” the CMO shared. Ah, yes, the double whammy. Everyone in the huddle sympathized with a “been there” nod. I silently stewed. A productive rant to follow.

Should CMOs Stop Using the Word “Brand?”

Yes. It’s toxic. Time to move on, and this is from the guy whose latest book subhead reads, “12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands.” If you must venture into brand-like language, use the word “reputation.” It’s much easier to grasp. Even CFOs can understand the difference between a good reputation and a poor one.

Does That Mean I Can Have Budget Items for Reputation Building?

No, unless you want that part to be cut faster than you can say “brand.” If possible, avoid sharing spending buckets beyond people, programs, and tech.

If you, like many CMOs, divide your budget into demandgen or growth marketing and everything else, your CFO will assume that everything else is unmeasurable and possibly wasteful. Choose your budget-bucket labels carefully. Events, for example, can drive new logos, accelerate late-stage deals, help with expansion, and reduce churn. If events are funded from your “growth marketing” budget, then that’s how they will be measured, and that may limit this invaluable channel.

What About the “Only Spending on Revenue Drivers” Directive?

Live with it. All marketing drives revenue (there, I said it!). It’s just a matter of timeframe and targets. Unless you’re selling an impulse item (Of course, I would buy another penguin hat if it showed up in my Instagram feed), you operate in the world of considered purchases and buyer journeys. Different marketing activities impact different parts of your target at different times in different ways.

Let’s take Analyst Relations. It can take 12-18 months to build a quadrant-shifting relationship with an analyst. When that higher rating or new category of your own making suddenly arrives, you’ll be rewarded with higher consideration and close rates. That’s revenue too. Just a bit slower.

Could We Shift This Conversation Altogether

Yes. Please. Let’s start at the end and work backward. Right now, every B2B brand has a win rate. If you, for example, compete against three better-known brands, your win rate is likely lower than that of the top three. What would it take to improve your win rate? Most likely, it is a combination of product changes, pricing, positioning, CX, and promotion, including analyst relations. Lead that conversation.

The second conversational shift is to pricing power. Conduct a thorough analysis of the discounting required to close deals. Understand how much discounting impacts profit margins. Find out the last time you took a price increase. Reputational strength equals pricing power and higher close rates. Work with your CFO to build the model.

Marketing does drive revenue. But it's not about SQLs.

Written by Drew Neisser