The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan – Details, episodes & analysis

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The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan

Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/10d. Total Eps: 15

Welcome to The B2B CMO Podcast, a show for marketing executives who are redefining what it means to be a strategic leader. Join Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan every week as they talk with the very best Chief Marketing Officers who are navigating the modern marketing playbook and positioning themselves as strategic leaders. Each episode, we unpack what it really takes to lead through complexity, earn trust at the strategy table, and shape the future of growth. We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth. For more marketing leadership resources, visit [b2bcmoproject.com](http://b2bcmoproject.com/).

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Apple Podcasts

🇫🇷 France - marketing
28/08/2026
#86
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
27/08/2026
#85
🇫🇷 France - marketing
27/08/2026
#56
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
26/08/2026
#49

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/
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https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/
18 shares

https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/
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https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts
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https://webflow.com/
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Score global : 68%

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How to Embed AI into Your Marketing Team with Wendy White

Episode 6

Monday, June 22, 2026 • Duration 33:24

Wendy White is the Chief Marketing and Partner Officer at Daxko, where she leads marketing and partnerships for the platform that's powering the member management and operations engine behind so much of the fitness industry. Wendy has been a CMO for a number of companies and held globe-spanning marketing leadership roles at giants like Microsoft and Intel. Wendy joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss how to lead an organizational AI transformation, what it means for a CMO to lead as a business-first executive, and why a new brand measurement matrix is needed for an era where LLMs, not search engines, are where buyers do their research.

Episode Takeaways

CMOs should position themselves as business executives first, and functional leaders second. Strategic CMOs actively weigh in on customer success strategy, sales org structure, and software procurement, which are all outside the traditional CMO scope. The modern CMO who earns a durable seat at the table does so by demonstrating strategic fluency across the entire business, not just owning the marketing lane.
Treat AI adoption as a cultural mandate, not just a tooling decision. This means changing job descriptions, updating career ladders to include behavioral AI capabilities, and making it explicit company-wide that AI is not a choice. Leaders who treat AI as optional will fall behind those who structurally embed it into how people are hired, evaluated, and promoted.
The "follow the sun" model, combined with AI, creates a continuous marketing execution engine. For example, Wendy's team has roughly half of its FTE headcount in India, with AI tools trained on brand guidelines, Gong calls, and campaigns. The result: Wendy wakes up to approval requests, not project kickoffs. This compresses execution timelines dramatically and is replicable for any GTM team willing to invest in AI-enabling offshore talent.
After years of decline, PR is becoming a top priority again for marketers, specifically because LLMs are trained heavily on authoritative published content. Getting your company cited in industry and trade press is no longer just a brand play; it directly influences how AI systems describe and recommend your product. GTM teams should re-evaluate PR investment through this lens immediately.
Brand measurement must be rebuilt for the AI era. Wendy introduced a new brand matrix that includes AI-driven sentiment monitoring (Reddit, G2), direct referral traffic as a brand signal, earned media share, and LLM citation share. CMOs should proactively introduce these metrics before the board asks why brand spend isn't measurable.

Standout Quote

“What a modern CMO needs to do is to be really deeply integrated into the overall market and business strategy of the company. Don't sit back and wait for it to be about like, what's the next trade show?” - Wendy White

Guest Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendywwhite/
Daxko Website: https://www.daxko.com/

Mentioned in this Episode

Guillaume "𝑮" Cabane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cabane/
Matt Heinz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz/

More from The B2B CMO Project

Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/
Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/
Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/
More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts

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The 5 New Imperatives for B2B CMOs with Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan

Episode 5

Friday, June 19, 2026 • Duration 37:47

In this special episode, Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller break down the most important findings for marketing leaders from The B2B CMO Project’s new research report. The findings in this report draw on recorded interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs at companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Sprout Social. Their goal: give CMOs the clearest possible picture of what has stopped working, what the best leaders and operators are doing differently, and exactly what to do about it. Sydney and Jon cover why the old B2B marketing playbook is broken and the five imperatives for modern marketing leaders to succeed.

Episode Takeaways

Why the Old B2B Marketing Playbook is Broken: The MQL-driven, content-to-lead-nurture model worked for a generation, but the data now shows it's actively undermining marketing's credibility in the C-suite.
Imperative 1 - Earn Your Seat by Becoming a Business Executive First: CMOs need to think of their C-Suite peers as their primary team and provide them with the voice of the customer, especially when that means surfacing problems before they’re apparent to others.
Imperative 2 - Prove Marketing’s Value in the Language of the Board: When CMOs report in marketing language, they get treated as a tactical marketing function. When reporting to the board and peers, the best CMOs lead with business outcomes first and treat marketing metrics as internal diagnostics.
Imperative 3 - Invest in Brand as a Strategic Economic Asset: Getting CFO buy-in on brand is very hard when marketers talk about awareness. Instead, connect brand strength to measurable business outcomes: lower customer acquisition cost, higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better pricing power. When marketers speak the language of finance, brand stops being a debate and starts being a priority.
Imperative 4 - Lead Marketing Through AI Disruption: Buyers are beginning their research, discovery, and evaluation in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, not just search engines. Adopt metrics like citation share and share of answer to measure how often your company and products surface in AI-generated responses, and build your content strategy around winning those placements.

Reframing Marketing ROI to Return on Objectives with Karl Van den Bergh

Episode 4

Friday, June 12, 2026 • Duration 38:53

Karl Van den Bergh is the Chief Market Officer at Illumio, known as the world’s first breach containment platform (built on AI and designed for Zero Trust). Over the course of more than 25 years, Karl has held leadership roles in Marketing, Product and as a GM in Cloud, Analytics and Cybersecurity businesses, including SAP, Gigamon, Datastax, and Tibco.

Karl joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to share his insights on why marketing leaders need to communicate with the C-suite using the language of the board, what it means to run a marketing team like a predictable sales org, and how to get buy-in on investing in brand by tying it to Return on Objectives, not ROI. Karl also dives into how to overcome ‘The CMO Tax’ and what his team is doing to stay top of mind, both for customers and LLMs.

Episode Takeaways

Earn executive trust by speaking the language of business, particularly sales, first. For example, Karl Van den Bergh leads every executive and board conversation with pipeline contribution and bookings, rather than top-of-funnel metrics, because those are the numbers the C-suite and CFO already understand and care about. Forget about impressions or MQLs; instead, anchor the marketing narrative to revenue outcomes before expanding to broader brand metrics.
Running marketing like a sales organization, with targets, over-assignment of pipeline, and a forecast, creates predictability, which earns trust with the CEO and CFO. That trust is critical for securing investment in longer-horizon brand and awareness initiatives.
Don't create a new category unless you have absolutely no choice. Category creation is extraordinarily expensive and slow, requiring years of market education before revenue follows.
Reframe success internally from ROI to "Return on Objectives" when selling brand investment. Rather than trying to tie every awareness dollar directly to bookings, Karl uses a Return on Objectives framework: define the objective (e.g., be top-of-mind when buyers enter the market), set metrics tied to that objective (web visits, content downloads from target accounts), and benchmark performance against industry standards. This makes non-pipeline investments defensible and credible to peers in the C-suite.

Nerding Out on the Neuroscience Behind Buying Decisions with Bryan Law

Episode 3

Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 40:17

Bryan Law is the Chief Marketing Officer of Nerdio, the all-in-one Microsoft Cloud management platform. Bryan previously led global marketing teams at Google, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, and SentinelOne, to name just a few. He’s passionate about building distinctive, memory-building brands that translate into efficient pipeline creation, backed by data-driven decisioning and pragmatic AI adoption. Bryan joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to dig into why B2B brands need to focus on their mental availability, how synthetic AI research can speed up uncovering customer insights, and how marketing leaders can jumpstart their tenure at any new company.

Episode Takeaways

CMOs who lead with business acumen, not marketing tactics, earn faster credibility with the C-suite. Bryan deliberately frames his role as a business leader who uses marketing as a tool, fluently speaking the language of revenue, pipeline, and growth targets with finance and sales before discussing campaign strategy.
When entering a new company as the CMO, it is critical to be very intentional about identifying who the key stakeholders internally who are going to make or break your success, and then how you can win them over quickly.
Understanding the customer’s pains, wants, and needs quickly is vital to your role as a CMO. One way to do this is by carrying out extensive customer interviews right when you join a new company. A way to speed that process up is to use synthetic AI to model your customers and uncover deeper insights.
The concept of Mental availability, which is understanding the buying triggers that cause customers to think about your category, and which brand associations fire in their minds instantly, is widely used in B2C but almost entirely ignored in B2B. Bryan uses this framework to find uncontested territory: buying situations that customers care about that no competitor owns. Marketing teams should map their category's buying triggers, assess which are already owned by competitors, and build messaging campaigns around the white space.

Standout Quote

“ I always try and think about my role is first as a business leader and then secondarily as a marketer.” - Bryan Law

Showing Up for Your Board with Tracey Newell, Author of Hers for the Taking

Episode 2

Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 43:53

Tracey Newell is the Author of Hers for the Taking and has led global revenue teams, served as President of Informatica and now sits on the boards of some of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Beyond leading major companies like Informatica, Proofpoint, Polycom, and Cisco, Tracey is now on a mission to help more women step into leadership with confidence and clarity. Tracey joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss what CMOs can do to show up strategically for their boards, how to prepare yourself for a career in senior management, and why marketing leaders need to pick strategic projects that align with high-level metrics.

Episode Takeaways

If you’re considering a career in corporate leadership but don’t feel ready for that, think about what experiences you would need to prepare yourself for a larger role and then start accumulating those experiences.
Despite how things may seem at times, it is absolutely possible for men and women to have both amazing careers and amazing personal lives. The key is setting time aside for both parts of your life.
Most growth-stage companies target a 50/50 revenue split between new logos and expansion, yet the installed base is dramatically easier to sell. CMOs should build dedicated programs around net retention and expansion, starting by solving the underlying data problem: knowing who your customers are, what they own, and where the whitespace lives. This is a direct contribution to top-line growth that earns marketing a strategic seat at the table.
A key to running a successful partnership motion is connecting the peer-groups across the different organizations. For example, the sales teams need to know each other and how to hand off opportunities or involve the other when an opportunity arises.

Standout Quote

“ I've always believed in quality over quantity. The quantity game is a long road to a small house.” - Tracey Newell

Guest Links

Building C-Suite Buy-In & Selling The Brand Story with Tricia Gellman

Episode 1

Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 44:41

Special guest Tricia Gellman, CMO of Box, the Intelligent Content Platform pioneering Intelligent Content Management, joins Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller on The B2B CMO Podcast to discuss the strategic role of the modern CMO. Tricia is a seasoned marketing leader with stints as Chief Marketing Officer at major SaaS companies such as Drift, Checker, and Salesforce Canada. Part of what sets Tricia apart as one of the top CMOs is her unique knack for category creation and steadfast commitment to fostering Go-To-Market alignment. In this episode, Tricia unpacks how to get the C-suite onboard to invest in building awareness, why partnership motion can unlock outsized growth, and how to build an operating rhythm between marketing and sales that connects brand storytelling all the way through to closed revenue.

Episode Takeaways

Own the story end-to-end. Strategic CMOs don't just craft cute messaging, they need to know the story, understand how to sell that story, and connect that story through thought leadership all the way down to the customer conversation and the sales motion that carries it through.
When entering a new category like AI, finding a story that maps to a real buyer need is critical. If nobody wakes up asking for your category name, you're pushing uphill.
Start small to build conviction. If your CFO or board won't greenlight a big awareness bet, run a small test, show the ROI, and use that proof point to advocate for the larger investment.
Build your Go-To-Market on shared data. Marketing and sales must use the same dashboards and have a shared understanding of what success looks like. If you're arguing from different reports, you'll waste time pointing fingers instead of driving revenue.
Leverage partner ecosystems for outsized reach. Box's model-agnostic AI strategy lets them co-launch with every major LLM and ISV partner, multiplying their awareness without multiplying their spend.
Match your superpower to the role. Before accepting a CMO position, assess whether the company's needs align with what you do best, and whether the leadership team values marketing as strategic.
Set pipeline council cadence to your deal cycle. Don't meet weekly if there's not enough change to discuss. For enterprise, biweekly is often the right rhythm.

The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan - Trailer

Wednesday, April 8, 2026 • Duration 00:37

We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth.

For more marketing leadership resources, visit b2bcmoproject.com.

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Pipeline Gives Permission to Invest Big on Brand with Jennifer Johnson

Episode 10

Monday, July 27, 2026 • Duration 45:31

Jennifer “JJ” Johnson is the Chief Marketing Officer at CrowdStrike, the Agentic Security Platform; unified and built to secure the AI revolution. Jennifer has been a CMO for more than a decade, leading global marketing strategy and execution, and building high-performance teams for some of the fastest-growing and most trusted brands in cybersecurity. Before joining CrowdStrike, she led both Amplitude and Tenable to successful IPOs as their CMO, along with leading Coverity to a successful acquisition.

Jennifer joins Co-Hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss how to build an AI transformation center of excellence in-house, why focusing on pipeline gives CMOs permission to invest in big picture brand strategy, and the operating timeline methods of the clock and the stopwatch.

Episode Takeaways

Leaders with consulting DNA, not just marketing chops, make great candidates for driving AI transformation. For example, Jennifer brought in someone from Boston Consulting Group's Go-To-Market practice specifically because she needed change-management expertise, not just tool knowledge. Peers should look for candidates who understand both marketing function and structured process transformation; the technology piece is the easy part.
Tackle AI transformation one workflow at a time, end-to-end. Rather than boiling the ocean across every marketing function, pick one process, execute it completely, build a playbook, and then repeat.
Treat "pipeline is permission" as the operating principle for earning strategic latitude. Consistently hitting core pipeline numbers is what earns a CMO credibility to pursue brand investments, category creation, or other "non-trivial" bets. Successful execution funds strategic ambition, not the reverse.
Build brand budgets in parallel with demand, never as an afterthought. Brand and demand leaders should each build their own plans and asks independently; demand should never get "first pick" of budget with brand receiving leftovers, which leads to underinvestment in brand.
Balance "calendar" moments with a "stopwatch" rapid-offense capability. Predictable moments (product releases, major conferences) anchor planning, but CrowdStrike also runs a rapid-response content engine reacting to real-time market signals and competitor moves; treating both cadences as complementary, not competing, priorities.

“Write for Humans, Optimize for Agents” with Chris Koehler

Episode 9

Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 38:33

Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer of Twilio, the platform for conversations in the AI era. Chris has over 25 years of experience in leading marketing, sales, and product teams across companies like Adobe, Box, and E-Trade. Lately, he's been chasing a question Jon Miller happens to care a lot about: what happens to discovery, to personalization, and to the CMO's mandate itself in the age of AI.

Chris joins Jon to discuss his four-pillar framework for strategic marketing, how his marketing team is approaching the seismic shift from SEO to AEO, and why the future of GTM belongs to teams bold enough to reimagine their workflows entirely, not just optimize them.

Episode Takeaways

Eliminate marketing jargon such as MQLs, SQLs, or marketing-qualified pipeline from executive and board communications. Focus on speaking in terms of revenue, profitability, and growth coverage. CMOs should translate all reporting to C-suite language and save marketing metrics for internal scorecards, where they belong.
CMOs need to own the revenue number alongside the CRO. If sales misses the revenue target, that's marketing’s fault too. Marketing teams shouldn’t blame sales or product; instead, frame marketing as a co-owner of pipeline and revenue. GTM leaders should build formal shared accountability structures with their CRO rather than treating revenue as someone else's problem.
Treat AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as a company-wide imperative, not solely a content team task. AEO isn't just an extension of SEO, it requires every team to rethink how content is structured, formatted, and prioritized for both human readers and AI agents. GTM leaders should run a company-wide AEO education session to get ahead of executives sending panicked "we're not showing up in ChatGPT" messages.
Pipeline is the path, not the destination; so stop celebrating it as a win. Delineate clearly between pipeline (a means) and revenue (the goal), and frame everything through the lens of revenue outcomes.
Write for humans and optimize for agents. AI agents are not a new persona, they act on behalf of humans, so the content you create still needs to serve human intent, just formatted and structured for how AI models surface and cite information.

Leading Marketing Change at a 140-Year-Old Enterprise with Chris Bontempo

Episode 8

Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 42:26

Chris Bontempo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Johnson Controls, a global leader in thermal management, mission-critical building systems, energy efficiency, and decarbonization. Prior to joining Johnson Controls, Chris worked his way up at IBM from an Analyst to become the Chief Marketing Officer, IBM Americas. He’s especially passionate about how AI changes the marketing operating model and how marketing can own market intelligence to shape strategy.

Chris joins Jon Miller to discuss the exact frameworks he uses to win C-suite trust, defend the marketing budget with the CFO, and turn agentic AI into a genuine competitive advantage.

Episode Takeaways

Marketing must own the "voice of the customer" function, not just demand gen. back into the company, and being an energy supplier to the ecosystem. Representing the voice of the customer back into the business is what earns marketing a seat at the strategic C-suite table.
CMOs should focus on the real business conversations, it's whether marketing, sales, product, and services collectively drove a revenue outcome. CMOs need enough financial acumen to defend budget in "secured revenue" terms with the CFO, not lead-volume terms.
Accept a certain amount of chaos as the price of AI experimentation. 100% success means you aren't taking enough risks. If every AI pilot succeeds, they aren't pushing hard enough. Leaders should explicitly normalize this with their teams so people aren't punished or discouraged when early AI pilots fail.
Shift the unit of work from "the tool" to "the workflow," using agentic frameworks to orchestrate multiple tools. Move away from evaluating individual platforms and instead map full processes and let agents determine which tools to invoke. Pair marketing AI engineering talent directly with field marketers, sellers, and service teams to rapidly prototype these workflows together.

Standout Quote

“ You have to be able to hang with your CFO in the conversation around secured revenue.” - Chris Bontempo

The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan – Details, episodes & analysis

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The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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LinkedIn27

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