Part 4: Why Do B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly?

Melissa Sargeant is a four-time CMO with over 25 years of experience in tech marketing. She has worked in various roles, including PR, demand gen, marketing, communications, and product marketing. Currently, she serves as the CMO of AlphaSense.

Part one of this series is an eBook on “Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly.” Click through for Part 2 and Part 3.

Melissa understands that content is the key to the company’s success, rating it a 25 on a scale of 1-10. Across all marketing channels, Melissa leverages data to measure content attribution, revealing true pipeline velocity drivers. This data is shared weekly with her team, the C-suite, and sales, fostering trust, respect, and collaborative relationships across teams and the organization. Skillfully using content and marketing attribution data is key to her success, which is why she isn’t a CMO failing quickly—but thriving.

Melissa Sargeant, 4x CMO – Follow Melissa on LinkedIn

“We look at the win rate differentials between deals that close that have five or more marketing touches from an attribution perspective. They close at twice the rate of those that have less than that.” – Melissa Sargeant

Read on to gain insights from Melissa’s expertise, spanning her best marketing strategies and how she leverages data for revenue generation—fostering internal team consensus, promoting collaboration, and executing successful go-to-market initiatives.

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 4-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

Introduction to Melissa Sargeant

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the B2B Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and it’s very rare that we have somebody with the depth of knowledge and experience that we have from Melissa Sargeant.

Melissa is a four-time CMO, so she has all kinds of insights for us today, specifically around why do B2B CMOs fail so quickly. They fail at twice the pace of CEOs. They have the shortest tenure of anyone in the C-suite. So, Melissa, before we get into the meat of the subject matter here, maybe give us a little bit more about your background, and we’ll start there.

Melissa Sargeant: Sure. And thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been in tech marketing for over 25 years now and started in PR, demand gen, marketing, and communications. I spent a lot of time in product marketing, the longest period of my career. Then I went into marketing leadership.

And as you mentioned, I’m a four-time CMO, and I’m currently the CMO of AlphaSense. So I do like to say that I feel as though I’ve done hard time in all of the key areas of marketing in this long career of mine.

Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic, because we’re going to tap into some of the insights that you have here, and let’s just start it out.

The direct connection between marketing and revenue

Steve MacDonald: Okay, so pretty big statement, right? Why do B2B CMOs fail so quickly? What’s your top line, right? When you think about this and the CMOs, or you might be a VP of marketing, running all marketing, you’re in your organization, but you have responsibility for heading up marketing. What’s your advice to us? And why is that failure rate so high?

Melissa Sargeant: So I think there’s truly a multitude of things that typically happen with CMOs. I think the most important thing is alignment around the business goals and truly understanding marketing’s role in driving pipeline, bookings, and revenue for the company. If that disconnect exists or there isn’t a program or operation in place to drive that to measure it over time and demonstrate that you are adding value to the business, the job becomes infinitely much harder.

I will often preach to my team. If there are a lot of different things, people will come to me and say what they want to do in the marketing organization. There are so many great things we can do. And particularly in the beginning, I’m very focused on the pipeline and revenue engine.

And it’s simple. If salespeople are swimming in opportunities and pipeline and deals are easier to close, everything else we do in marketing is much easier. Temperatures come down. We have the space we need to do that, but we absolutely have to focus on that revenue engine first because that’s what the company wants us to do, that’s what the board wants us to do, and that’s how we’re measured today.

Steve MacDonald: So tell us a little bit of difference in terms of, what you’re not talking about here is I’m throwing more and more MQLs over the wall, right? It’s sales, you’re talking about deep pipeline penetration and booking. So tell us what your thoughts are on the difference between those two.

Melissa Sargeant: Yes, it’s not about counting MQLs, as those days are long behind us for good reason. It’s really actually about driving more quality into the pipeline. And I tend to come into organizations that are wanting some sort of transformation in marketing. And I first look at the pipeline and revenue engine and what’s actually driving that.

And at the heart of that are a bunch of things. A functioning website that enables you to serve content. But most importantly, the content you’re driving at the very top of the funnel must be highly relevant to your audience.

I work at a company where we’re very segmented from an industry perspective as well as personas. And the business problem that each of those, if you look at it and sort of map it out, is really, really complex. So for us, that means we have to be able to create a tremendous amount of highly relevant, compelling content that identifies with those pains right away so that we can pull them into the top of the funnel.

And then, in a really intelligent way, start nurturing them through that path and continuing to serve them up other assets and content as they’re making their way through the buyer’s journey. And this is long before they ever want to talk to us.

I am very much a science-led marketer steeped in data. I have a data scientist who’s worked with me at four different companies now who really instruments all of this for us so that everybody in marketing understands the data that we’re looking at, what it’s influencing from a pipeline and revenue perspective, and what we need to do to get better month over month.

The data science of marketing

Steve MacDonald: So, before we hit the record button here, you and I were talking, and I’d asked you a question on the importance of content to the overall success of the organization—one, not, not important at all, and 10, vital. And you said 25. And you just explained a little bit why, right? It was one of the very first things that you did there.

But I wanted to ask you about two things: you talk about data. And a lot of people have a perspective on content and its influence on the pipeline. And how do I measure that? How do I actually show that marketing sourced or influenced that pipeline? And you’ve got a data scientist here.

So I think many of us who are listening right now would love your perspective on how you track that. What are the things you’re looking for to get people into and nurture through that funnel and prove that you are impacting the pipeline?

Melissa Sargeant: Yes. That content truly is the lifeblood, and across all of our marketing channels, every single thing we do, we are measuring from a channel perspective, whether it’s marketing-sourced or it’s attributed, so that we can see the attributed information and show you what’s actually driving pipeline velocity. From an attribution perspective, we look at the win rate differential between deals that close that have five or more marketing touches. They close at twice the rate of those that have less than that.

So we measure everything so that our teams have a clear map they can follow regarding the best place to invest our dollars. And it’s the type of thing where your hands are always on the wheel. You never stop fine-tuning this, but you can make better investment decisions by having both views of that and really understanding what channels are driving the most for you and what segments. You can identify problems and dial things back in real-time.

And then really the most important part is really training your entire organization to be able to understand the data. I have to send out a lot of reports. Most do send out a report every week or twice a week, but what our team does without me in the room is they all get together. The entire marketing organization gets together with my marketing leadership team, and they talk through all of the numbers that I had just sent to the executive team every Monday morning, what they mean for us, what trend they’re seeing, have other people chime in so that every single person in our organization is fully steeped in that data and looks at it from that perspective.

Steve MacDonald: What I love is you are not sitting back and saying, I know I’m doing a good job. I know the content and marketing efforts are influencing the pipeline. But you’re using data to prove it. And you’re reviewing that data. Your team’s reviewing that data. The rest of the C-suite is reviewing that. It’s important.

So your organization knows exactly how marketing contributes to the pipeline’s success and closings. Is that correct?

Melissa Sargeant: 100%. And I can think of going into QBR (Quarterly Business Review) season earlier in my career and just having a stomach ache because I had blind spots. I don’t have any blind spots. So we just went through our QBRs for Q2. And we have the depth of information that we could, and that enables us to sit down with our sales counterparts on the sales leadership team. And instead of having arguments over the numbers, we have a shared understanding of the information that we’re looking at, and those QBRs become less of a wrestling match like I used to have to deal with.

They actually become strategy sessions like that was great. Yep. Here’s the area. Yep. We highlight that it’s not all good. It doesn’t all, it’s not all green and rainbows and ponies and group hugs, but it’s a much more strategic engagement with the sales organization. And when you talk about CMOs that might be struggling in their roles, your relationship with your business partner as the CRO is as important as all of their first-line managers, the senior leadership team. Everyone has to be interlocked across the board and have a shared understanding of goals and how we’re looking at things.

And they want to ensure that we want to ensure they are being heard. They have great ideas for things that we can do to improve and expand, or maybe something that was important last quarter that they thought was really important, they’re seeing different signals in the market now that tell them that’s not as important right now. Can we actually do this? And we have the flexibility regarding our integrated marketing planning and framework to do that.

The importance of a marketing and sales activation

Melissa Sargeant: But again, that’s another key. An important part of your job there is to have that strong interlock with sales. And we all talk about it, but it’s a very hard thing to do, and it takes time, and I think if you start with a shared understanding of the goals and the data, again, temperatures come down, and sort of rational teaming comes into play.

Steve MacDonald: Well, something you said a few minutes ago, I think, is really, really important because what you said is you look at data, and one of the examples that you gave was how many marketing touches were happening in the closed sales. And the ones closing are the ones that get more marketing touches, and all the studies these days show that the majority of B2B buyers before they ever want to talk to anybody, are 70% through their research and decision-making process. That means marketing is taking on a much greater portion of sales, right? And that 70% of their research is part of the sales cycle. And you’re proving on the backend that those marketing attributions are accelerating sales.

And I imagine that reciprocal relationship that you’re talking about with marketing and sales and sales enablement, if sales see that there’s a lot more success with marketing touches, they’re going to look a lot closer at your content. They’re going to be a lot more open to working with you and want to say, here’s the kind of content we need. Because right now, most of the sales in the B2B world don’t think that the content coming from marketing is any good.

Melissa Sargeant: I think that was key. That was a key turning point for us because they weren’t activating the content when we started producing greater volume.

We were the sole, we were carrying it out and social and pushing it out, and email campaigns, and our digital advertising. The turning point was when they started grabbing the content, and we see them using it on social. We help them rework their outreach sequences by persona by industry to plug in the right asset at the right time with their outreach segments.

So when they really grabbed ahold of it was a huge turning point for us, and we saw a big difference in the attributed contribution and how that numbers went up pretty quickly. And I love seeing those numbers. Explaining marketing attribution can be challenging internally.

And I talk about it, not in terms of taking credit. Nobody wins that battle. Don’t do it. It’s not going to go well. It’s about marketing understanding the true value of the programs and the content we’re creating, and the lift it provides for the organization so that we can make the best investments that drive the most pipeline and revenue.

And it’s also for us to be able to see throughout the buyer’s journey the role that lift has because we know it’s not unless you’re selling, even if you’re selling in a direct-to-consumer motion, people are still going to have multiple touchpoints there.

So in our QBRs, we pick out a couple of deals where there’s a good balance of sales and marketing touchpoints. And we actually draw a picture of the specific deal. And then we show from the first engagement; however, they came in, whether it was from an outbound SDR who made the first contact, or it was the inbound team that brought that lead in, and the different touchpoints, all the different places they went, how many times they went to the website, how many times they went back to Google and searched again, where they went on LinkedIn, what customer success stories they read. Then they started their trial with us.

And that you see that it’s basically fairly balanced across both of them because even when they scheduled that trial with our sales crew, they’re still doing all this other research in the background, and when we show that picture to them to see, this is what we mean by the buyer’s journey and that there is no handoff. It is this continuum. It’s really compelling.

Steve MacDonald: I love showing a picture of how it comes to fruition. So one of the things you said earlier as well was that you have a number of different ICPs, a number of different industries and that the need for content in that buyer’s journey never ends, right?

Overcoming overwhelm in content creation

Steve MacDonald: So that can be overwhelming, right? Let’s say you’ve got seven industries and eight different ICPs. You put the grid together, right? You have all the problems you’re addressing and trying to educate these people in the industry and be thought leaders. And so, tell me a little bit about how you think about that content engine.

Because that can be paralyzing in terms of what needs to be done there, what’s your philosophy on that?

Melissa Sargeant: Yeah, it can be incredibly overwhelming for your content team. And most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring an army. It’s usually a small, mighty group that’s doing a lot of work. So the way we have approached it is through what we call key macro themes.

And so these are themes that resonate across all of the different personas and industries. And then, we take that macro theme and write a positioning document around it to start every quarter, or sometimes they can even run for two quarters, depending on that macro theme. And there can be multiple macro themes.

There could be two or three, depending on what we have going on in the business at that time. And then figuring out and mapping out when you have sort of that baseline, then customizing it and personalizing it so that some of the work, it’s not 100% that you have to do every single time.

And it also puts us in a place where we found with macro themes that we get a better lift, a better brand lift across the board. What across all of these different segments and all these different personas you’re linking up to this macro theme, it really does elevate that brand message and does better work for us.

And because it’s really easy, certainly in a company like ours with that level of complexity, to do a thousand random acts of marketing and a lot of work that goes into it, but nothing breaks through. And so we found that that’s been a really good technique for us, starting with macro themes.

Steve MacDonald: So, with a macro theme that’s very carefully selected, that has a lot of opportunity for education and insight and impact, then at the beginning of the buyer’s journey, whether you’re talking about ad click-through rates or email opens and click-through rates, if you can improve even 1% your click through rates, that is really important, right?

Melissa Sargeant: Yes. It’s huge.

Steve MacDonald: And I’m sure that’s part of that marketing attribution and the data and everything because of the thousand random acts of marketing, you’re going to get industry average or below engagement and clicks. And that’s the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

That’s what we have to do. So I love the thought process of focusing on content, working with sales, and having macro themes that can apply and easily be positioned for an ICP in a specific industry. So you’re not starting from square one because this takes this very large, overwhelming task that has to always be done with a small team.

The power of podcasting

Steve MacDonald: So let me ask you one thing. You have recently, not like last week or anything, but recently started a podcast strategy. Tell us a little about why you started that podcast strategy and what you think the benefit is coming out of it.

Melissa Sargeant: So I, like a lot of people, I’m a big consumer of podcasts. So when I came to AlphaSense, and since we’re a market intelligence company, I was like, this is a no-brainer. This is what we do for a living. We absolutely have to have a podcast, and ours, we’re very fortunate in that I have a director of research who came off of Wall Street. So his perspective is truly unique in that he’s not talking about AlphaSense at all. They’re just talking about issues that are very topical in different specific industries and investment banks, hedge funds, and across the spectrum. He has the agility and knowledge bank to hold a very credible conversation with the kind of people you see on CNBC in the morning.

And so the credibility of the content that is coming out of the podcast has just been phenomenal for us. And then our sales team loves the podcast, that there’s a really cool episode, and that we do great activation of it on social. And then it’s an easy share for them.

And then it’s something they can share as they’re nurturing their contacts without being salesy. It’s just here’s some interesting insights that Nick Mazing, who’s our director of research, was talking to an analyst about. Thought it was relevant to your industry. Here you go.

I had it on our list right away that this is the place to, if there was ever a place to do one, that this is the place to do it. And the fact that I had the perfect human being to be the host was too good to be true.

Steve MacDonald: Well, it’s interesting because when you talk about how sales loves it, right, salespeople, they have to be perceived not as a salesperson, but as an advisor, as an expert, as somebody that understands the industry beyond the product and service that you’re representing. That’s what buyers want.

And so what I’m hearing from you is that this is helping position the company. This is helping position each and every salesperson, giving them a reason beyond, Hey, I wanted to talk about the free trial, right? It gives them a reason to stay in touch in a high-value way. And that’s huge.

Melissa Sargeant: Thank you. And then another entry point into our brand and what a great way for people to meet AlphaSense and that if you’re a market intelligence company, intelligence, and an AI company, and now a gen AI company, intelligence is part of our DNA, and so the people that we are selling to often is the market intelligence person, or it’s a financial analyst.

These are very, very savvy, discerning people. We have to be able to engage them with content that’s truly compelling to them.

Key Takeaway: Interlock from day one

Steve MacDonald: We’re reaching the end here. And what I’d love to do is ask you, just as a recap, everything that we’ve talked about here, if there was one takeaway that you wanted the audience to know, what would you tell them?

Melissa Sargeant: Interlock from day one with your executive leadership team on the business’s pipeline and revenue needs and focus your time in the beginning. And understanding how that works for your company, what gaps you have, and what quick opportunities you have to make an impact. And then continuously improve from that point.

But that is the place, I believe, to start and have a fast and strong start.

Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. Well, thank you, Melissa, so much for coming on. If people wanted to get ahold of you, a link to your profile on LinkedIn would be appropriate?

Melissa Sargeant: Yes. LinkedIn, Melissa Sargeant. I’m happy to connect with anyone.

Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you for coming on today. We really appreciate your help and your insights here.

Melissa Sargeant: Thank you, Steve. Have a good one.

Next Steps

Melissa refers to herself as a science-led marketer steeped in data. Make no mistake, Melissa starts with highly valuable content, relies on the data for direct impact on pipeline velocity, uses it to unite teams, activate sales, and continually refine her marketing efforts. To elevate your content’s ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.