Part 2: Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly

Are you looking to increase the conversion rate of your leads? Having a hard time getting your marketing team to work well with sales? Want to have a fully integrated go-to-market effort from initial lead generation all the way through customer retention?

Part one of this series is an eBook on “Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly.”Click here for Part 3 with 4x CMO/2xCRO, Darryl Prail.

This article is the second piece of the puzzle in answering the important question of why B2B CMOs fail so quickly, with the shortest tenure of any C-Suite role. Steve MacDonald interviews Nancy Maluso, a seasoned B2B marketing expert with a background as a leading CMO, a Chief Strategy Officer, a Forrester Analyst specializing in B2B GTM consulting, and a former Vice President of Sales. Nancy shares her insider insights from consulting with B2B companies while at Forrester to implement sales and marketing strategies for the C-Suite.

Nancy talks about creating a 27% greater return if you have alignment on your executive level across your functional leaders.

Nancy Maluso, CMO & Former Forrester Analyst

To improve their effectiveness, B2B CMOs need to focus on collaboration, communication, and ongoing support for sales. They should have a holistic understanding of the customer beyond digital interactions. Nancy gives high-level strategic advice, combined with highly tactical suggestions like using conversational intelligence tools for listening into sales conversations between salespeople and buyers, learning how the sales story is crafted, and an ongoing study of buyer pain points and needs.

“While at Forrester and consulting with companies, I knew in the first meeting which companies would make it to an integrated go-to-market function and which ones would win just by the behavior of the sales and marketing leaders. What invariably happens is that one is not able to truly understand the value of the other.” – Nancy Maluso

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube.

An introduction to Nancy Maluso and her insider insights from consulting with B2B companies while at Forrester to implement sales and marketing strategies from the C-Suite

Steve MacDonald: We’ve got a guest today with an extensive background from all sides. I’m going to let Nancy introduce herself here in just a second. But Nancy, you are a Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, a VP of sales. You’ve done the role of sales, sales enablement, and product marketing.

You’ve been at Forrester as an analyst, making sales and marketing go-to-market recommendations to B2B companies. You’ve been executing from the customer side, from within the company, all angles. So your perspective is very, very unique here. Is there anything you want to add to that about your background and what you do before we get into some of the questions we will cover today?

Nancy Maluso: Well, yes. I have an interesting background. I have held a variety of roles. I started doing technical support in customer service before moving over to industry marketing.

From there, I decided to go into sales because they were making money. I’m like, oh, I could do that. I could make some money. So I did, and I was very successful at doing that. And I saved up enough money to go back to grad school full-time.

I then started a company with two partners. We ended up selling our company to one of our clients. And I moved over to one of the tech partners we used in our company, and I was running sales. Then moved over and ran our managed services business in the customer success team.

Then I did sales enablement and built a global sales enablement function at the time when we weren’t really calling it sales enablement yet, and supported both our direct and indirect channels. Then I went into product marketing. After that, I was a GM of a business unit at another company. Started my own company after that and ended up going to Serious Decisions and being an advisor in sales enablement, and then over to Forrester and advising sales leaders and sales ops leaders before coming here to Edgio as the CMO and Chief Strategy Officer.

Steve MacDonald: The really interesting thing is that there are a lot of us that we’ve never had a sales background. So we’ve continually, throughout our career, helped enable sales, but we’ve never done that function.

And there’s nothing we do in marketing that isn’t more important than enabling the sales team. And you’ve played that sales and marketing role. You’ve been in one of the biggest research companies in the world in terms of supporting the B2B effort related to sales and marketing, the entire go-to-market strategy, and you’re doing that now for Edgio as their CMO, covering all rev ops and everything.

Why do you think B2B CMOs fail so quickly?

Steve MacDonald: I’m going to ask you a question. Before we started the recording, I told you about an e-book I’ve written recently, “Why B2B CMOs Fail So Quickly,” They fail at twice the rate of CEOs, and they have the shortest tenure of any of the C-Suite roles. And you’ve been a chief strategy officer, a chief marketing officer. You’ve been in sales and enablement, and you’ve done the analyst/advisory side. So what is your perspective on maybe why that’s happening? So we can unpack this statistic and learn how to be more successful CMOs as a result.

Nancy Maluso: I think one of the biggest issues that I saw when I was in advisory and working, I worked very closely with companies that were in the 40 to 100 million space and were trying to scale.

And I had a co-lead, this wonderful woman, Barbie Mattie, while at Forrester, who would work with the chief marketing officer or the marketing lead. And I’d work with the sales lead, and we help to build their go-to-market strategy, their integrated go-to-market function, and help them understand how their processes and everything had to be integrated.

And we knew within the first meeting which groups would make it to an integrated go-to-market function and which ones would win just by the behavior of the two leaders, the sales and marketing leaders. And what invariably happens is one or the other is not able to truly understand the value of the other person.

For example, I’ve seen marketers who think they live in isolation. They think they work at the top of the funnel and then give leads to sales. And don’t care what happens after that because they’ve done their job. “I’ve given you the leads.” But leads, leads don’t matter.

Revenue matters at the end of the day. And so if they’re not leads that can convert, it doesn’t matter. You’re looking at the wrong thing. I see that a lot. I see sales leaders who think that marketing isn’t valuable at all. And today, one of the stats that I remember from research we had done at Forrester was that the number of interactions that buyers make prior to a purchase doubled really over the last five years.

And over 55% of those interactions are digital. So the salesperson only engages out of all those interactions four or five of what, 30? So, a sixth of the interactions are with a salesperson.

Steve MacDonald: What that really means is that marketing is actually taking on a significant portion of the sales function.

Nancy Maluso: That’s right. But you have to approach it as if you’re trying to enter into a relationship. You’re not trying to get a hand raised, you’re trying to say, is this company or person worthy of a relationship? Is it the right time? Do they have interest?

Do they align with our idea of the ideal buyer? Is their behavior indicating that they’re going to purchase? My brother is a really fabulous salesperson. He always tells me, I love when somebody says no because then I could go onto the next guy, because if you’re not ready and don’t want to buy, tell me quickly so I can get on, you know, with my job.

Which is an interesting way to look at it. So qualify early, qualify often. I think a lot of sales leaders don’t understand the role of that and how tightly integrated those have to be.

We also need to provide digital cover to salespeople during the sales cycle. Not just at the front of the sales cycle, but during the cycle, after the sale, for renewals; particularly with SaaS models. We must keep them engaged and continue to share with them what they need to know and what we’re doing. So it’s not a handoff, it’s not a baton race.

Steve MacDonald: There was a stat that I saw recently that salespeople spend roughly 30% of their time creating content. And because during that process in the sales cycle, we’re not trying just to sell the suite of products or services; we’re educating, right? But I’ve never met a salesperson that was hired for their content creation capabilities.

What's your point of view regarding creating ongoing support for sales?

Nancy Maluso: It’s critically important. So when we build our messaging stack at Edgio, we build our levels of messaging. We have our messaging framework starting at the corporate level and going all the way down and deep.

When we build that messaging framework, we build it independent of content. So what are the key messages that the personas need to hear to go to the next step in their journey, of their knowledge journey? It’s really a knowledge journey. So what are those key pivotal knowledge learning points that they’re ready for more information?

You can’t overload them with too much information initially. You have to pace yourself with them and teach them. Think of yourself as really an advisor and a teacher. So, we build the messaging framework. Then we build all the derivative content from there, whether it’s website content, or whether it’s collateral for salespeople to use, or whether it’s enablement materials.

We do a lot of co-creation in the field, partly because our marketing organization was new when I got here. We didn’t really have a marketing organization. It was kind of scattered. It wasn’t a cohesive team. But also because the field knows what they need.

Any of these conversational intelligence tools are so great for marketers. And suppose they’re not listening to those recordings of the salespeople in action. In that case, it’s really a shame because you learn a tremendous amount, not only about the buyer and how the buyer’s talking, but how the salesperson’s crafting the story.

You can immediately tell if this is a salesperson who really knows how to craft the story and how to have the conversation. Or is this a person who’s trying to sell? And there’s a difference. The person trying to sell is most likely going from a script…let me show you the next slide, and let me get you into my product.

We have to, as marketers, understand how conversations happen, how knowledge transfers, and how we can do that for our salespeople and help them do that with our buyers.

Steve MacDonald: The conversation is really important, and you used the term relationship earlier. And listening to those conversations, marketers have the ability to understand how to help expand that conversation.

Nancy Maluso: Salespeople traditionally are very often looking for reasons why to keep the conversation going. And not just the dialogue of the moment, right? But the conversation over time. To set up the next conversation. So if you’re not listening in and you do not understand the beginning or the middle of the conversation, how are you going to help enable the end of the conversation?

Please explain the importance of understanding the buyer’s needs

Steve MacDonald: I think that’s a very important point that you made there. Before we hit the record button, when we talked about this subject, you mentioned a real understanding of the buyer and how important that was. And you actually gave me a story when you were actually in sales, and you were going to meet a buyer.

Can you explain the importance of understanding the buyer’s needs and being in the seller’s shoes? And being in front of that buyer? And what the difference is versus I’m in marketing, and here’s how I’m trying to enable that and how these teams can work together.

Nancy Maluso: I don’t mean to infer that you must have been a salesperson to be a successful marketer. I don’t mean to infer that, but it certainly helps. The story you’re talking about is where I was asked to meet with a new prospective client. The client at this company had called into our CEO’s office and said, send somebody to see me. We want to talk to somebody there. Right?

So I went off, and the prospect was at a big company. And I knew very little about what they were interested in. I knew nothing other than what I could glean from their website, but it’s a huge conglomerate. They do lots of things. So I knew the basics of their business, but I didn’t know what to be prepared for.

I’m in the parking lot getting there early, so I’m waiting to go up to the desk and check in, and oh, the butterflies and the nerves, right? That is the uncertainty. Am I prepared enough for this? What are they going to talk about? Am I going to embarrass myself? Am I going to be able to carry the conversation?

Am I going to be able to add value during this conversation? I don’t have any slides. I don’t have anything but my notebook and my pen. How am I going to do this? It worked out fine. We had a fabulous conversation.

And in some ways, it was a conversation because all I could do was ask questions. I knew nothing. But he wasn’t expecting me to know. And it was actually a room of people. It was five people. And they weren’t expecting me to have all the answers. They actually wanted to brainstorm about whether they should do something different, and we did that, and it was great.

And then I could say, hey, there are some things you should think about. And some were things we provided as a company, and some were not. But it was a fun conversation, and they became a customer. But it was nerve-wracking.

And so when I think about creating collateral or enablement programs, you know, training programs or anything else, I think about those nerves and what it felt like to not really know what I was facing. And so we have to not only teach them, but we have to help them practice and gain confidence.

It’s not just about knowledge, it’s about applying knowledge in a very emotion-laid setting because you don’t know what’s coming at you, even when you have a great relationship with a client. Things happen. Some reorgs happen, people retire, and people get let go. Things happen.

You never know how your deal will go and what twists and turns. And you have to be able to think on your feet. One of the most important traits of a good salesperson is the ability to connect the dots between disparate things.

What is the role the emotion plays in the sales and marketing process?

Steve MacDonald: You just said confidence, you said emotion. And there actually have been really great studies that have been done on this where over half of the buying decisions are based on emotion. Because what you’re asking the buyers to do many times has risk. And they have their careers on the line as they decide.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM kind of a saying, right? But with every decision that they’re making comes risk. They want to know what you just described in that meeting when you came with just a notepad and pen. You just had a conversation. You were an advisor to them. That emotional connection to a buyer has been proven to be equally as important to what it is that you’re selling.

Nancy Maluso: It’s absolutely true because the risk of a decision, a purchase decision, accrues to the individuals making it, but the benefit accrues to the corporation.

So there’s a mismatch in the whole equation of buying. And the bigger the purchase, the more risk to the individual. That’s why buying groups are so important. That’s why there are so many members of a buying group because you want to share the risk. So people have to feel comfortable. You just think about any interaction you have and whether the interaction was a positive one or not.

Steve Wynn said something really interesting. We were at a conference at one of his hotels, and he was a big customer of ours, and he came to speak at our conference. He told a story that one of his intern groups was graduating. One of the graduates asked him the question, Steve, who’s the most important employee at Wynn Hotels? And he came back with the next employee because every day somebody, someone on the employee team, is having a bad day. Every day, mistakes happen. There’s a drop in performance on the software. Something happens, right? Every day a mistake is made. The next employee who touches that customer is the most important employee. So we never know when what we do as employees will be the most important.

My analyst relations guy, who’s having a conversation with an analyst, and something he says, or the way he interacts, is going to make a difference between whether we’re in the magic quadrant or not or whether something that an engineer does to fix a problem and what it’s going to do for somebody else’s day.

We just don’t know it. It’s an interesting thing. People want to be able to trust the corporation as a whole. So all the people they interact with have to fit together in their commitment to the purpose of the company and the value they’re trying to drive so that the customer feels secure in their decision.

It feels less risky when they emotionally feel like they’re going to be cared for, even when mistakes happen.

How important is the CMO in bringing together internal teams?

Steve MacDonald: So what you’re saying is that enabling that team and that team, knowing that I can be a very, very important part of this. It might be a very simple thing that I did, I produced, I said, but it is a team effort.

And if everybody has that perspective, then we all get to raise our shoulders up a little bit, feel a little bit more confident, a little bit better about what we’re doing. But you talked about, before we started recording, enabling that team and creating that kind of culture. Is that the takeaway from what you’re saying right now?

Nancy Maluso: Yes.

When I think about the revenue engine, we can think about it as marketing, sales, and customer success as the revenue engine and the people at the forefront. I’m now in a business, Edgio, where we have a network, and we deliver content, whether we’re helping websites deliver performance faster so that images pop in and all that stuff. Or whether we’re helping an over-the-top sports entity broadcast hockey games. Whatever it is, there’s technology involved. And if any of that fails or doesn’t perform well. So when I think about it in our company now, it’s, when I think of the revenue engine, it’s much broader even than just sales, marketing, and customer success.

It has to include our performance team and our operations team. Our service team, because they’re part of the product. In my role as a go-to-market strategist, we’re trying to educate the whole company on where we are going. What is our differentiation? Who are we? Who’s buying from us? Why are they buying from us? Why does it matter to them, and what are the outcomes we’re trying to deliver for them? And we’re trying to really think in terms of outcome. What outcome are we creating for our customers? Because of that operational component, we have to deliver.

We’re not done when we sell it. We must deliver it every day, just like in Steve Wynn’s hotels. They have to deliver it every day. The rooms have to be cleaned every day. The food has to be hot, it tastes good, etc.

Who really is the buyer, the user, and what’s the difference?

Steve MacDonald: I will take a right turn for a moment here. And this was something that we had talked about before the recording started. You opened up with a focus on understanding the buyers and their needs. And actually, there was a piece written recently by Gartner that talked about how CMOs need to play much more of a role of a chief customer officer to be successful today. What are your thoughts on that?

Nancy Maluso: I think people could misunderstand by saying that a marketer has to be a chief customer officer but certainly has to understand the entirety of the customer. Not just the digital interactor. We have to understand all the conversations that are taking place between our company and our client company because the people who buy are not the people who use, typically.

So they may be involved, but often in a SaaS company, you know, the software users are not the same people as buyers. Somebody may have sat on the buying committee to represent the user community, but once the buy is done, right, procurement’s not involved. They might do a review to say, are we getting value out of this purchase?

But they’re not in the day-to-day of it. So if we don’t understand, ultimately, all of those interactions will happen. Then as marketers, we cannot create the right kind of message and provide the right information. I was working with a client and they were a maintenance provider, and one of the things they never talked about was their service process.

And yet the people using it were going to really care about the service process. But the procurement person buying it doesn’t really need to know the service process. But you still have to articulate it because if you want the service people, the people who will be using the service, to go to the procurement guide and say, use them, right? You have to speak their language. So there’s the influence that happens in the buying group that you have to speak to. So you have to speak to all those people. And we spoke about this. It’s not a baton pass, you know, it’s not marketing handing off the baton to sales.

Marketing needs to be involved throughout the entire customer life cycle, from their first interaction all the way through to their renewal and their expansion, if we want to be successful.

Steve MacDonald: And now we have to understand that many marketers don’t even think about it. I had a conversation with a CRO last week, and he said we need to reassure our buyers that when they buy, the transition is going to be easy.

The integration’s going to be simple. Because they’ve got their existing integrations and teams and everybody using the technology they’re used to, and they’re scared of making a move just because it’s going to rock the boat. That’s really important. What you’re talking about here is that marketing’s gotta be involved in every component.

If that’s a major obstacle to completing the sale, we must address that, right? We need to have content that can be used in the conversation, in the reassurance that that is going to be a good transition.

I’ve got two more questions. Okay, before we wrap up here. Here’s the first one. We’ve talked about the conversation, we’ve talked about the emotions.

How important is content to the sales and marketing effort?

Steve MacDonald: We’ve talked about being involved all throughout, and you talked about your message platform and creating the content that fills that. On a scale of 1 to 10, if you had to rate the importance of content in helping to carry and nurture and execute that conversation, that relationship that’s happening, with 1 being not important at all, doesn’t affect the success of the company, 10 being that content is vital to the success of the company.

Where would you rate content on the one to ten scale?

Nancy Maluso: An eight or a nine. To make it a 10, it would have to be the right content at the right time for the particular audience. And by content, I really mean the message.

And the format of the message so that it can be received properly by the person who needs to receive it. I often talk to people about when you’re at the beginning of the sales cycle, customers care about, does this company have any customers who had my problem? And so when you think about a case study, all they really care about is the beginning of the case study.

Are there people that you’ve helped who look like me, who have my problem? That gives me trust that you know what you’re doing. It makes it a little less risky. If you’ve got many examples of customers who have had my problem, then as they progress through their buying journey, they care about if you have customers that you’ve solved the problem for them the same way you’re going to solve it for me.

Then at the end, they want to know what kind of return I should expect.

We put all those three pieces in a single case study, but when we’re actually talking to the client about what they care about, the component of that piece of content that they care about is different at different stages.

What content trumps all others at getting sales conversations started?

Steve MacDonald: You’re right, if you haven’t proven that you understand what their problem is and that you’re good at addressing that problem, they’re not going to care about hearing about your solution first.

Nancy Maluso: Plus, it feels like you’re trying to tell them already, right? They haven’t even figured out exactly what their problem is.

They like that you know about this problem and you’ve seen it before. But they’re not yet ready to have you tell them what they should buy because they haven’t even framed their requirements properly yet. They’re still thinking about what is my problem? Do I have to solve my problem? Is my problem big enough to solve?

Next is what will happen if I don’t solve the problem? They haven’t yet thought about how they want to solve the problem. Right? They’re just still analyzing the problem. And so when you ask about content, my caveat about it being an aid is it’s the application of the content that’s even more important than the content itself.

We must teach our sellers how to use it. We have to teach our marketers when and how to use it, and we can only do that if we really understand what’s happening at every stage of that journey.

Steve MacDonald: You know, what you just brought up reminded me of another study that showed how B2B buyers want to consume content on our websites, and a huge percentage of them want to be able to identify the pain points, the problems. So literally, the navigation of where they can see them and say, oh, I get it. These are the kinds of pain points you solve. And there’s rarely a site that’s created that has front and center a pathway that literally says, these are the pain points, so you don’t have to dig, and you don’t have to look for where are the case studies, and then is this case study solving a problem that you know I have?

It’s like, how do we make it easy? That’s the beginning of the conversation. I have a problem I’m looking to solve. Do you help with these kinds of things?

Nancy Maluso: Right. That’s where we can add value as an organization if we can help our customers frame their problems and understand the scope of their problems, and think about, the various ways that the problem can be solved. If we can do that, we’re adding value in the moment.

Steve MacDonald: So here’s the last question. Ready? The conversation has been about how we help chief marketing officers, right? They have a short tenure, half that of the CEO, the shortest on the C-suite. And there are a lot of CMOs out there. Many companies don’t have a CMO where. A VP of Marketing takes on that role.

And a lot is on their shoulders. Out of everything we’ve discussed, is there something we haven’t covered or as a takeaway? What would your overall recommendation be? If there’s one thing, we want to ensure these folks know, what is it?

What is the takeaway for why CMOs fail so quickly?

Nancy Maluso: The biggest mistake any functional leader can make is to be in their functional silo.

We have to spend time with our peers, understanding what they’re doing, having them understand what we’re doing, and forming and ensuring that we’re aligned on our collective journey. What are we trying to accomplish here? And do we agree with how we want to go about accomplishing it?

How do we want to get there? What customers, what buyers, how do we deliver value to those people? What does that value proposition look like? And do we have everything we need to be able to deliver all that?

And if not, how do we build it together? I spend a third of my week with my peers, and it’s not me talking to them, it’s us talking together. One of my peers in my one-on-one will say, oh, this is what I got for you. This is what we need.

This is what I saw. And I might say, well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I noticed this, and we can just work on this, and I’m trying to spend this. Physically spend time together every month with at least a few of them, making sure we’re working collaboratively in the same space. We’re completely virtual as a company, so it’s important that we do that because we have to be aligned when a lot of us are new.

When the company was just merged, I was taking notes and reminding myself of some stuff that I wanted to do now. You know, like, oh yeah, the pain point, journey the pain journey on the website. Well, where do we stand on that? And, you know, I’m sure we’re not there yet.

We’re not there yet, so we’re just getting our feet underneath us. But it’s important. If we’re not aligned, as a matter of fact, I think the statistic was you could drive a 27% greater return if you have alignment on your executive level across your functional leaders. My advice is to find a way to collaborate with your peers and your customer success.

You know, whoever’s in charge of customer experience, whoever’s in charge of sales, and I do a monthly meeting between my marketing team and the sales leader about what’s coming. What are we working on? What would they prioritize? What would they change?

Steve MacDonald: That’s so important because in so many organizations I’ve worked with in marketing or consulted with, it’s almost like we can’t bother the sales team. They’re really busy, right? And it’s like, what? What that’s really saying is, we shouldn’t be talking, we shouldn’t be having that dialogue.

Nancy Maluso: You know, it’s interesting. I brought it up before, conversational intelligence tools are the best gift to marketing because we don’t have to ask sales about what they’re experiencing.

We can listen to it and learn from it directly. And there’s just no substitute for that.

Steve MacDonald: That puts you in the middle of the conversation to understand it. Well, Nancy, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you, a wealth of information and knowledge.

And if anybody here wanted to reach out and talk to you, is LinkedIn the best place to do that?

Nancy Maluso: LinkedIn, Nancy Maluso on LinkedIn.

Steve MacDonald: Alright, well, thank you for coming on, and we’ll look forward to having another conversation again in the future.

Nancy Maluso: I look forward to it. Thanks, Steve.

Next Steps

One of the things Nancy stresses is how to use content across the buyer’s journey to establish the all-important role of a trusted advisor and a teacher for buyers. To learn more about efficiently creating this type of content that opens doors and creates greater ROI from all angles, CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

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.