The CMO Dilemma: Surviving & Thriving in a High-Stakes Marketing World with Jenny Sagstrom

Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.

Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. It's a particularly tough time to be a CMO. As competitive pressures rise, CEOs are demanding faster results and clear demonstration of ROI, even as attribution becomes more complicated by the day. No matter how smirk or creative you are, it's challenging to prove the direct impact of marketing efforts when the customer journey twists and turns across multiple channels and platforms. At the same time, many organizations are rethinking or even doing away with the CMO role, reflecting the struggle market leaders face in this high stakes environment. Today, I'm delighted to speak with Jenny, the founder and CEO of b two b creative agency Skomuna. Jenny is someone who deeply understands how CMOs can navigate these shifting expectations while still pushing forward with ambitious and creative marketing strategies. With the right mix of strategic perspective and tactical know how, marketing leaders can continue to deliver tangible results, proving their worth, and securing their place at the executive table. I'm really looking forward to hearing Jenny's insights on how marketers can power through these challenges and keep driving growth for their organizations. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Jenny Sagstrom: Thanks. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Jenny, can you start by telling us about your background and how you came to found Scona and share how those early experiences shaped your perspective on the b two b marketing world.

Jenny Sagstrom: I'm originally born in Sweden, Stockholm, and I studied economy economics and international relations in college. And I fell into an ad agency as so many of us have done. And within a couple of days, realized that this is where I wanna be. People get paid to do this for a living. It's fantastic.

Mark Evans: You're

Jenny Sagstrom: right. No one told me. So I started working there and never left. In those early days, actually back in Sweden, this is in the late nineties, one of my first clients was actually Atlas Copco. They made ergonomic jackhammers. And as weird as that sounds, it was interesting to me to really get to go deep on something that I knew nothing about. And I think that's probably why I've come to love b to b so much because you get this opportunity to really learn something that you normally wouldn't. A lot of people say, well, advertising is always like that. It doesn't matter what it is. But I think the difference is, like, most of us know what milk is. We know what shampoo is. We don't have to necessarily use that much analytical firepower to understand it. So what I love is that challenge, really kinda getting to the bottom of of what a client does and and understanding it. That's how I ended up in b to b and how I ended up loving it. But fast forward a couple of years, I moved to San Francisco working in an ad agency there. The .com bust and boom happened. In 2004, the stars aligned and I was able to start my own shop, which became Sona. Nod to my heritage from Sweden, the word actually means beautiful, comfortable, glorious, which is all the things I feel about marketing and advertising when done right. Since 2004, we've been running Sona in San Francisco. With regards to how how I can say when it comes to the b to b experience we had there is we didn't start out as a b to b shop. Our first clients were the San Francisco Examiner. We worked with the Palace Hotel. We did a lot of regional restaurants and and those types of businesses. And then in 2005, we started working with VMware. And at the time, they were only about, I think, two, three hundred people. And we stayed with them for more than ten years. During that process and during that time, we met a lot of great marketeers who moved on to other high-tech, specifically, companies in Silicon Valley. Without really knowing how, we found our ourselves, oh, wow. We're, you know, really steeped in this b to b tech world. And, wow, we're really good at it. And we really enjoy it since probably, I I wanna say, like, 2016 or something like that. I wouldn't say we pivoted, but we definitely leaned into working solely with b to b. And that's apart from our pro bono clients, that's all we do today.

Mark Evans: It's interesting that you mentioned working for a pneumatic manufacturer. Recently started, probably the last six months, started working for a company that makes equipment for oil and gas industry. Oh. Totally different from the work I do with BB's NAS companies that came out of the blue. It was an opportunity that was interesting. And like your experience, I am delving into a new and interesting world. I never thought I would work in the oil and gas industry. I never thought I'd work for an equipment baker, and I walk around the factory floor learning about how to drive sales and marketing. That's one of the wonderful things about working in b to b. It's always something new, always something interesting and exciting. Wanted to dive into this world of CMO. It seems a very volatile. It's exciting and terrifying at the same time because the customer journey, it zigzag. It's it's not linear. Attribution is increasingly difficult, if not impossible. From your perspective, why do you think the CMO role has come under such scrutiny? Why are some organizations moving to the extreme, moving away from it? Is this a short term reaction or maybe the sign of deeper structural changes within the industry?

Jenny Sagstrom: It's an interesting question. And full disclosures, I've never been a CMO myself, but I obviously know a ton of them having sat on my side of the fence, so to speak. Thought through this a lot. And think firstly, why if we start with why they are being so scrutinized right now, I think it comes down to the thing that always drives business, which is money and how to make money. The last few years, increased interest rates and everything that went on. As money became more expensive, the pressure of delivering was much higher on CMOs in that chair and in the role that they sit in. If I roll back the tape a little bit and I think about twenty five, thirty years ago when I first started working, when I came when I started working, we didn't have CMOs. I think back when we had SVPs of sales and marketing, that was a combined title back then. The CMO title is only something we've seen the last probably ten, fifteen years. The CRO role is even newer than that. What I've seen lately is, yes, there's been some elimination of the CMO roles, but it it there are still marketing people. They tend to roll up to sometimes it's been a CRO. But I've also seen now lately, actually, that some companies have started have have come with the chief strategy officer role, which sounds super cool. I don't actually do, but that sounds like a job I'd want.

Mark Evans: Oh, I'd want to.

Jenny Sagstrom: I've also seen chief design officers, which I think is actually putting more and more emphasis on the creative aspect. So perhaps it's not eliminating it. Part of it could be systematic that something is changing in the business. Like, it's a cyclical then. And there's also if the trend is that sales and marketing are coming closer, I wouldn't necessarily say that's a bad thing. I think in order especially the type of marketing we do nowadays, it it's really key that sales and marketing are speaking together.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Jenny Sagstrom: To some extent, there's something good that is coming from it.

Mark Evans: You read things like like the Spencer Stuart report, which shows that the average tenure of a CMO is shrinking. It's probably around three years now. It doesn't seem to be a long time for a senior position.

Jenny Sagstrom: It's even shorter in b two b.

Mark Evans: It's like professional sports coaches. If you're not happy with the performance, you can't fire the team. You'd have to fire the coach. The CMO sends to you the to get the brunt of it. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing CMOs right now, particularly in b to b marketing? How do you think these challenges differ from those facing more traditional consumer face marketers?

Jenny Sagstrom: What you're actually hitting on is perhaps that CEOs, perhaps even more CFOs, don't actually understand marketing, especially and I think maybe here's the difference between b to b and b to c. I think in b to c companies, and I don't have quite the statistics to back this up, but I will actually go look into it after we're done here today. But it seems to me that there's a better or more widespread understanding of marketing at the top brass, I. E, CEO, CFO, the people holding the money in the b and c world. Probably, and here's a guess, that many of those people are traditional MBAs who have gone through that more traditional training. While in a b to b company, many of the top leaders, the CEOs at least, are more product or engineering focused in their background with limited exposure to traditional marketing thinking. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that it's really hard for CMOs is that there's such a discrepancy in understanding what what what the role is for, which then I assume and I I see FIREC's lack of understanding for why the results aren't being delivered and so forth. So I think that maybe there's something in that. I don't know. I I have a sense that that's where it's a big problem. I also think that if if I look at 2025 and what we have ahead of us, to me, I believe and what I hear when I talk to partners and clients and people in the industry is that the focus for 2025 is mostly for for most marketeers back to brand. Everybody is talking about the fact that we must do brand marketing again. We're talking about top of the funnel. We're talking about bringing new people into the ecosystem. We're talking a lot about the ninety five five rule. And I think most of us in marketing have talked about that for a long time, but it's finally gaining traction. I think the CMOs, in turn, have a hard time or a bit of an uphill climb getting more traditionally engineering, technology driven CEOs and founders to comprehend the fact that perhaps the biggest ROI isn't necessarily marketing to people who are gonna buy you anyway, but to marketing to people who've never heard of you.

Mark Evans: What you're saying reflects my experience. I mean, I think what happens is that you have people, senior leaders in b to b companies that have no marketing experience. They're great engineers. They're great computer science people, but they're also the smartest people in the in the room, or they think they're the smartest people in the room. It often means they think they're great at sales and marketing. What happens when they eventually hire a marketing leader is that it's a turf battle. The CEO says that he wants marketing help or she wants marketing help, but at the same time, they wanna be in control. Eventually, you get the two sides at at war versus working together. And one of the things that I raise in a regular basis is how do you get alignment? If you're a CMO, you've just been hired to leverage marketing to drive growth, how do you make sure that it's a one plus one equals three proposition that the CEO is clear about expectations? Some of our marketing is gonna be quantifiable, some isn't. Some of our marketing is gonna be experiments because we always have to be looking at different channels and approaches. Part of the marketing mix is gonna be success and failure. That's a very different proposition when you're dealing with engineering, for example, and it's just a matter of linear improvements. If you are a CMO, how do you establish a partnership as opposed to enter your relationship which can become affrimonious and confrontational and eventually see the CMO leave the scene because the CEO gets frustrated?

Jenny Sagstrom: I was at an event this week. I ran a roundtable of CMOs, and we're discussing some of these challenges that they're up against. This was definitely top of mind. And the advice that came, which in hindsight sounds very luxurious, is for the CMO to really do their due diligence before they take the gig. You've got to interview your CEO and and the rest of of the leadership to make sure that they're aligned with your vision and that they have marketing's back. They need to be thinking marketing first or you won't be able to do your job well. However, I realized, I don't know if you agree with me here, that this sounds like a luxurious position to be in. It's not not everybody has that luxury to to interview for the best job, but I think that's really, first and foremost, the way to approach it. What's your reaction to that?

Mark Evans: It sounds like fantasy should be honest with you. The idea that a CMO can be interviewing the CEO to make sure it's the right fit. I mean, marketing leadership positions are tough to get these days as marketing budgets get there and the demands on marketers to perform increase. There must be huge competition for for CMO positions. And I don't know. Unless you're really, really good, you just don't get the luxury of picking and choosing. It's usually if I can get a job, let's just make this. That's a good thing. In an ideal world, that's great, but the real world doesn't work that way. The other angle that I wanted to ask you about when it comes to that that dynamic, that relationship, is alignment on our quantifying the impact that marketing has on the business, which is something that is immensely challenging right now. Because it used to be that if we did a and b happen, there was a direct correlation between the two. But that doesn't work anymore, especially in b to b where sales cycles may be really long, where there's multiple channels at play, where attribution becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. As a marketer, you you have this budget. You do all this activity, and the CEO can't really tell what's working and what's not. How do they handle that? What's the recipe for success? All that they care at the end of the day, if you're a CEO, am I getting enough leads? Am I gonna get getting enough sales? Should they care where and how it happens other than the fact that marketing is doing what they're supposed to be doing?

Jenny Sagstrom: Just a holy grail question. I think there's two things I wanna bring in. And then the first one is someone much smarter than me. I listened to him speak the other day. His name is Carl Worthington, and he spoke about exactly this. The intangible things that you can't measure and how they are the most important things in marketing, especially when it comes to brand building. He used the quote that things like what is it? Things that are measured get managed or something like that. We've all heard the quote, but he pointed to the fact that this quote actually initially may meant something different. It came from a scientific paper and it pointed to the fact that people start over measuring things and that we shouldn't do that. That the the a lot of the more important things in life can't be measured. That's exactly the point with marketing. But it doesn't help our CMOs who are fighting for budget. So that's the one thing. That goes hand in hand with this advice that all CMOs get. And that you need to learn to speak business. You need to learn to speak speak the language of the CFO. I think that is happening. A lot of our CFOs are pointing to or CMOs are using that type of language that are getting them more and more a table at that at this base of the table and being able to argue for the budget they need. So I think that is underway. But I think the third thing that might be that we sometimes don't even think about as much as we should, which is the beauty of marketing is that we get to build the black box any way we want to. And we get yes. We should be measuring what we do. But if if we we it's up to us to decide what we're gonna be measured, and it's up to us to then convince the people in charge of the money and in charge of spending that what we measure matters. So if that black box is share of surge, share of voice, earned media, it could be anything. But we have to really before we start any creative project, any marketing activity, we gotta think about how are we gonna be selling this internally to show that it actually worked. Even if it has a longer lead time to get there, what can we show incrementally? It can't just be leads because that's what we're saying. Those leads are useless. So how do we get away from thinking that way? What can we think about that we can affect with marketing, with brand that we can continue to show our worth? And so I think maybe as marketers, maybe the fault is maybe what we're doing wrong is not spending enough time thinking about what goes into our black box of measure measurements.

Mark Evans: The quote, only what gets measured gets managed is Peter Drucker, well known economist. Everyone loves that quote. Yeah. It is an interesting quote given what's happening on the marketing landscape. We went through a huge period where data was king. And we all, as marketers, looked at our dashboards. And if the green arrows were going up and they were better than the red arrow was going down, it was all good. We were optimizing results, and it was data, data, data. At the same time, you had brand sitting in the corner waiting to be discovered. I kept waiting for the pendulum to come back to brand. It now appears that brand matters. 2025, as you say, could be the year brand. But it also lends itself to the attribution quantifying results conundrum. When you're driving brand, when your focus is brand awareness and trying to get a market, it could be a a niche market, a segmented market, aware that your product exists. And it should be one of the choices among many competitive options. That's a different marketing proposition that can be more difficult to measure. Sometimes you use the phrase leap of faith when I just discuss that kind of activity, and I always get slapped on the wrist for using it because it looks at marketing as a guessing game. But when you're doing brand marketing, you're making a bet that it's going to get the impact that you want, but you don't know. You may not know a month, three months, six months from now. If you're a CMO and you are hard into brand and your CEO is saying you gotta go hard into brand, how do you demonstrate results? How do you tell the c CEO this is the impact? How do you measure that?

Jenny Sagstrom: We need to dig deeper. It goes from case to case. It could be as easy as search. I think share of search is still an important measurement of this. We know what people do. They see some brand thing and they instantly Google or go to Chut GPT. Right? Let's not forget that that part of that search. Search is an important measure. If it's a really long sales cycle, what other things do we want? Is it that we want our brand to be measured? Is it we started probably about seven years ago talking about brand gen, which was a combined effort of brand awareness and then adding lead gen on top of it to satisfy this understanding that brand awareness on its own is gonna get our NCMOs fired. And that's terrible because even if it's a creative thing, we need to show incremental results. If you look at the scientific studies too, I think that none of them are saying go short all 100% in a brand. The number for b to b is something like 30 or 70% more sales directed activities such as lead gen and brand gen towards people who are already in the funnel and the remainder to be brand. Maybe that's how you do it. You are continuing to nurture people who are in the funnel. You're pushing them further down the funnel, but staying away from advertising to people who are already ready to buy. Right. That's the key. Like, no need to waste your money on that. But then put the remain you've gotta fill the top of the funnel. If you just keep talking to your people who are already in your ecosystem with common sense, you're not gonna grow. If no one new gets to know about your brain, they're never gonna buy you. End of story. So that I think is the key. How do we met I think the key is how do we measure that top of funnel? It could be something from the salespeople. How are their door opening conversations going? How are the SDRs and the BDRs? How are their conversion rate? We gotta work closely with sales in order to see what happens here.

Mark Evans: Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned the rise of chief revenue officers as part of the mix. One of the things that have especially for smaller companies that have always stressed is that marketing is sales and sales is marketing. They have to be working in lockstep so they understand prospects, customers, what's happening in the marketplace, how they match up against the competition. The question is, given that collaboration across departments is crucial, what are the best ways that CMOs can effectively partner with other executives like the CRO to break down silos and to drive stronger results? I mean, are there specific frameworks or steps or tools that you recommend to encourage a more integrated approach?

Jenny Sagstrom: The first one is the easiest one. Get rid of the idea of NQLs and SQLs. There is nothing that drives diversion more than SQLs and NQLs. What you gotta think about is pipeline as a whole, not where it came from. Every time marketing and sales, there's a breakdown in communication, it's because sales think that marketing is delivering crappy leads. And marketing is annoyed because sales aren't doing anything with the leads that they're delivering. We just gotta get away from that. Right? We're on a piece of that. Sales are from sales are from Morrison. Marketing's from Venus. Basically, it's kind of that same thing Yeah. That we have to be better co parent. At the core, though, marketing is generally underfunded in many ways. Salespeople generally get compensated very differently. If the CEO wants a fully working and fully integrated system, then we gotta think about compensation early on. How do we equalize compensation between those departments in a way that that makes everybody go towards the same goal? That's gonna be a a key thing too. But apart from that, more more tactically, get rid of NQLs and SQLs think pipeline. Secondly, if you're a CMO, you should be having a standing meeting with your CRO. If not weekly, at least biweekly. How are you tackling problems together? How are you supporting each other? You know, if you two are the best of friends, the rest of your organization will follow.

Mark Evans: Amid this battle between data and brand, there's a common perception that b to b marketing is boring. That it's not really much fun. It doesn't entertain. But one of the things you rally around is creativity. Doing things that are engaging, interesting. I'd like to get your thoughts on how creativity can be brought into the mix and how marketers can convince CEOs that thinking out of the box, zigging when people are zagging, doing things that may be as a change up when consumers are expecting a fastball is a good thing. It is a way that you can break through the noise, that way that you can differentiate yourself in very competitive marketplaces. What's your advice to companies, marketers, CEOs who wanna leverage creativity, but do it in a way that is aligned with their brand, is aligned with what prospects expect, what they want, and at the same time, you got that measurement element that that you wanna bring into it.

Jenny Sagstrom: Well, I'd advise first if I could to skip that measurement altogether. Secondly, if we look at the stock market and we look at organizations that do marketing really well, for me, Salesforce is right up there. They have some amazing marketing, and they also perform really well on the stock market. Same actually service before I got on this call. Was checking out one of their latest ads that dropped. Amazing. They're fun. They're so clever, and and they help you think of the business in a different way. The beauty is neither Salesforce nor ServiceNow nor any of our clients, Like, say, none of our clients in the campaigns that we produce, for example, for Snowflake, none of them talk features and benefits. That's where b to b gets boring. If we let the engineering and product marketing department tell the audience about all the 4,000 features that they've added, no one's gonna wanna buy that. No one cares. That's not what that's for. Right? Yes. Maybe at some point, someone wants to know how it works or that it works, But that's not what advertising and marketing should be about. When it comes to fitting inside your brand, of course, it has to fit inside your brand. That's why ServiceNow doesn't necessarily look like Salesforce even by even though they have someone in charge of marketing there right now who comes from Salesforce. But that's beside the point. Right? You have to find whatever is authentic to that brand and lean into that. Lean into how this brand that you're working for know is different. And it it what's different isn't your features and benefits or speeds and feeds and all of that. What problems do you actually help your customers solve? And how do you make their world and lives easier? And leaning into that and telling stories around that in an authentic and appealing way. And use emotion for it. Like, that's key.

Mark Evans: When you look at your client portfolio and you think of creativity, any campaigns, any clients stand out as embracing that creative approach to marketing? Some a brand that wants to be different, is willing to be different, and willing to take willing to take creative list to do it.

Jenny Sagstrom: Snowflake has been over explained since 2016 when they first came out of stealth mode, especially the early billboard campaign. They now have a bill billboard campaign that's been running for seven years. Those stand out. They were funny, a little edgy. They always leaned into zeitgeist. They still do. There's something about them that makes you open your eyes. Apart from really wanting to associate snowflake with data, which is the most important thing that we wanted to do, especially when it came to billboards, we realized that not everybody who sees this board, they're not our customers. Billboards on the 101 in San Francisco, there's soccer moms, there's teenagers, there's god knows what not that drives down that road. We feel like we owe them at least a little chuckle by taking up the time that it took for them to read our billboard. We want it to not be so navel gazing that it's boring for everyone who isn't in a position or ever gonna be in a position to buy from Snowflake. That was key. Early on, if I can get this that right, I believe the CMO mentioned that 70% in the early days of Snowflake, it was key to, of course, hire right people, new people. They mentioned that 70% of those people they hired in the early days first came into contact with the Snowflake brand through those billboards. That was, again, different KPI. That doesn't necessarily talk about brand awareness in the larger sense, but to their core constituent then, that was the key fact.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And how do you quantify the effectiveness of a billboard campaign?

Jenny Sagstrom: They definitely look at that reach in terms of how many eyeballs you get on on it per month. But to Snowflake, a big percentage of those eyeballs are going to do with data warehousing or anything that Snowflake does. Back in those days, it was more important that people who came to work for Snowflake had a good and wanted to come to work there. And the billboards were super important in terms of that.

Mark Evans: Let's take a step back. Airbnb, for example, is another brand that beverage billboards. Peel back the onion of the snowflake marketing strategy, the idea that they would do something different. What was the strategic strategic thinking when they decided to go hard on billboards? We're gonna be fun. We're gonna be creative. We're gonna do some different things. We're not gonna do other things, although they're important because we're we have to make choices. Our investment's gonna be in billboards. Who convinced who that this was the right thing to do? Did the CEO have to get involved and say, yeah. Let's do it? What was the backstory behind the the snowflake billboard strategy?

Jenny Sagstrom: They have a very brave CMO. And so she, early on, decided that the best marketing strategy was to create marketing that markets itself. We've always done marketing that creates ripples on the water. Marketing that isn't just one and done, but marketing that becomes almost water cooler conversations. She's a rock star. She drove us forward as an agency with that in mind. And with regards to if the CEO had to get involved, I I don't actually know. I wasn't in those rooms, but I doubt it. So I think that she has to produce results, and they have to continue to deliver. The marketing department had been trained to do what they do best.

Mark Evans: I have an advisory client, scrappy, small startup serving the fast food and Sweet. And restaurant industry. They are targeted geographically. They have no marketing budget. What they are spending their money on is a billboard. Two billboards, in fact, because they believe that it's the best way of capturing the attention of a peer people that matter to them. Restaurant owners, people who own grocery stores, manage grocery stores are gonna drive by those billboards every single day. How do you reach people like that who may not be digital animals? Maybe billboards are the secret weapon of b two b marketing, the bike that most people drive or take the train or take the bus. If you do what Snowflake does and you're creative and you think out of the box and have fun, that can work. One final question, and this is a hard one or an easy one depending on end of the view of the world. As marketing continues to evolve and we see the rise of AI and the impact it's having on how we do our jobs as marketers, what new skills or mindsets do you believe CMOs must adopt to, a, remain effective, and, b, to keep their jobs? Do you think there's emerging trends that will drastically reshape how marketing leaders operate in the near future?

Jenny Sagstrom: The obvious answer is things like prompting, engineering, that type of stuff. But I don't think that's what they need more than anything. What marketing leaders need to be successful in this future it real leadership skills. The marketing department and marketing is so uncertain that what's gonna be more important than ever is the ability to help inspire their people to do the best work that they possibly can. Provide a safe space for them to be creative, to come up with new ideas, to feel safe because it is a really uncertain world. More than anything, marketing leaders are gonna have to lead in lean into the second part of that word, which is that leadership ability. The other thing that they're gonna have to look into is to be brave. Because we're always seeing the volume of creative work being produced is enormous. To stand out, you're gonna have to stand out. And standing out is really uncomfortable. Like, Gary, just think back to high school. Who wanted to stand out in high school and goes against the human grain to wanna stand out? But yet, that's what needs to happen to be remembered. Marketing that no one objects to cease or have an opinion on is basically wasted marketing because no one remembers it. You're gonna have to go against your natural instinct for just to stand out and lean into that and and dare to be brave and then make those decisions that make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. That's probably the skill that people are gonna have to have to live in that uncomfortable area that you can't quite navigate, but you have to be in.

Mark Evans: Could be the good tagline for marketers is that be brave, maybe the tagline that we need to embrace going forward. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for all your insight. Where can people learn more about you and Skona?

Jenny Sagstrom: Skona.com. Skona.com. Come check us out. We're on LinkedIn. You'll find me at LinkedIn slash Jenny Sagstrom.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Jenny, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, subscribe, or follow via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or favorite podcast app, and share via social media. And if you're a b to b or SaaS company with 1,000,000 to $10,000,000 in revenue and you're looking for traction and to scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. Reach out via email, mark@markevas.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.com. We'll talk to you soon.