The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan

Katrina Wong is the Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, where she has led brand, demand, and communications. Before taking on the CMO role, she started her career as a consultant at PwC. She later on became Divisional CMO and VP of Marketing at Twilio Segment and held marketing and go-to-market leadership roles at Hired, Zuora, Salesforce, and SAP. In this episode, Katrina joins Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller to share how New Relic repositioned its category as intelligent observability and turned that into an AI story told chapter by chapter. She explains why she reports new business and post-sale pipeline separately in a consumption business, and why one marketing team owns both. Katrina also walks through how her marketing engineering and AI team rebuilt reporting on Gemini, the 85 agents running competitive intel every morning, and what happened when an agency sent her team 200 variations to review. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Katrina’s path from consulting to marketing (05:21) Being a strategic CMO and redefining observability for AI (09:13) Telling the AI story like chapters of a book (11:48) How marketing proved AI modernization to the board (14:18) Separating new business and post-sale pipeline (16:21) Customer hackathons and the link between engagement and revenue (18:01) Building a trusted BI layer with vibe coding (20:53) Humans in the loop and the problem of too much AI content (23:18) Gemini gems for sales and 85 daily competitive agents (25:12) The pillars of a superhuman marketing team (27:05) Gratitude, mentors, and key takeaways Episode Takeaways Take a bold stance on your category before someone else sets it for you. New Relic repositioned observability as intelligent observability, was first to claim it, and Gartner recognized the company for its AI vision the following year. Tell your AI story in chapters. Chapter one explained why AI matters in observability. Chapter two named the problem: code volume growing beyond human scale. That led to the brand campaign, Welcome to the Superhuman Era. Measure pipeline the way your business makes money. In a consumption business, new business pipeline is a leading indicator, but revenue comes from usage. New Relic tracks both, and one marketing team owns both. Keep humans in the loop, even when AI can produce more. When an agentic agency sent back 200 variations, Katrina's team realized more output wasn't the answer if no one could review it. Remove the bottlenecks between marketing and the field. Gemini gems for competitive and value selling replaced last-minute Slack asks, and 85 daily agents now draft most competitive updates before a human fact-checks them. Standout Quote "Sometimes the move to be strategic is to take a bold stance and see if it pays off." – Katrina Wong Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinawong11/ New Relic Website: https://newrelic.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Zuora: https://www.zuora.com/ Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/ Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com/ Tien Tzuo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tientzuo/ Sue Barsamian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suebarsamian/ Carilu Dietrich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carilu/ Tom Hartman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hartman/ Jennifer Covington: https://www.linkedin.com/in/covingtonjennifer/ 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

Denise Persson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company. With over 10 years in the role, one of the longest CMO tenures in enterprise tech, she has helped take Snowflake from roughly $1 million in revenue to more than $4 billion. She now leads a marketing team of about 700 people responsible for 40 to 50% of the company's growth, and this year marks her 30th in tech marketing. Denise shares why a new CMO's first team is the leadership team, not the marketing org, and why she throws out her own playbook every year. She also walks through how Snowflake's brand team became its most AI-forward function, how her morning brief replaced waiting on dashboards, why Snowflake moved its SDRs back into sales, and why her team is already working next quarter's pipeline two quarters out. Denise shares the one thing she says builds brand trust above all else: consistency. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Welcoming Denise Persson, CMO of Snowflake (01:56) From Commodore to 30 years in tech marketing (05:52) Why the CMO's first team is the leadership team (10:47) Throwing out the playbook every year (14:49) Moving marketing from AI fluency to agentic workflows (19:22) Growing 40 to 50% without adding headcount (21:35) Replacing dashboards with a daily AI brief (24:25) Why Snowflake moved SDRs back into sales (25:59) Fixing a soft quarter two quarters out (29:53) How AI adoption differs across regions (32:02) Why consistency builds brand trust (36:03) Closing gratitude and the leaders who see potential first Episode Takeaways Treat the leadership team as your first team. Denise says the day you become CMO, you are a business leader. That means understanding finance, having empathy for the sales craft, partnering with product, and bringing data and customer proof, not opinion, when you push a point of view. Rebuild your playbook every year and hire for your gaps. Over 10 years at Snowflake, Denise has thrown out her playbook annually. Her survival tactic is self-awareness: know your strengths, then hire people with the superpowers you don't have. Move AI from individual experiments to your top three workflows. Snowflake's top marketing AI user sits on the brand team, which is now building an agentic workflow so regional marketers can self-serve campaign assets instead of waiting 5-10 days. Work pipeline two quarters out. There is no magic campaign that fixes a soft quarter in a long sales cycle. Denise's team uses signals to see a weak quarter six months early, then drills down to territories as small as eight reps to find what's in the red. Build brand trust through consistency. Denise points to McDonald's and Coke as proof that trust comes from never delivering surprises. Her challenge now: keeping the brand consistent when anyone in the company can generate their own branded content. Standout Quote "When you get that CMO role, you need to understand that that’s the day you are a business leader." — Denise Persson Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisepersson/ Snowflake Website: https://www.snowflake.com/ Mentioned in this Episode The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.tablegroup.com/topics-and-resources/teamwork-5-dysfunctions/ Frank Slootman: linkedin.com/in/frankslootman Maria Pergolino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariapergolino/ Latané Conant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/latane-conant/ Demandbase: https://www.demandbase.com/ 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

Rachel Truair is the Chief Marketing Officer of Demandbase, the pipeline engine for AI go-to-market trusted by some of the world's leading B2B enterprise brands. Rachel joined Demandbase in January 2026 after more than two decades in B2B marketing leadership, including CMO roles at Simpro Group and Cart.com and senior roles at Adobe, Confluent, Oracle, and 3M. In this episode, Rachel chats with Sydney Sloan to look at AI disruption from the customer's side of the table. She shares what Labs by Demandbase is seeing in ChatGPT-referred traffic to B2B websites, why the real opportunity sits with the 95% of buyers who aren't in market yet, and why she may be the first Demandbase CMO to actually run her team on Demandbase. Rachel also makes the case that software should prove its own ROI, and explains how thinking like an investor helps CMOs split their AI bets into separate efficiency and growth stories for the board. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and Demandbase, the pipeline engine for AI go-to-market. Episode Takeaways Assume your buyers are researching somewhere you can't see. Labs by Demandbase found a roughly 300% increase in ChatGPT-referred traffic to B2B websites over the last year, which means a big share of discovery now happens before a prospect ever lands on your owned properties. Get the data foundation right before you scale anything with AI. Rachel's version: you avoid running off a cliff by standing on a flat surface. If your data isn't unified and you don't know which signals actually matter, AI just helps you scale the wrong things faster. Market to the 95%, not just the 5%. When everyone has access to the same in-market data, the advantage goes to the teams that use signals, buying groups, and context to reach buyers before they start an evaluation. Point AI at the spreadsheets, not the storytelling. Rachel saw AI-generated creative fall flat, and believes the better use is taking reporting, attribution debates, and campaign friction off marketing's plate so teams have more time for creative work. Bring AI to the board as an investor would. Rachel splits her AI initiatives into an efficiency story (time savings, headcount savings, program spend) and a growth story (pipeline and revenue), measures each on its own terms, and reinvests savings from one into the other. Standout Quote "The work that marketing does that's really valuable is the creative, it is the content, it is the storytelling. It's the reason we all got into this to begin with." — Rachel Truair Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/racheltruair/ Demandbase Website: https://www.demandbase.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Mojo by Demandbase: https://trymojo.ai Labs by Demandbase: https://www.demandbase.com/resources/labs/ The Prompt, Rachel Truair's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prompt/id1372690438 Kelvin Gee, Forrester: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelvingee Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/ 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

Cindy Zhou is the Chief Marketing Officer of Imprivata, the simple and secure access management platform used by roughly 90% of U.S. hospitals. Before Imprivata, Cindy built her CMO track record at KnowBe4, LogRhythm, and in senior marketing roles at IBM and Verizon, making this her fourth cybersecurity company as a marketing leader. Cindy chats with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan about her new role to unpack how she built her 30-60-100-day plan, why she believes CMOs need to operate as business executives first, and why she has already told her team to stop talking about MQLs. Cindy also walks through how she prioritizes with her CEO and CRO, why she is tying her customer marketing team's KPIs to retention and churn instead of lead volume, and how KnowBe4's InfoSec team tried to break her first AI SDR before she would let it near a real customer. Jump Into the Conversation (00:00) Welcoming Cindy Zhou, CMO of Imprivata (02:31) How Cindy went from product management to marketing (07:49) What it means to be a strategic CMO (10:05) What she brought from past roles into Imprivata's C-suite (11:36) Seeing the market beyond industry silos (14:17) How to earn the strategic CMO seat (19:51) Moving beyond MQLs and tying priorities to strategic metrics (22:12) Investing in retention and customer marketing (27:41) How to build brand in an AI-disintermediated world (29:48) AI SDRs and AI teammates, governance, and human-in-the-loop (32:01) Closing gratitude, mentors and board members who shaped her career Episode Takeaways Treat marketing as a business-executive function, not a departmental one. When Cindy evaluates a new opportunity, she starts with market dynamics and the financials (NRR, GRR, growth rate) before she gets to a marketing plan, because 'chief market officer' only works as a title if you actually understand the market. Look past the vertical to find the universal pain underneath it. Imprivata's brand is deeply rooted in healthcare, but Cindy makes the case for expanding into manufacturing and public safety by pointing to a pain point every industry shares: nobody wants to deal with passwords. She backs this up with real customer stories, like a casino cage worker locked out of a login for 45 minutes, to show how the same root problem shows up everywhere, just wearing a different industry's clothes. Use your CEO's and CRO's own words to build your first 90 days. Cindy's tip for new CMOs: go back and listen to the sales kickoff keynote, then build your plan around the problems leadership already said out loud they want solved. Parroting it back makes the plan easier to align on. Replace MQLs with metrics tied to retention and growth. Cindy has moved her customer marketing team's KPIs away from lead volume and toward NRR, GRR, and churn signals, arguing that in a private-equity-backed business, those numbers matter more to the board than marketing-sourced pipeline. Stress-test AI SDRs before they ever talk to a real customer. At KnowBe4, Cindy had her InfoSec team try to break the AI SDR with off-topic and legal questions before launch, and the program is still built to route uncertain questions to a live human rather than risk a wrong answer. Standout Quote "We’re business executives first, that’s the way to really think about it. We just happen to have responsibility over marketing.” — Cindy Zhou Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyzhou/ Imprivata Website: https://www.imprivata.com/ Mentioned in this Episode Mark Logan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-logan-894977/ Betsy Atkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsy-atkins-a36b114/ Shanti Atkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanti-atkins-602b493/ Brian Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/privacy-policy/ Penn Entertainment: https://www.pennentertainment.com 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

Most CMOs are trying to solve an operating model problem with a job posting. Dom Colasante is the founder of 2X, and he has spent the better part of a decade helping B2B companies run marketing, sales, and customer success as one system. Following 2X's acquisition of KnownWell, he is betting the company on what he calls the human agentic go-to-market model. This model involves expert teams and AI agents fused so tightly you cannot tell which is which. In this rapid-fire conversation, Dom joins Sydney Sloan to explain why asking the same people to own both strategy and execution suboptimizes both, how to sort every piece of go-to-market work into three buckets, and why the single most common mistake he sees right now is a CMO hoping one expensive hire will rewire the whole function. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and 2X. Jump Into the Conversation: (00:00) Why 2X is betting on human agentic go-to-market (01:57) Why the go-to-market org chart is finally breaking down (02:36) What happens when one team owns both strategy and execution (05:46) Inside the human agentic operating model and the KnownWell acquisition (07:52) Why every workflow should have both human and AI in it (09:22) Door one versus door two and why growth beats efficiency (12:13) The three buckets of go-to-market work (15:14) Where to start and the honest talent conversation (17:46) The mistake CMOs are making with the single go-to-market engineer Key Takeaways One team owning both strategy and execution suboptimizes both. Strategy shrinks to what that team can personally execute, and execution never gets the full best practice treatment because the same people are busy thinking. Dom's fix is specialization of labor, with the two groups still on one team and the integration point on collaboration rather than day-to-day work. Once you split them, the marketing, sales, and CS silos stop mattering as much. Execution across all three is largely the same motion, and so is strategy across all three. Find a buyer, activate a buyer, or get a buyer to love the product more. That is what makes the converged org chart workable. Deconstruct the work into three buckets before you touch the org chart. To succeed, you need to divide your work into three different categories: what you must be the best in the world at, what you delegate to a partner to execute using best practices, and what you automate through systems. The work you personally own should account for only 10% to 20% of your total workload, and mastering that critical slice is what creates leverage and drives the success of everything else. The efficiency framing is the wrong ask. Given a choice between halving cost for the same output and holding cost while doubling output, Dom's read is that nearly every CEO takes the second door. Pitch the human agentic model as a growth argument, not a cost argument. An agentic operating model is a discipline, not a person. Hiring one go-to-market engineer runs a six-month search, produces someone who needs a team around them, and often ends in turnover a year later with the goal unmet. The same $250K buys tech, partners, expertise, and projects together. Standout Quote "When the same group of people, the same individuals, the same department is doing both strategy and execution at the same time, it sub-optimizes both." - Dom Colasante Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domeniccolasante/ 2X website: https://2x.com/ Mentioned in This Episode KnownWell (acquired by 2X): https://knownwell.com/ Lisa Cole: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacole01/ 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