Inside G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report with Alexandra London, CMO of G2

Alexandra London is the Chief Marketing Officer at G2, the world's largest and most trusted data source in B2B software, serving more than 200 million annual software buyers. She joined G2 to lead marketing into the AI era, building growth engines designed for acceleration, accountability, and long-term value creation.  Alexandra joins Sydney Sloan to unpack the findings of G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report: The Evaluation Maze: how 82% of buyers have sourced a software recommendation from an AI chatbot, what separates getting cited from winning the answer, and why 49% of buyers had a CFO veto a software purchase that had already been approved. This episode is part of a partnership between The B2B CMO Project and G2.  Jump Into the Conversation: (00:00) Meet Alexandra London (01:28) Why the Buyer Behavior Report matters to CMOs (03:57) The new research timeline only takes hours instead of weeks  (05:20) How to win the answer, not just get cited (06:02) Marketing to the human and the agent at the same time (08:57) The new data point: 49% of CFOs vetoed an approved purchase (10:27) Why nobody wants to sign a three-year deal anymore (12:27) Token maxing and bringing the CFO along the journey  Episode Takeaways The shortlist is now built before you know the buyer exists. 82% of buyers sourced a software recommendation from an AI chatbot in the last 24 months, and review sites and AI chatbots are now the top sources influencing which vendors make that shortlist. Research that used to take weeks to months is now happening in hours. Getting cited is not the same as winning the answer. Being mentioned is table stakes. What matters is whether your brand is the recommendation the buyer acts on, and whether your own content is what shaped how the model describes you. Your content has two readers now, and one of them recrawls every 90 days. The models recrawl, re-understand, and repopulate on roughly a 90-day cycle, which means stale content quietly becomes a stale answer. Open your site and content to be crawled, and run an AEO tool that benchmarks prompts, citations and performance at scale rather than treating it as a one-time optimization pass. Awareness is not the finish line, evaluation is the bottleneck. Discovery compressed, evaluation did not. Buyers still have to compare and validate, and they need first-party comparison content alongside third-party reviews to build the internal business case they are the ones defending. 49% of buyers had a CFO veto a purchase that was already approved. CFOs are scrutinizing tooling ROI, watching AI consumption costs, and pushing back on multi-year contracts. If the CFO is not your financial buyer, add them to the buying group anyway through late-stage brand and paid social, so they recognize your name before the contract reaches their desk. Standout Quote "Now you have to speak to both the human and the agent, because they're both crawling and they're both understanding your site and pulling data in real time." — Alexandra London Guest Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandralondon/ G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/ Mentioned in this Episode G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, The Evaluation Maze: https://sell.g2.com/2026-buyer-behavior-report G2's announcement of the report findings: https://company.g2.com/news/buyer-behavior-2026 G2's acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/g2-to-acquire-capterra-software-advice-and-getapp-from-gartner-302673901.html Kim Storin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin/ 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