Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing

Summary

CMO Confidential Episode Summary: Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing

Release Date: April 15, 2025

Introduction

In this insightful episode of CMO Confidential, host Mike Linton engages in a deep conversation with Jon Miller, a seasoned marketing leader and co-founder of industry stalwarts like Marketo and Engagio. The episode, titled "The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing," delves into the evolving landscape of B2B marketing, challenging traditional paradigms and exploring innovative strategies for future success.

The Gumball Machine Metaphor

Jon Miller introduces the gumball machine metaphor to critique the conventional B2B marketing playbook. He explains that the traditional approach treats marketing efforts like a gumball machine—inputting resources (quarters) to receive leads (gumballs) with the expectation that these leads will convert into customers.

“[01:59] Jon Miller: ... it's like the marketing playbook we've been following for years. At Marketo, we promoted that old playbook: use content to generate leads, nurture them with emails, score them, and pass them to SDRs at the right time."

Why the Gumball Machine is Broken

Miller argues that this linear, highly measurable system is fundamentally flawed. The modern buyer’s journey is non-linear and influenced by myriad factors beyond the marketer's control. He highlights that buyers are becoming more savvy and are opting out of traditional marketing tactics, making the gumball machine analogy increasingly obsolete.

“[03:14] Jon Miller: ... marketing is a much more complex machine that can't be tuned and optimized like a repeatable machine."

He further emphasizes that the saturation of traditional tactics has led to buyer fatigue, with prospects engaging more anonymously and resisting conventional lead generation methods.

Evolving Role of the CMO and Marketing Strategy

The conversation pivots to the necessity for CMOs to redefine their roles and strategies. Miller suggests that instead of focusing solely on demand generation and MQLs, marketers should prioritize building long-term relationships and enhancing brand awareness.

“[13:10] Jon Miller: ... we need to redefine what driving revenue means. Being a revenue marketer needs to become about putting in place conditions that drive long-term revenue."

He advocates for investment in branding, understanding customer psychology, and creating valuable, proprietary content that fosters trust and recognition.

Emphasis on Customer Relationships and Branding

Miller underscores the importance of treating buyers as relationships rather than mere leads. This shift necessitates a focus on brand building and customer experience, drawing inspiration from successful B2C strategies.

“[09:27] Jon Miller: ... it's about treating the buyer as a relationship to be built and not a lead to be captured."

He cites companies like Gong and Carta as exemplars in utilizing proprietary data to create unique, valuable insights that resonate with their target audiences, thereby enhancing brand authority and customer loyalty.

Predictions for 2025 and AI's Impact

Looking ahead, Jon Miller shares his predictions on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will further disrupt B2B marketing. He anticipates the rise of AI agents that can automate and streamline marketing operations, potentially transforming how campaigns are executed and how customer interactions are managed.

“[29:36] Jon Miller: ... marketing operations agents that can automate tasks like building campaigns or cleaning data will be profound."

Miller highlights both the opportunities and challenges posed by AI, noting that while it can alleviate bottlenecks, it may also lead to increased competition and rapid changes in customer engagement dynamics.

Examples of Companies Leading the Change

Throughout the episode, Miller provides concrete examples of companies that are successfully navigating the shift away from traditional B2B marketing tactics:

1. Gong: By leveraging millions of recorded sales calls, Gong analyzes interactions to derive actionable insights, enhancing sales training and strategy.

   “[17:32] Jon Miller: ... Gong records sales calls and analyzes them to create reports, such as the impact of swearing on deal outcomes.”

2. Carta: Utilizes comprehensive startup data to offer valuable statistics that guide entrepreneurs in fundraising and equity distribution.

   “[19:29] Jon Miller: ... Carta provides data-driven insights on fundraising rounds and equity management, building brand authority through unique offerings."

Practical Advice for Marketers

When asked for practical advice, Jon Miller emphasizes the need for CMOs to fundamentally rethink their marketing approaches:

• Invest in Brand Building: Allocate a significant portion of the marketing budget to brand awareness and customer relationships rather than solely on lead generation.

  “[24:27] Jon Miller: ... invest more in brand than most B2B companies are doing, focusing on long-term value over short-term metrics."

• Leverage Proprietary Data: Develop unique insights from internal data to create valuable content that distinguishes your brand from competitors.

  “[17:32] Jon Miller: ... using proprietary data to produce unique insights that resonate with buyers."

• Embrace AI for Automation: Adopt AI tools to streamline marketing operations, allowing human marketers to focus on strategic, relationship-driven activities.

  “[22:55] Jon Miller: ... envisioning platforms that truly automate marketing, enabling marketers to concentrate on understanding the market."

Conclusion

In "The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing," Jon Miller presents a compelling case for overhauling traditional B2B marketing approaches. By shifting focus from linear lead generation to building enduring customer relationships and embracing AI-driven innovation, CMOs can navigate the complexities of the modern marketplace. This episode serves as a crucial guide for marketing leaders aiming to stay ahead in an increasingly sophisticated and AI-influenced environment.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jon Miller [03:14]: "Marketing is a much more complex machine that can't be tuned and optimized like a repeatable machine."

• Jon Miller [13:10]: "We need to redefine what driving revenue means. Being a revenue marketer needs to become about putting in place conditions that drive long-term revenue."

• Jon Miller [09:27]: "It's about treating the buyer as a relationship to be built and not a lead to be captured."

• Jon Miller [29:36]: "Marketing operations agents that can automate tasks like building campaigns or cleaning data will be profound."

• Jon Miller [24:27]: "Invest more in brand than most B2B companies are doing, focusing on long-term value over short-term metrics."

Transcript

[Mike Linton]

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential.

[John Miller]

The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.

[Mike Linton]

Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer at Best Buy and ebay, Farmers Insurance and ancestry dot com. I'm here today with my guest, John Miller. Today's topic, the Gumball Machine is broken. Rethinking B2B marketing. Now, John is the co founder and former CMO of Marketo, founder and former CEO of Engagio, former CMO of Demand Base, and a board member of several startups. Notice there's a lot of things he did there that end and out. I don't know what that has to do with the show, but it just occurs. He is currently working on a new venture which is in stealth mode and he is also a fearless prognosticator, publishing a yearly list of B2B predictions which we will talk about during the show. Welcome John.

[John Miller]

Awesome. Great to talk to you today.

[Mike Linton]

All right, John, let's start with this concept of the gumball machine for B2B. Tell our listeners what is the gumball machine and why is it broken?

[John Miller]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a metaphor for what I just call the playbook, the marketing playbook we've been following for years. And I am somewhat responsible for helping to promote that old playbook. At Marketo, we went around and said this is how you do marketing. You use content to generate leads, you capture them and then you nurture them with emails. You score them and you pass into an SDR at the right time. You know, you have other SDRs that are doing outbounding, you know, to reach out SDR.

[Mike Linton]

Just we don't have half our show is B2B. The other half not B2B. SDR is sales development rep, right?

[John Miller]

Yeah. You know, kind of a junior salesperson that's going to, you know, try to bring the human part to the whole to the whole system. And everything about this playbook was meant to be highly measurable, high, you know, highly quantitative. You know, I would even go to people and say the way you should set your marketing budget is you should calculate that, well, I need this much pipeline, which means I need this many opportunities, which means I'm going to need this many leads, which means I need to run this many marketing programs. And like, like literally kind of do that backwards math. And, and, and that's the origin of where the whole thing starts to fall apart because.

[Mike Linton]

Oh, go ahead.

[John Miller]

You know, it starts to make you think of marketing being like a gumball machine where I can just put my quarter in and get my gumball out, I can run my campaign and I can get a buyer and that's how work.

[Mike Linton]

Right. But, but I mean this basically also assumed that it's marketing qualified leads, MQLs, right, that came out of this thing for, for B2B marketers. And the concept here is I put this marketing campaign out for X Money and MQLs, which are essentially the gumballs come out. Is that right? Am I, am I describing it right?

[John Miller]

And that those gumballs that come out are going to become customers.

[Mike Linton]

Right.

[John Miller]

And, and marketing is a much more complex machine that, I mean, and we, there's hundreds of examples that you can point to for this, right, where like yeah, that person comes to your website and fills out a form because they want to get a demo request. Right. And it turns out it's because they talked to somebody that you marketed to 18 months ago.

[Mike Linton]

Right.

[John Miller]

And so it's a non linear system that can't be tuned and optimized the way you would, you know, tune and optimize a repeatable machine.

[Mike Linton]

But when you came out with Marketo and everything though, that was at the beginning of all this where actually the gumball machine worked because no one had actually used it before. Right. Is that kind of why this thing took off? And you could standardize it across all the B2B businesses and as it becomes more normalized, the concept breaks down because you have still have to fill the gumball machine up with new gumballs. Is that a fair way to look at it?

[John Miller]

I think that's a great point. You know, that like, yeah, when it was new and innovative it worked better, but buyers have gotten pretty savvy and annoyed by all those traditional tactics. You know, they've learned that if they feel go to your website and fill out a form, you're going to start emailing them and calling them with stuff that they don't want. So yeah, they're, they're opting out and tuning out. They're trying. They're, they're, they're doing more stuff anonymously. And, and that just is all the more reason why this gumball missing mentality just is, it's not working. It hasn't worked the last couple years.

[Mike Linton]

And when I think about it though, and we've done a bunch of shows on why B2B marketing is no good and what to do about it, this is another look at it, which is people are still using that gumbo machine and pounding on their CMOs to get more leads. But you're saying they're not going to happen because the, the leads are a lot more savvy now. The marketplace is a lot more mature. And you also say you think AI is going to accelerate the decline of B2B as well.

[John Miller]

Yeah, well, I mean, think about like we already, a lot of people already have like Google promotions tabs in their inbox. Right. That's a version of AI deciding which emails go in your primary inbox and which ones go to promotions.

[Mike Linton]

Right.

[John Miller]

But I also have Gemini now in my Google inbox. Gemini can read my emails. It can, it can summarize them, it can synthesize them. We're not so far away from me just getting a digest that says, here are the emails you got today. Here are the, you know, you can ignore these, these 17, these five you need to pay attention to and I've already drafted your reply. Right. That's like what we're also seeing on websites today with zero click search. Yeah, people do a Google search. They don't even have to come to my website anymore to get their answers. So AI is dis meeting or search, it's disintermediating or email. You know, those old tactics that we were doing before, you know, aren't going to work in the age of AI. We need a new playbook. Yeah.

[Mike Linton]

And we'll talk about the playbook in a minute. I want to, I want to kind of tie this up a little bit on why the gumball machine is broken. We also did a show called your next best customer may be an AI bot. In which case we talked about customers aren't going to come to your website. You've got to be out there to be found and you have to be doing good. But you're saying a lot of B2B is still stuck in the old way of doing things and AI is going to even make that harder on, on marketers now.

[John Miller]

Yeah, you Know, I mean, any B2B CMO listening on this call I would be willing to bet has had a tough few years. Right. Unless they're at some like, outlier company, right. Where they are probably not making the pipeline goals. They, you know, they, I can almost guarantee you they had some meeting where the CFO came to them and they said, all right, well, we need to grow 25% next year, but the win rates are down, so you got to generate 35% more pipeline. Oh, but your budget's going to be flat and the CMO is probably looking at that and saying, I didn't even make my pipeline goals this year.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah, right.

[John Miller]

And that somehow you think it's going to be different next year because I'm going to what, work just a little harder? No, it, like, it doesn't work that way. Like, we need a fundamental rethink about how are we trying to generate our pipeline and our revenue, you know, which, which is going to start from a recognition of some of these things we talked about. Marketing is a complex machine. It is not a linear machine that can just be gumball in, leads out. Right. Which we'll get into. Like, that means thinking about longer term investments. Like brand AI is going to disintermediate our traditional tactics, which means we need to start thinking about things that AI can't disintermediate, like relationships and experiences. Right. Like, we got to evolve how we're thinking about this. Because what's undeniable is it's not working.

[Mike Linton]

I like that. I think that's a good pivot to the next question, which is when I look through your predictions and read some of your stuff, one of the things you said is the future is going to go to those who do right by the customer. Tell us what you mean by that in B2B.

[John Miller]

Yeah, that. Where that came from was, you know, I've been talking to marketers for 18 months now about this old playbook. Isn't working. Yeah, obviously people are like, okay, I believe you. What should I do differently? And I, I, I, I, all these lists of things that they should do differently. Like don't gate your content. Right. That's good for the buyer. Like publish your pricing. Because people, you know, want one to know that without having to kind of, you know, go, go, go talk to a salesperson. Make it easy to learn and experience about your product. These are all things, you know, they're right by the customer. Don't bombard them with SDR calls just because they filled out a form. Right. And There were all these things that I could say this is what you should do better in the new playbook. And I realized what they all had in common was that, you know, it's about treating the buyer as a relationship to be built and not a lead to be captured. And you know, the more, and it's funny because the route is this, what old. What's old is new again. Right. I'm basically saying understand the customer, build a brand, you know that that's going to be emotionally engaging with them. Yeah, we, we can go and like, like invest in the insights so that you know how they think. Create communities where they can learn from each other and have content that's so valuable they'd pay for it, but give it away for free. Right. What if you do all this? Right. What should happen is you're building that mental availability and that awareness. So that way when they do become think about having a problem, right? You're going to actually be on that short list which, which if you're not on the short list by the time they start a sales cycle, you're dead. It's not going to happen.

[Mike Linton]

So I, I started a P and G and I'm a fundamental believer in the brands and the customer experience and, and all that. So this is, it's music to my ears. And, and if you look back, you know, this customer approach has been around a long time since you know, Proctor and brand management and Deming, the Deming studies. But many companies, especially in B2B, I guess I'll go on a limb and say they're like that CFO that just came in and said do a lot more doing the same thing with less money. We got to make this quarter or we're going to get pounded by our investors. What's going to make it different this time? And is B2B really ready for this kind of change in, in a large way?

[John Miller]

You know, I, I think we just got to start by, by you know, this whole idea of, of the gumball machine came out of this concept of revenue marketing, right? Where, where you know, B2B marketers had this bad rep 20 years ago of just, you're the people who throw parties and make color brochures and sales got all the glory because they drove revenue. And marketers like no, no, no, we drive revenue too. And look at the MQLs we create and all that kind of stuff. And that revenue mindset was the right thing, but it led to that kind of short term gumball machine thinking what needs to happen is we need to kind of redefine what does driving revenue mean? Being a revenue marketer isn't just I generate MQLs. Being a revenue marketer needs to become you put in place the conditions that will ultimately drive long term revenue.

[Mike Linton]

Hey, John, let me jump in and make sure I'm hearing this right. The gumball machine really works as long as there's an unlimited supply of gumballs. What you're saying, if I'm hearing you right, is there's not so many gumballs and those gumballs are now moving a lot more independently. In fact, they don't even show up in the machine. They are out there in the wild and you have to go find them. Is that is it? And what used to be the marketers just pulled them out of the machine and gave them the salesforce. Now the gumballs are everywhere. Is that fair?

[John Miller]

All right, yeah, I see, you know, you're pulling the analogy. Yeah. These gumballs are not just sitting around the machine waiting to come out. Right. They're on their own, having their own autonomous journeys, doing complex things on their own. Right. And again, I think the research says, you know, that they, you know, they, you can't do things that will make them enter a buying cycle. Right. They will enter the buy cycle at the time that's right for them. But if you're not on the short list, 80% of the time, they've already picked the window by the time they've done that. Right. So you've got to think about your marketing not as being demand creation or demand generation because you can't really generate demand. But you know, you have to be, you know, build that awareness and then be, you know, be, be ready to be, be mentally available when, when they're there. Right. Which again, these, you know, this from P and G, these are, this is not rocket science.

[Mike Linton]

This is a big deal though, because you have to build a relationship with all these gumballs out there in space. When the, when, when you started your companies, there was only one way to do the work. You know, people were just getting into the Internet just figuring it out and now there's a million ways to connect with them. And you're saying the gumballs are now independent? The rise of the gumballs.

[John Miller]

I want to go back to what you said a second ago. I think that this change is inevitable because what we're doing isn't working. But that doesn't mean that it's going to be easier happen overnight. You know, I think that, you know, the problem that CMOs get into is they still have a CFO or a board that demands quarterly results, and they have private equity investors that are basically saying, you need to report to me monthly how many NQL gumballs you created. You know, and, and, and so as leaders, we need to be part of changing the conversation, you know, and, and I think it's gotta start with the. Some of the things we've talked about, like a recognition that what we've been doing doesn't work, that the way people buy has changed, you know, and that therefore we need a different set of tactics and different set of metrics for marketing. You know, that's, that is, it's funny, you know, that's about marketing, the marketing.

[Mike Linton]

Also about that Everybody in the B2B space saying the whole marketplace is different. It's not just that the marketing is broken.

[John Miller]

Right. Yeah. Not every CMO will have that credibility.

[Mike Linton]

Right. And not every CFO will ever will think about it. So who's doing it? Well, right now, if I look at this and I think who. Are there any companies or industries you would say are on the forefront of. Of this new way of doing it where you're actually marketing, you know, relationships versus the gumball, the MQLs.

[John Miller]

Yeah. Well, I mean, assume you're asking about B2B companies specifically B2B, because a lot.

[Mike Linton]

Of B2Cs, I think, do do this pretty well.

[John Miller]

I think that's sort of the point. I think B2B needs to learn a lot from B2C and how they've done branding and build, you know, kind of that mental availability kind of over time, you know. But I think, you know, for example, two companies that I've been impressed with, what they're doing specifically on the content side of things.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

Are Gong and Carta. GONG makes call recording software. They would say it's bigger than that. Sales enablement. But, but, but ultimately they record sales calls and then they can analyze those and you use it for training and coaching and. And other use cases for gong. But one of the things that they do is they now have, you know, literally millions of calls recorded and an understanding of how those calls led to outcomes like deals. And then they create these reports by analyzing that proprietary data. The one they're most famous for is research that says when and where. How should you swear on a sales call?

[Mike Linton]

God damn it. Tell me about that, John.

[John Miller]

They've got the data. And again, what apparently they found is if you swear first, that's not good. If you swear after the buyer has sworn.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

You actually have the best chance of Winning the deal. Right? Like basically matching your buyers, swearing there. But the point is that's cool data. And that there's. And salespeople want to know the answers to the questions that they're researching. And as a result most. You talk to most sales leaders, at least in technology companies, they know who GONG is. Right. And they've done it by, by using their own proprietary data to create insights. Which is not asking ChatGPT to write a blog post. This is actually publishing something kind of unique and valuable. Carta does something similar. Carta is a cap table management system. So thousands of startups share data about their investors and their employees, ownership and their founders, owners with Carta and then they produce amazing stats that to me as a founder tells me exactly how I should think about my next fundraising round and how much equity I should give to my employees versus my investors. And because they have all this data that they can publish.

[Mike Linton]

Give me an example of what they. What Carter might tell you. And I know Carter, but not this way. What would they tell you like on your cap table as a, as a founder that you.

[John Miller]

So they would say like the median series A is at a pre money valuation of 48 million and is raising $12 million and has an employee option pool of 14%. Right. And that's immediate. Here's the 25th percentile and here's the 75th percentile. Right. But, but again, they have the data to make these kind of things. But the, the point is less Gong does this for salespeople or Carter does this for entrepreneurs. It's more what data do you have that allows you to produce some proprietary insights that your buyers are going to resonate with? You know that only you can produce. That I think is a fabulous way to be building brand awareness in B2B these days. And then you know, the other one is just people talking about who are building great experiences, great communities. And you know, I was talking to, there are lots of companies who do this well, especially for their top customers. But I was talking to the woman who runs this function for Salesforce. Yeah, right, their executive engagement committee. And I mean they've got a big budget to spend, but yeah, they're taking people to F1 event and other things like that. But it's again, when you can create an experience and connections, AI is never going to take that away.

[Mike Linton]

Got it. If I'm a B2B agency out here in the world now and, or I'm a CMO sitting here looking at my agencies and my martech stack, what should I be thinking about in addition to the concept of I got, I got to build relationships, the brand manners. How should I be thinking about all the relationships I have with everyone invested in that stack and in my current set of creative now?

[John Miller]

You know, I mean we can take that question. A lot of different answers. I'll say if you're a CMO. One thing that I'm seeing some CMOs do is redefine the CMO title. You might have heard somebody else on the podcast talk about this, but there are people calling themselves chief Market Officers.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

That have chief Marketing officers. And the reason why is because marketing is otherwise the only CXO function named after the. The act of doing the job and not the outcome. Right. It's not a chief selling officer. Chief Financing Officer.

[Mike Linton]

Right.

[John Miller]

So I get that. I don't. At the end of the day, I don't give one. You know, what about whether you don't.

[Mike Linton]

Swear till I swear first, John.

[John Miller]

A chief market officer or chief Marketing Officer. I don't care about that. But what I care about is can you have that conversation about the changing role of marketing? And then it is about understanding the market and being strategic rather than tactical and having long term value creation over short term metrics. And if having a conversation about re changing your title can prompt that conversation, I think that's. That's potentially important. Go ahead. Oh, you also asked about Martech stacks and that's obviously near and dear to my world.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

You know, we started Marketo the same month my son was born. He's a freshman at college now. So literally this month is the 19th birthday. These old tech legacy tech stacks are not going to take us into the next AI enabled generation. I think what we want, you know, is, is the irony of marketing automation is that it didn't actually automate anything and that we had to hire people to run the marketing automation. But what if we actually had a platform that could truly automate the marketing? I think if we could do that, we could have technology to focus on the ing of marketing. So as humans we could actually focus on the market. And I think that's exciting.

[Mike Linton]

I like the market thing. And we had. It was Kate Bolas.

[John Miller]

She's well known for preaching this. Yep.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah. And does a lot of B2B CMO searches. Who is very passionate about what you just said, which is your, your job is to understand and take and manage the market. It's not just to do the marketing. So I think that's a really good call out. So if I'm sitting Here in this space, as a marketer, I'm looking at 2025. What should I be targeting to do in the. The. The remainder of 2025 that keeps me on the front end of where the new machine is going.

[John Miller]

So big. A big part of what we talked about is, you know, how can you start thinking about adjusting your mindset to be a little bit More demand focused versus or brand focused versus demand focused. LinkedIn did a study a while back with Binet and Field where they updated the classic recommendations for Dave Field, and they end up saying that recommending 56% demand, 46% brand, which is, I think, a higher investment in brand than most B2B companies are doing. That causes stress and agita for a lot of people I talk to. Right. Because, like, well, how do I make that measurable and, you know, all that kind of thing. I had a conversation with the CMO of Brammarly that I thought was insightful on this topic. You know, at the end of the day, the brand isn't about your color or your logo. You know, the brand should be. What is that set of feelings that you want your target buyers to feel about you?

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

And it ideally is one or two words is something very simple that you just kind of need to inject into their consciousness for Grammarly. You know, she's very clear on what that is, because most people think of Grammarly, at least I did, as, like the tool that their kids use to kind of check, you know, their school papers.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

But what they want to be is they want to be an enterprise AI content solution. Um, and so she knows what her job is. Right. Is how do I get more of the people I care about to think of Grammarly the way I want them to think about Grammarly.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

So she then said, I'm going to spend one less trade show than I would have otherwise done this year. I'm going to take the money that I would've spent on that trade show and use it to do a more traditional brand tracking study. Right. How much my audience thinks about me the right way. And then she can track that over time and she can say, at the end of the year, how did we move the needle on this number one thing that we all said is the number one thing that matters. So it does mean spending less on some of these gumball tactics that may not work anymore and having the courage to say, I'm going to put it more into these things like proprietary content programs and experiences, but I'm going to track it by really moving the needle on, on knowing what I'm, you know, what I want people to think and feel about me.

[Mike Linton]

So she probably worked with her CFO to say, I'm going to lose this many MQLs out of this trade show, but this will be worth it. And she's bringing the company along tastefully without having a massive fight of saying, I'm going to cut our trade shows in half or something.

[John Miller]

MQL's was a vanity metric that didn't actually measure value.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[John Miller]

And what mattered is these other metrics around, you know, who are the accounts that we care about, what do they think of us, are they engaging with us? You know, and when you can, she was able to move the conversation forward in that way. That's, that's, I think, what we really need to be focusing on.

[Mike Linton]

I like the vanity metric thing because I think actually a bunch of brands do this where they. Or a bunch of companies do this where they care more about traffic or they care more about likes than they actually, whether those translate into sales or anything. They can get lost in the vanity metric, particularly if they're doing compensation wrong and paying for the vanity metric.

[John Miller]

Oh, yeah.

[Mike Linton]

So I think that's good. Let's talk about your predictions because every year you make a bunch of predictions and we haven't touched on your predictions for 2025 or maybe we have in some of this discussion what predictions you want to put out there for our listeners.

[John Miller]

Yeah, well, good news. We've hit a bunch of the big ideas. Right. We talked about breaking free from the gumball machine, reframing marketing's role in revenue, balancing the budget towards brand, as well as how AI is going to change buying by disintermediating our marketing and therefore need to focus on things like experiences and relationships. Well, we did. The one other set of things that we didn't really talk as much about, I think is AI agents. And you know that I think it's tough for us humans to really understand just all the changes that are going to be coming here. But for example, I think marketing operations is a function that exists most B2B companies. And I love marketing operations people, but the reality is they are often a bottleneck on what we want to do. Like, oh, I want to do more. Oh, but we only have so much capacity.

[Mike Linton]

Right?

[John Miller]

Right. There will be marketing operations agents that, you know, literally you can be in asana and, and, and create a task and assign the task to the agent and the agent will go build the campaign for you, you know, and build your landing page for you or whatever the things are or, you know, clean this list of date, you know, of data, you know, that's going to be pretty profound, right. When we start seeing these agents take on tasks and I think free us from the bottleneck so that we can do more things. We're already seeing agents on the sales side. I frankly think most of them aren't very good. But we. There's this big rise of AI SDRs where I think a lot of companies are using these AI SDRs today for outbound prospecting, which I think unfortunately ends up just being more spam. But on the, but I think there are interesting use cases for these sales agents, especially on the inbound side. Right. So, you know, if you want to see a demo, right. What should you really have to fill out a form, wait for an SDR to call you, schedule a meeting, do a discovery call, and then finally you can get a demo. Right. Three weeks later, somebody's going to come along with an AI agent that can just give you your personalized demo right then and right there, you know, and if you can do that, your competitors, three weeks later, who do you think is going to win?

[Mike Linton]

Right. Well, so you're saying the agentic AI will just compress the entire timeline for someone that really wants to look at a demo or something. Right.

[John Miller]

I think when, you know, when somebody's ready to raise their hand in a buying cycle, they don't want to like ready, you know. So anyway, I, you already, I think talked a little bit earlier about, in the earlier episodes around agents. So I like, we're gonna have to start marketing to agents. We're going to start talking about, you know, agent qualified leads or whatever the name's going to be. It also potentially will change pricing. Right. If you're a, you're a SaaS vendor that sells by seat. Yeah, There might be fewer seats to sell if agents are doing more of the work, you know, so there's just some pretty profound things that are coming and I'm not, you know, I'm not going to get all those. Right. You know, because could you imagine if, like, if you would be able to predict uber in, in 20, you know, in like 1999, you'd be really rich. But the reality is, like, we didn't even conceive that such a thing might be possible.

[Mike Linton]

Even when it started, no one believed it was going to work. So any other predictions you want to share with our listeners for the year?

[John Miller]

I guess the last one is I really do think, and this is a Prediction. I'm working to try to make happen that we're going to see a new era of marketing platforms built for the age of AI and personally, I'm pretty excited for that.

[Mike Linton]

Excellent. We'll bring you back on the show when that shows up. This brings us to our traditional last question, John. It's a two parter practical advice for our listeners we haven't talked about yet and. Or the funniest story you can tell on the air. You can pick one or both, but you have to pick at least one.

[John Miller]

All right, well, first I, I'll just bring in, you know, because we're talking about it in the pre show, you know, so. Yeah, my first company was called Marketo.

[Mike Linton]

Yep.

[John Miller]

My second company was called Engagio.

[Mike Linton]

And you were CMO of a lot of these too.

[John Miller]

Companies. You know, the best thing I ever heard about Engage IO was that it's a Harry Potter spell for marketers. When I was trying to find a new name for this new company that I'm doing, the name I originally came up with was going to be Conducto because it's kind of like an orchestra conductor orchestrating all the interactions. Right. And then I'd have Marketo, Engagio and Conducto. But my wife convinced me that Conducta sounded better than Conducto. All right, I bought the URL conducta.com but there's a company that I've been friendly with. I've known their CEO for a long time, a company in the SEO space called Conductor. And out of a courtesy, I decided to call the CEO and just say, hey, you know, I'm, I'm starting a new company called, you know, and I just want to give you a heads up. And he's like, oh, no problem, let's talk. Hey, I'm getting in the elevator. So talk to me Ongoing. And right as he's getting in the elevator, you know, I say, yeah, so the company's going to be called Conducta. But what I didn't think about the fact is that this guy is from New York. And how does a New Yorker, the head of conductor, call. What does he call his company? Right, like Conducta. Like, like, like, like. No, no, you're conductor, I'm Conducta. Anyway, he didn't like that. So needless to say, Conducta is not the name of my new company and the new company I'm not going to reveal the name of yet, but is not a three syllable word ending in a vowel.

[Mike Linton]

Okay, very good. All right, well, thank you, John. And thank, thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. Look for more of our shows on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and the I Hear Everything network, which include why is B2B marketing so bad? And what to do about it. Parts one and two. Is your next best customer an AI bot. The Warby Parker case. I can see clearly now with my CLTV glasses on. And. It's a bird. It's a plane. Holy shit. It's AI. Parts one and two. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential.