Why brand matters and how CMOs are playing out of position

Summary

Podcast Summary: Insights Unlocked

Episode: Why Brand Matters and How CMOs Are Playing Out of Position
Date: September 15, 2025
Host: UserTesting (Johan Reed, CMO; Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager)
Guest: Joe Chernoff, B2B Marketing Leader and Executive in Residence at Battery Ventures

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Episode Overview

This candid 40-minute discussion explores the evolving role of the CMO, the enduring value of brand in B2B organizations, the challenge of balancing pipeline generation and long-term strategic work, and the implications of AI for marketing leadership. Joe Chernoff, a seasoned CMO, shares career highlights, personal stories, and actionable advice for marketers feeling stuck, pressured, or disconnected from their core strengths. The episode delves into why brand work remains pivotal and how AI could help marketers break their biases and operate at a higher level.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Joe Chernoff’s Marketing Journey: From PR to Content to VC Advising

• [02:04] Joe Chernoff recounts luck, relationships, and positioning as decisive factors in his path from public relations to content marketing.
• A pivotal moment: being asked about Twitter followers in a PR interview and realizing the shift to digital and social media was underway.
  • Quote: “We would all be really spooked if we knew how much luck played a role in our lives… I started in content marketing when I was trying to get out of public relations.” [02:04]
• Early advocacy for using content to drive PR coverage and credibility, leading to broader influence in marketing.

2. Marketing’s Changing Landscape: The Shift from PR to Social, Now to AI

• [04:59] Both host and guest reflect on how the move from traditional PR to social media changed marketers’ work — and how we’re now undergoing another transformation with AI.
  • Quote: “It’s changing all over again… we have another tectonic shift with AI and arguably a bigger one.” – Joe Chernoff [04:59]
• The initial impulse towards self-preservation: “Am I in the right career? Is this threatened or augmented by AI?”

3. CMOs as “Underpaid CROs” and the Pressure to Prove Value

• [06:35] Joe discusses how modern B2B CMOs tend to act like underpaid CROs (Chief Revenue Officers), focusing narrowly on revenue-adjacent KPIs like pipeline.
  • Quote: “If you show up and you live and die by exactly the same numbers as a CRO, then you essentially are in a CRO role without getting that hazard pay… Your role should be broader than that.” – Joe Chernoff [07:24]
• Root cause: Desire for credibility in front of the board; the CRO is compensated more due to hazard pay/risk and getting replaced faster if targets aren’t met.

4. Measuring Brand: The KPI Dilemma and “Spirit of the Role”

• [09:01] Why brand is hard to quantify, and how some organizations only recognize its value through indirect metrics—like changes in cost per click when a brand campaign is paused.
  • Quote: “I haven’t had to do a lot of that convincing. In fact… the best companies I worked for had a CEO who believed in brand and didn’t need the value proven to them.” [09:28]
• Memorable moment: Joe’s CEO at Pendo, Todd, calls him out for focusing too much on pipeline and losing sight of why he was really hired.
  • Quote: “‘I hired you to be focused on our brand, our story and the future of this business, shaping who we’re becoming. And you’re worried about leads. I hired you to be creative. Are you even creative?’” – Joe Chernoff [12:12]
• Insight: Marketers must balance KPIs and the broader mission — the “spirit” of the role, not just the letter.

5. “Playing Out of Position”: Why Marketers Drift from Their Strengths

• [15:15] Joe reflects on how marketers—even at high levels—self-sabotage by focusing on KPIs that aren’t their core strength or job purpose.
  • Quote: “The dirty little secret… I was playing myself out of position. Todd wasn’t playing me out of position… If I would listen to this podcast, if I'm playing out a position, am I doing it to myself?” [15:15]
• Analogy: Similar to founders trying to prove themselves in their areas of weakness to investors—focus instead on your unique strengths.

6. The Myth of the “Full-Stack Marketer” and the Two-Peg Rule

• [17:19] Joe’s advice to founders hiring a CMO: You can’t find someone great at brand, product marketing, and demand gen all at once. Pick two out of three “pegs” — the rest must be owned elsewhere.
  • Quote: “Somebody can be good at two things… But there's not three pegs.” [17:19]

7. AI’s Role: Augmenting, Not Replacing, Marketing Strategy

• [18:45] Will AI make marketers more “full-stack”? Not necessarily; it’s about augmenting the team, not the individual.
• Example: AI can make persona development more data-driven, helping marketers overcome long-held biases and assumptions.
  • Quote: “Persona development is way more art than science. It’s a bit of a guessing game… Along comes AI that can provide much more scientific ways of knowing who your ICP is.” – Joe Chernoff [18:45]
• Potential: AI could help B2B marketers understand their customers at the emotional depth that consumer brands (like Mr. Clean) have achieved.
  • Story: “Your house is clean, but for other people’s dirt.” — Joe’s example of a nuanced consumer insight rarely achieved in B2B [24:14]

8. The Limits of KPIs and the Power of Anecdotes

• [28:13] Joe argues against chasing elusive brand KPIs; instead, ensure pipeline is in place, then use stories and anecdotes to capture brand value.
  • Quote: “If pipeline is in place and you talk about brand and the role brand is playing… that’s the prerequisite… If pipeline is not in place but you have this big brand audit, people are going to call BS.” [28:13]
• Memorable story: Sending Pendo-branded sneakers to influencers leads—serendipitously—to a major account, exemplifying the unexpected ROI of brand investments.
  • Quote: “Someone said, ‘How are you going to prove this worked?’ … I said, ‘Well, I’m not. [But] by the way, I’m a size 10.’ … A month later, that person helped source a massive deal.” [30:06]

9. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Marketing Needs

• [34:49] Discusses the concept of a hierarchy, with pipeline at the base, and more sophisticated brand work only possible after repeatable pipeline is established.

10. Closing Advice: Escaping the “Pipeline Loop” and Longevity in the CMO Role

• [38:10] Joe’s hard-won wisdom: CMOs who focus only on demand gen are usually buying 18-24 months in their job, but not long-term success. Sustainable impact comes from investing in brand and vision beyond immediate pipeline needs.
  • Quote: “Even I did my best work when I wasn’t afraid of getting fired… If you want the job for five years, 10 years, you have to do [the long-term brand work].” [38:10]

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Most Notable Quotes & Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Story | |-------------|------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | [02:04] | Joe Chernoff | "We would all be really spooked if we knew how much luck played a role in our lives… I started in content marketing when I was trying to get out of public relations." | | [04:59] | Joe Chernoff | “It’s changing all over again… we have another tectonic shift with AI and arguably a bigger one.” | | [07:24] | Joe Chernoff | "If you show up and you live and die by exactly the same numbers as a CRO, then you essentially are in a CRO role without getting that hazard pay… Your role should be broader than that." | | [12:12] | Joe Chernoff | "'I hired you to be focused on our brand, our story and the future of this business… And you’re worried about leads. I hired you to be creative. Are you even creative?'" | | [15:15] | Joe Chernoff | “The dirty little secret… I was playing myself out of position. Todd wasn’t playing me out of position… If I would listen to this podcast, if I'm playing out a position, am I doing it to myself?” | | [17:19] | Joe Chernoff | "Somebody can be good at two things… But there's not three pegs." | | [18:45] | Joe Chernoff | “Persona development is way more art than science… Along comes AI that can provide much more scientific ways of knowing who your ICP is.” | | [24:14] | Joe Chernoff | "The challenge they faced was selling a cleaning supply to people who didn’t want to acknowledge their house was dirty… so the campaign was, 'Your house is clean but for other people’s dirt.'" | | [28:13] | Joe Chernoff | “If pipeline is in place and you talk about brand … that’s the prerequisite… If pipeline is not in place but you have this big brand audit, people are going to call BS.” | | [30:06] | Joe Chernoff | Story of branded sneakers influencing a major account, despite lack of direct KPIs. | | [38:10] | Joe Chernoff | “Even I did my best work when I wasn’t afraid of getting fired… If you want the job for five years, 10 years, you have to do [the long-term brand work].” |

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Segment Timestamps

• [02:04] – Joe’s origin story: Luck, relationships, and the move from PR to content
• [04:59] – PR to social to AI: Changing tectonics in marketing
• [06:35] – The “underpaid CRO” trap for CMOs
• [09:28] – Proving the value of brand to boards and CEOs
• [12:12] – On playing out of position; the “creative” confrontation
• [15:15] – Self-sabotage and the importance of playing to your strengths
• [17:19] – The myth of being “full-stack,” and pegs-holes analogy
• [18:45] – How AI changes persona development and CMO impact
• [24:14] – Lessons from consumer brands: “Your house is clean but for other people’s dirt”
• [28:13] – Why most brand work and KPIs are less tangible; power of stories
• [30:06] – The branded sneaker anecdote and serendipitous value of brand
• [34:49] – Maslow’s hierarchy of marketing needs: pipeline to systems to brand
• [38:10] – On escaping the short-term “pipeline loop” for true marketing leadership

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Takeaways for Marketers, Product, and CX Leaders

• Recognize the limits of what you can prove. Don’t sacrifice the “spirit” of your role as a marketing leader just to chase immediately measurable pipeline metrics.
• Don’t let yourself be boxed in. Many leaders “play themselves out of position”; it’s up to you to assert what unique strengths you bring.
• Brand is a long game. When pipeline is stable, brand investments—not just campaigns—drive future growth and personal longevity in the CMO role.
• AI is an amplifier, not a silver bullet. Use it to round out your team, test your biases, and gain new insights, especially for persona development.
• Stories resonate more than spreadsheets. Anecdotes and real relationships often move the business more than any single KPI can show.
• Systematic approaches inspire trust. Consistent, repeatable systems for pipeline free you to pursue long-term work and earn brand trust.

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Where to Connect

• Joe Chernoff: Find him on LinkedIn at Joe Chernoff
• Show notes & resources: usertesting.com/podcast

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, thoughtful, and often self-deprecating—offering honest wisdom gained through wins and mistakes alike. Both host and guest use memorable stories, practical takeaways, and direct talk to demystify the CMO role and the challenges of modern marketing leadership.

Transcript

[Nathan Isaacs]

Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, Joe Chernoff, a longtime B2B marketing leader and operating partner at Battery Ventures, joins us to talk about what happens when CMOs lose sight of their real job. From the pressure to chase pipeline to why Brand matters, Joe shares honest insights and plenty of hard earned wisdom. Enjoy the show.

[Podcast Narrator]

Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.

[Nathan Isaacs]

Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at UserTesting and joining us today as host is UserTesting's CMO Johan Reed. Welcome, Johan.

[Johan Reed]

Hey Nathan. Good to be here.

[Nathan Isaacs]

And our guest today is Joe Chernoff. Joe is a longtime B2B marketing leader, three time CMO and now executive in residence at Battery, a global technology focused investment firm. He advises early and growth stage companies on marketing strategy, drawing on deep experiences from companies like Pendo, HubSpot and Insight Squared. Welcome to the show, Joe.

[Joe Chernoff]

Thanks, Nathan, and good to meet you, Johan.

[Johan Reed]

Good to meet you, Joe. Thank you for joining us today. And I think we'll just dive right in. You've been at some really great brands, Pendo, Hubside, Insight Squared. You've done some really cool stuff and now you're advising startups as an executive in residence at Battery Ventures, which sounds like a really fun job. It is probably a whole separate podcast just to learn about what that's like. But take, take us through your journey from those early days in content marketing to, to what you're doing now.

[Joe Chernoff]

Sure, I, I've gotten lucky a lot of times. That's, that's really. The truth is, I think we would all be really spooked if we knew how much luck played a role in our lives. You know, we like to assign ourselves a lot of credit for our own success. But I've had some good relationships. I've had some people that looked out for me and I've made some, through some good fortune have, you know, come up heads for me. So I started in content marketing when I was trying to get out of public relations. I had this like terrifying moment in PR when I was looking for a job as a VP of PR at a company and I was interviewing and I talked about the company I had been at. We had been on the COVID of the New York Times Sunday magazine. We were on CBS Evening News, Nighttime Edition, nationally, feature articles in the Economist. And the CEO said That's all great, but how many Twitter followers do you have? And I was like, oh, no, this whole thing is over. I've got to get out of pr. And I took a job, and this is through luck with this guy, Brian Cardin, who is the CMO of a company called Eloqua. And I said I would take the PR job if he would give me responsibility for social media. And he had to put social media in my title. Why? Because if that CEO was onto something, saying, how many Twitter followers do you have? Then I had to cover myself there. And that ultimately led Brian and I together to this realization that the way to getting press coverage was not through the products you released so much as the content you published, the research you conducted. And we used content as a way to gin up PR coverage. And that's how my career in content marketing got started. It got started by trying to find a way to keep up with our competition's press coverage. And we were able to do so by publishing interesting reports and interesting visuals, and. And that was the key to unlock PR for us. So that was the path.

[Johan Reed]

That's very cool. Yeah. I think it's not often that we get to be a part of these big tectonic industry changes. Right. And that moment, I think, happened in a lot of offices in tech and probably around the world, where it was suddenly this realization that PR represented the traditional way of marketing on traditional media outlets. And now there was this transition into the world of social media, and that really changed the game for marketers.

[Joe Chernoff]

Didn't, Did. And look, it's changing all over again. Right? Because we have another tectonic shift with AI and arguably a bigger one. Arguably. And you see the same situation playing out where there's a scramble and people are trying to figure out what it means for them. And the kind of. The first impulse is self preservation. You know, am I in the right career? Is this threatened? Is this going to be augmented by AI? Is this going to be undone by AI? And I think around the bend, you're going to start to see people figure out a way that it blends in naturally with how they do their job. How they do their job will change, but whether or not they do a job is less likely to change.

[Johan Reed]

I want to drill in just a little bit on this whole AI topic. I mean, I don't think it could be a modern podcast if we didn't talk about AI. But in all seriousness, I think in my mind, in a lot of the conversations I'm having with CMOs, comes the question around how does AI change the role of the CMO fundamentally? Does it, does it shift what we think about how we work? I know you have some opinions about CMOs functioning like underpaid CROs. Is that related to AI? Is that coming before AI and will it change again as we see greater AI capability at adoption?

[Joe Chernoff]

I don't know if it's going to change again with greater AI capability and adoption. I will say that right now most CMOs and B2B tech companies act like underpaid CROs. I do believe that. And what happens? And we'll get to the AI bit, but there was a lot in that question. We'll get to the AI piece momentarily. But I think this is really important. Like pre AI and post AI, the CRO makes more money than you. And the reason they make more money than you is they get hazard pay. They usually get fired in a couple of quarters if things don't go super well. Right. The CMO generally has a little bit more durability, not much more. They probably go next. Right.

[Johan Reed]

Just. I was going to say it's just a little bit more.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, it's like one person more in the, in the wheel. But what happens is the CMO is so desperate to sound like a revenue generator, frankly that they like lock arms at the CRO and they go into board meetings and all they talk about is like inputs into revenue. So maybe they're really sophisticated. They don't talk about MQLs, they talk only about pipeline. So that's an accomplishment to be a CMO that's talking about pipeline. But you also have to be a caretaker for the long term vision of the company. You have to be a caretaker over the strategic direction of the business. And if you're only thinking about that quarter and maybe 1/4 out pipeline, then you're only thinking like the sales lead and you live and die by the pipe numbers. And I'm not saying at all that a CMO shouldn't be responsible for pipe gen. They should be, but they shouldn't only be responsible for that and they shouldn't only be measured by that. They also have to be a caretaker for how the company is perceived. They should be a caretaker for what the company story is and what it's becoming. And all of that is outside of the scope of the CRO. And so if you, but if you show up and you live and die by exactly the same numbers as a CRO, then you essentially are in a CRO role without getting that hazard pay. Your role should be broader than that, it needs to be broader than that.

[Johan Reed]

I think that leads to the big question that has plagued marketers for a really long time, which is how do you portray a set of KPIs and metrics around brand and the value of that long term view of the health of the business to a board that's often far more interested in talking about revenue metrics or let's call them revenue adjacent KPIs?

[Joe Chernoff]

Yep, yep. I don't have a spectacular answer for this. When I, when I left Pendo, I, I thought hard about whether or not I wanted to be an operator again, whether I wanted to go off and start my own practice or whether I wanted to do an EIR operating partner role at a vc. And I thought back in the companies that I had the most success at and was there anything that they had in common? And they had a cmo, I'm sorry, they had a CEO that believed in brand and didn't need the value proven to them. And so I didn't have some magical brand KPI that convinced them they trusted their own eyes. Now I do know marketers that have succeeded at convincing leadership in the value of brand, but usually they prove it out by looking at the impact of a brand campaign on the cost per click of performance ad. And they'll have a brand campaign running and they'll look at CPC and they'll shut off the brand campaign and look at cpc. And lo and behold, it costs you more money to get a click when somebody hasn't heard about you or when somebody's not there thinking about you. And so they have been able to prove out the value of brand in language that could speak to the CFO or language that could speak to the CEO. I've had. And let's go back to the very first thing we talked about is luck. I've been lucky. I've been lucky to work for CEOs. Not in every case, but in most cases that are passionate about brand or at least have an appetite for it. And so I haven't had to do a lot of that convincing. In fact, I had this really intense conversation with Todd, the founder and CEO of Panda, one of the founders and I don't think he would begrudge me for telling a story. I've been talking a lot about pipegen and demand creation and one day it's just like looked uncomfortable in the meeting and he said why are you talking about this stuff? You're not like world class at pipegen. You have somebody world class at Pipe Gen. I Hired you to be focused on our brand, our story in the future of this business, shaping who we're becoming. And you're worried about, like, leads. I hired you to be creative. And then he gets, like, wrapped up. He's like, are you even creative? Give me a creative idea. Right, because you got himself all, give.

[Johan Reed]

Me a creative idea.

[Joe Chernoff]

But he got himself all worked up in the conversation. And like, Joanne, it was this arresting moment where I was like, am I even creative? Like, I'm totally playing out of position right now. I'm trying to be somebody that I'm not. And to know why you were hired and to know, like, yeah, we all have our KPIs, but to know what that boss really wanted you to do beyond just the KPIs, what do they really want you to transform in this business? It doesn't have to be a cmo. This could be any position. You're hired to deliver some numbers. Yes. But you're hired to deliver more than those numbers. Same true for a CRO. Like, we hired a CRO at Pendo. He's got a bunch of KPIs, but he was also hired to change the culture of the sales team. I don't know what the KPI on that is. It's not attrition, because some people need to leave and so to, like, be faithful not just to the numbers in your board deck, but the spirit of why you are brought into that business. And that's what I took from what Todd was saying to me. What he was really saying is you're adhering to the letter of your job, but not the spirit of your job. And I don't know. That's advice I would give to somebody in any role in business, but particularly in a marketing function where our KPIs tell a limited. Paint a limited picture of the value we deliver.

[Johan Reed]

I think that's an incredibly important point. Thinking not only about the sort of hard duties that you have to perform as a marketing leader, which is fill the pipeline. Right. Help sales be more effective, but the spirit of it. And I think that's the part where maybe it is a little bit of luck. Right. Having CEOs who recognize that and a board that understands that, that in order for a business to be built and to be successful, you have to operate in that larger spirit and create brand awareness. And a positive brand perception leads to preference. But I think it's really about marketers and CMOs in particular, not losing sight of that ourselves.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah.

[Johan Reed]

And I think it's about having that Innate sense of. Because I think part of what you were saying about feeling like you were suddenly playing out of position, I think all of us experience that this moment where we're like, oh, wait, we've kind of been led away from who we are as marketers or what's helped us be successful in our careers to that point, and then suddenly we're focused on somebody else's numbers instead of what we know to be really the important thing for the business. And I think that's such an important point for our audience to take away. And actually, regardless of if you're even a marketer, I think it's a universal truth that people need to consider, what's the spirit of the role? Not just what are the hard measures and are you delivering on the hard measures, but are you also delivering on the spirit of the role?

[Joe Chernoff]

And the dirty little secret here is I was playing myself out of position. Todd wasn't playing me out of position. He wasn't holding my hand to the fire for those numbers. I was just showing up, blathering. And, and so I would ask myself if I would listen to this podcast. If I'm playing out a position, am I doing it to myself? You know, I asked this investor once, what's the most common mistake founders make after they take your money? And he said, it's easy question. They try to become. They try to fill. Prove to me that they can fill their weaknesses. So if somebody is bad at sales, but it's a great engineer, they want to prove to me that they're good at sales. And so they spend their time selling as if to demonstrate to me that they're this total executive. And I'm like, no, I want you to be that incredible technologist and hire somebody to run sales. I don't want you to prove to me you can do it. And in some ways, that's what we do to ourselves.

[Johan Reed]

Well, to illustrate your point, I think if you go out and look at CMO profiles on LinkedIn, how many people, myself included, put full stack marketer on there? Right? Like, yeah, yeah. It's impossible to be truly full stack because while while all of us have. Have run all of the functions of marketing as marketing leaders, right. We're not. We're not. We didn't come up through, through every possible marketing channel. You can't be both this really great brand storyteller who also came, came up focused on demand generation. They're different personalities, different experiences. And I think it just speaks to the, this, this need that we have as marketing Leaders to say, hey, we've done it all, we can do everything as opposed to leaning into the thing that makes us unique and, and where our strength really is.

[Joe Chernoff]

I tell I get this question a lot from founders, both that battery and just in advising on the side prior to battery, founders will ask me what profile CMO they should hire and what they should look for. And I say look. To oversimplify, there's a brand bias, there's a product marketing bias, there's a demand bias, there's three holes, there's two pegs at most. Somebody can be good at two things. So you could say I want somebody, I want both pegs in brand, I want the world's greatest brand marketer. You just have to accept then that there are two limitations. You could say I want one in brand and one in demand and I'm going to own product marketing. That's fine. You accept that there's one limitation. But there's not three pegs.

[Johan Reed]

It's the old you can have two of these three things. Which ones do you choose?

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah.

[Nathan Isaacs]

So I want to bring you back.

[Johan Reed]

For a moment back to the AI question because I feel like, you know, AI is rapidly changing the landscape of marketing and, and, and I think it'll have a knock on effect to marketing leadership if we as marketing leaders don't embrace ways of working that involve AI. And so do you believe that AI is a tool that allows a marketing leader to get that third peg?

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, it's less about whether or not I am rounded out. It's a matter of is the team rounded out? Is marketing's contribution to the business fulsome in all those areas. And I do think AI will be helpful in those areas. Like let's pick one. Take product marketing and then take specifically within product marketing Persona development. I think every CMO will tell you that Persona development is way more art than science. It's a bit of a guessing game. It's based on kind of small and a couple customer conversations at a user conference that have an outsized impact on the definition of all users. And then along comes AI that can provide much more scientific ways of knowing who your ICP is, who your buyer is, many more data inputs that inform that Persona. So you can have a much richer, much more dynamic, evolving, changing ICP through AI. So it's a way that you can augment what product marketing delivers to the business and add a skill that may not be resident on the team. Because frankly Persona development is critical, but it is much more art than science in most companies, and now with AI, it could be equal parts art and science.

[Johan Reed]

Yeah, well, and I mean, that certainly resonates because even we are loading in Personas into GPTs so that you can have a conversation. I think that's in a way for us, it's about creating, giving marketers and salespeople the ability to have practice conversations with a perceived audience with a Persona. I think for me, what becomes interesting is how we as marketing leaders use that capability to help inform our strategies for the areas where we are weak and where we are reliant on other people. And I definitely agree with the idea of higher in the place where you're weak. So to that investor's example, go out and find the yin to your yang. But I also think that at least the way I've been thinking about AI tools and my own use of them as a leader versus as an individual contributor is helping me try to understand and make sense out of what I'm being told by my demand generation leader and so that I can be a better partner to her, even though demand generation isn't necessarily my strong suit.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, I get the LLM interrogation of Personas and to get to know them better in that regard. But I'm also talking about Persona development. Like there's a AI company I was talking to that uses multiple data sources to figure out exactly who's consuming your content, what messages is resonating most with them to give you to challenge your assumption about who your ICP is to begin with. And I think if we go way up the stack and we say, how does AI writ large, not an individual tool, but this whole movement, how does that affect the way a CMO operates? I think, I think it will get a CMO to the position where there's just less bias in the way he or she operates. Like at Pendo, I was really locked on to a definition of our buyer and I don't even know where that definition came from. If I were CMO there today, I would have the opportunity to challenge this definition that just sort of evolved organically and be able to challenge it with a much more scientific interpretation of where ICP is. And so I could relieve myself of a bias. And so I do think that the data sets you're working with with AI can help CMOs overcome, or at least acknowledge and overcome some of the biases that we operate with day in, day out and may not even realize it. I didn't realize I had a bias around our ICP until I talked to this company. I had then it Occurred to me. I've just sort of made up an ICP in my head.

[Johan Reed]

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I think to that point, getting human insight from real people and understanding them at scale has been a huge challenge for marketers. The big brands, the consumer brands have consumer research teams that are out there doing this. But that's not something that is scalable and it's certainly not something that that mid sized companies have budgets to go.

[Joe Chernoff]

Out and certainly not B2B. B2B is terrible at this. Right. And you know, here's this. I'll tell you a great icp, a great definition is when I was at Eloqua, my CEO Joe Payne had done, I don't know if he was an intern or an MBA intern at Mr. Clean, the consumer brand.

[Johan Reed]

Yeah, looks like me on the bottom.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, you said that. And I'm not much further along. The challenge they faced was this really interesting dilemma where they were selling a cleaning supply, cleaning product to heads of household that didn't want to acknowledge that their house was dirty. So how do you do that? Well, the whole ad campaign was around, your house is clean, but for other people's dirt. So the dog runs through the house and tracks mud. The teenager takes off their basketball sneakers and puts their dirty socks on the sofa. The house is clean, but for other people's dirt. That's a level of Persona that B2B seldom if ever gets to. And so we have this like very brittle definition. It's like title level, years of service and like what their generic three pains are. And there are those three pains are like, want a promotion, can't get a promotion. Don't have a budget. Right.

[Johan Reed]

Drive revenue while cutting costs.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah.

[Johan Reed]

Help support the business.

[Joe Chernoff]

So generic. But this is. Your house is clean but for other people's dirt. Like that is so nuanced and there's so much you can do with that. And my hope is that AI in this one tiny sliver of marketing that we're talking about. But my Hope is that AI can help B2B marketers get to that Mr. Clean like level of understanding of their customers, their buyers. Whether it's the input, what the data says, who the data says your buyer is, or what you were saying. Like having a back and forth dialogue, train an LLM on that particular buyer and then dialogue with them so you can get the at scale part of, of understanding the sort of consumer sentiment. Maybe we can get to Mr. Clean like level of understanding of our customers that has eluded B2B marketers forever.

[Johan Reed]

Yeah, I think there's so much that gets lost. I know a lot of people try to build up a knowledge set by going out and scraping LinkedIn profiles or sending surveys or doing those kinds of tools. And there's just so much nuance that's lost when you do that. Because really, to get to that, but for other people's dirt sort of sentiment, you actually have to hear what people are saying and you have to get the anecdotes and you have to hear even the, the nonverbal stuff. Right. The frustrated look, the rolling of the eyes when you say the word pipeline. Right. It's, it's all of that nuance that gets you there, I think. And that's, that's, that's where I, and I, and I, I'm agreeing, I guess, violently with you. It's about taking the AI analysis of real people's thoughts, intent, reactions, anecdotes, stories, all of that, and coming to that, that place of saying, now I really understand the motivations of my audience in a much deeper way.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah.

[Johan Reed]

So I guess from there the question is, if we can get to this and if we stay in that place, the spirit of how do we articulate ourselves to our executive leadership team partners and the board around the spirit of our roles and the future of the business, how do we then put a set of KPIs into place that go beyond these measures that we typically measure so that we are creating the right behaviors across the rest of the organization?

[Joe Chernoff]

I'll be controversial here. I don't think we try to. I think there are things that we know with our head and there's things that we feel instinctively. And you won't get to any of the other stuff, the story of the business, the stuff that KPIs are blurry on if you don't have pipeline in place. So job number one is the thing you're measured on. But if Pipeline is in place and you talk about brand and the role brand is playing, and maybe you have some anecdote that really punctuates, and I'll tell you a story on this that really punctuates the value of brand and Pipeline is in place, that's the prerequisite. Everybody's. Most people, most reasonable people are going to accept your, your premise for the value of the other stuff. If brand is not in place, but you have this, I'm sorry, if pipeline is not in place, but you have this big brand audit that's done, people are going to call BS because they're going to say, well, yeah, but the main thing I need Pipe isn't there, so I don't really care about this other stuff. Ironically, the best way to get people to believe you on being the caretaker for the long term narrative is to take care of job number one, which is Pipe. But we get all wrapped up in thinking, well, Pipeline has a KPI and everybody cares about it. Ergo, if I can put the right KPI on brand, everybody's going to care about that. Not the case. They only got to care about Pipeline.

[Johan Reed]

It's correlated, not causal.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, exactly.

[Johan Reed]

People don't care about it because it has a KPI.

[Joe Chernoff]

Every year at Penda, we would do this big brand study and it became this omnibus document. I got up and I presented the board. I presented that kickoff. I was super proud of it. It was like our fourth year doing it. And finally Todd was like, it sounds like you're trying to convince everybody they're going to feel it that our brand has momentum or not. Like, don't use this as a sales tool. And you're using it as a sales tool. And he was right. I was like treating it like it was the KPIs for pipeline. But people didn't have the same attachment to it as they have to Pipeline. You know what moved the room? I told this story that. The story blows my mind because it's like the encapsulation of so much in one. I decided at one point at Pendo, I just wanted to have a little bit of fun and have a Pendo branded sneaker. And we found this shoe designer that created these, like custom Nikes that didn't say Pendo on them, but there was, there was some pink in them and it was a company color. And I, I wrote to a bunch of influencers and said, what's your shoe size? They responded like, why? And I said, I have this custom sneaker. I'd like to give you a pair. There's no quid pro quo. I just tell me your address and shoes, I send you a pair. And one person said, like, how are you going to prove that this worked? And I said, well, I'm not. And he's like, well, how are you going to get funding? I said, well, I don't know, we'll see what happens. And he's like, yeah, good luck with that. By the way, I'm a size 10, right? So took the sneakers. Was kind of vaguely insulting in doing so. And like a month later, we're preparing for a board meeting. And the CRO said, we just had this massive bluebird account just land in our lap. And I asked how it got sourced, and he said, all I know is they attended this workshop taught by this guy and heard about Pendo in it and heard that you really don't need a product operations full team if you have Pendo. You can have one product ops person. And wouldn't you know that was the person? And wouldn't you know that that workshop happened like, a week after I sent him the sneakers? That, too, is correlation, not causal. But there's a relationship between those two things. And I think that brand is about building the relationship between two things and then trusting that rational people will draw the connection.

[Johan Reed]

I absolutely love that story because I feel like as marketers, we know in our hearts that it doesn't take one thing to move the needle. It takes a whole series of small moments, some of which are surprising. Delight at getting a pair of sneakers from somebody who you didn't think had the budget to do that sort of thing and didn't ask you for anything in exchange. Yeah. I think that's a really powerful story that you just shared. And. And it speaks to the value of investing in not only your brand, but also in those brand relationships that are.

[Joe Chernoff]

Here's the crazy thing. Say I never heard the story. Say I never happened to be in this board meeting prep or the CRO, just like, didn't recall. Is still would have happened. The relationship still would have contributed to that Bluebird landing in our laps. I just wouldn't have known about it. And so you do have to simply take some leaps of faith when it comes to the value of marketing outside a pipeline. And Todd said, how many other people have gotten a pair of sneakers and done something similar that we never heard about? I had a CEO that was an advocate for this.

[Johan Reed]

Yeah. Yeah. And I think as you were talking earlier about, and you were sort of underscoring the point that you have to have the pipeline challenge essentially lit. Like, you have to be flowing pipeline in a repeatable way so that everybody can breathe a little bit and then say, okay. Right. It makes me think about sort of like, is there a Maslow's hierarchy of marketing needs?

[Joe Chernoff]

Right.

[Johan Reed]

Where you're like, the bottom of the pyramid is pipeline, and you can't move the conversation up to anything else before you, you know, if. If you don't have pipeline covered? Because the business is always going to pull down to that. To that level first.

[Joe Chernoff]

I think you're right. I think you're right about two things. You're right about pipeline, but you're Also right about it being systematic and repeatable. Like the second level in the maslow is like the first level is do we have pipeline? The second level is do we have a system in place that I trust will continue to generate pipeline? Okay, now we can move on to more of the self actualization stuff.

[Johan Reed]

Well, and, and if we, if we pull this all the way through. Right. If you don't have a system in place to capitalize on the brand work that is higher order. Right. If you're, if your efforts to build pipeline are ad hoc and always sort of running around with hair on fire, then, then you will be poorly set up to, to, to derive the benefit from those brand moments. And then if you're not, then you won't get that lift. You won't see these, these moments of a bluebird coming in or just suddenly an uptick in the effectiveness and the, and the cut in the costs on generating the demand. So I do think, I think there's something, somebody out there has probably already got this, but I think there's something to be said about thinking about your approach to all of this. And even if you're trying to build a KPI hierarchy that you want to talk to your team about is we have to get the current pipeline needs met, having a system in place to make it repeatable so we can meet the pipeline need quarter over quarter, then we can put in place brand initiatives that will accelerate that system to give us even more sufficiency or an abundance of pipeline so that we can cherry pick the biggest deals out of that pipeline.

[Joe Chernoff]

Yeah, I don't know if anybody has an abundance.

[Johan Reed]

I'd love to hear from anybody who's done this.

[Joe Chernoff]

You had me at abundance. Yeah, I think.

[Johan Reed]

That'S a world that we'd like to operate in. But I do think that making sure you have this systematic approach is really key. And I think that also is the part that inspires confidence. I suspect that your CEOs that you've worked with, the reason they had that trust and confidence in you was because they saw the systematic approach to.

[Joe Chernoff]

The.

[Johan Reed]

Necessity of pipeline, but also to the spirit of the role.

[Joe Chernoff]

I hope so. I hope I played a role in that, but I think I picked well. I think I picked well there.

[Johan Reed]

Luck does play a huge part of the role, but I know we've been talking for a while, I've kind of lost track of the time. This has been such a great conversation, Joe, but before I let you go, I'm curious to see if there's one additional piece of advice other than be lucky that you can give to our listeners who might feel stuck in this cycle of like I keep getting dragged into pipeline conversations or I've tried brand stuff but it hasn't landed or, or just maybe a different way to think about their role.

[Joe Chernoff]

Even I did my best work when I wasn't afraid of getting fired. I think the reason why we put ourselves in this pipeline loop to begin with is because we think it's a better way to keep our job. And I have this whole thought on why CMOs last 18 to 24 months and it's because you get the six month honeymoon and then you realize that honeymoon is ending and I've got to show an impact. And the easiest place to look for an impact is in pipegen. And so you shift all of your dollars, even those future dollars, into pipegen so that you can show that there's a step function in what you're contributing to the business. But particularly if you're at a venture backed company, the growth expectations aren't linear, they become logarithmic because it's a winner take all world we live in. And you can't demand gen your way to a logarithmic outcome Demand gen is high floor which is valuable. There's always some food on the table for sales. But you're never going to win the market by being a more efficient spender in demand gen. And so by essentially front loading your budget into demand gen, you're buying yourself 18 to 24 months until leadership says good at demand gen but we're not keeping pace with our goals. We're growing, but not fast enough. And so when I say you have to be thinking long term and be the caretaker of a long term vision of the company, it's not because I like the art of doing that or it sounds romantic. It's because if you want the job for five years, 10 years, you have to do that because that future is coming and you have to be ready for it and you're not going to get ready for it by being a little bit more efficient at your demand gen spend. You have to find points of leverage, you have to find steps functions and those step functions come from outside of the demand gen program. And so I say it as a self interested person that wants to last somewhere for a long time and wants to be remembered for having an impact on that business. Not because I think it's more fun or more romantic to write the brand narrative. And so I would just say rethink your role in a self interested fashion that if you're going to be in that job for five years, demand gen alone isn't going to do it. It's going to probably get you 18 months and then you're going to be starting over.

[Johan Reed]

So brand and thinking about the way that the company is perceived by that refined icp, that deep understanding of the buyer is not only an investment in the future of the business, it's also an investment in the future of your own role. Absolutely brilliant advice. Joe. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This was the best conversation I had all day.

[Joe Chernoff]

Oh thanks. Yeah, me too. I enjoyed it. Joe.

[Johan Reed]

Such a great conversation. How do people learn more? How do people read a little bit more about your point of view or get engaged with you?

[Joe Chernoff]

Well, it's no longer on Twitter. That's no longer the happy place it once was for me. I would say LinkedIn. I'm pretty much aechernoff everywhere, so LinkedIn would be JadeChernoff would be on the flash. But find me LinkedIn.

[Podcast Narrator]

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