DemandRevenue, 254 West Street, Northborough, MA (2026)

06/20/2026

Picking the right customers isn't just about this year's acquisitions. It's about lifetime value and growth. Focus on metrics like LTV to customer acquisition cost for long-term returns. Every CEO cares about these metrics!

06/19/2026

Exit Ready Podcast- Episode 1: Driving Value Creation with Intelligent Marketing

I’m so honored to welcome our first guest, Gary Survis, Operating Partner, AI Transformation at Insight Partners.

This is the first of two 30-minute segments with Gary.

Insight Partners is a 30-year-old private equity investor with over 550 active investments, 55 IPOs, and around $90 billion in assets under management.

They also have a 100-person Onsite Experts team that works alongside their portfolio companies.

Gary, a “recovering CMO,” helps Insight Partners portfolio companies with AI transformations. He sees more market data across the portfolio each week than most marketers in their careers.

So, it’s worth paying attention to what he has to say.

Here’s a sample of what’s covered:

- Pipeline coverage is a number most marketing teams are proud of, but it could be quietly working against you.

- How 4X pipeline coverage is usually an empty tradition for organizations: the math changes when you increase conversion rates instead.

- Why ~60 percent of your ideal customer profile is not currently in-market to buy; therefore, the major task at hand is getting into that group's consideration set, NOT trying to get this quarter's pipeline numbers through gimmicks or golf outings.

- Trusted metrics for the board.

- There’s no magic set of slides that satisfies every board and what to do instead.

- What boards are actually asking of CMOs today and the fastest ways to lose them.

This podcast is worth watching for any CMO, C-suite executive, or investor.

Link to the Full podcast episode is in the first comment.

06/19/2026

You may have been the first to recognize where markets would move. In the meeting, you stated (what you thought was) the obvious. However, your suggestion failed to gain traction.

This could have occurred because you recognized an opportunity earlier than others, or because your comments threatened to step on the wrong person’s toes.

Regardless of the reason, your comments were ignored. Eighteen months passed by. You were sitting in the same meeting room. Someone else stood up and suggested (almost) the exact same suggestions that you previously mentioned. They received praise as if they created fire.

People rarely talk about this aspect of corporate life, yet it becomes increasingly true as you advance through the ranks. Being right doesn’t always mean you get the praise or results you deserve. Being right certainly helps, but it is far from sufficient.

Whether a correct idea or observation survives scrutiny depends on when it is discussed, on whose territory it threatens, on who feels ownership of it, and on whether the room is ready to accept its reality.

In the corporate environment, the best observations and ideas don’t always stand out. The ideas and observations with the right kind of cover, raised at the right moment, alongside the right people, will usually always win.

As you probably know, under these conditions, it doesn’t even have to be the best observations or ideas. It’s the other factors that often matter most.

Everyone working in corporate culture knows this, and almost nobody will admit it, because saying it out loud means admitting the meritocracy that some companies have become.

And here is the part that stings for the CMOs who take real pride in the marketing work they do and want to be “above it all.” Treating corporate politics as beneath you is not integrity.

It is a very dignified way to make sure your best ideas and observations die quietly.

Being correct and being effective are not the same skill; only one of them keeps your ideas and observations alive and keeps you employed.

So the issue at hand is not to be more right. It is to make the right idea safe to adopt. Time it to the moment the room actually needs it, not the moment you first came up with it.

Give the people whose territory it touches a way to support it without losing face, and sometimes let them share ownership (if that’s what it will take), even when it was initially yours.

Build a quiet agreement about your views and analysis before the meeting, so the meeting only has to confirm it.

None of that is selling out.

It is the gap between having good ideas and getting them implemented, and at the top of the marketing profession, only the second one counts.

If you keep getting frustrated because your best observations and ideas go nowhere, the problem is almost never the quality of your thinking.

It is often the corporate politics around your thinking, and that part can be learned.

06/19/2026

Why is understanding your ideal customer profile so important? Because when everyone aligns on strategy (including what to say NO to), everything becomes simpler. ICP is a game-changer.

06/18/2026

The marketing metrics that matter most finally came in green after a bit of a struggle, and you have to present this success to the board. Now, what do you do?

You waited three quarters, and you did your fair share of clawing to get there. The pipeline is up, the cohorts look healthy, and for once, you walk into the board meeting with good news instead of a defense.

You present the amazing results at the board meeting, and everyone nods. Someone says “nice work,” And then the conversation moves on, and you walk out, realizing the best quarter you ever had in a year just bought you almost nothing.

I have watched many CMOs pour all their preparation into delivering bad news when things are going wrong. They (rightfully so) obsess over how to frame the miss, when to raise the flag, how to walk into a hard room, and how to maintain the trust of everyone else in the meeting room when it all went south.

Funnier still is that most CMOs do not invest the same amount of thought and effort into how to deliver good news. This is the more costly blind spot because, unless you guide the narrative behind your win, the board will see it as a “minimum” win and won't know why it happened.

The next time your metrics dip (and they will), there will be no credibility with the board to help buffer you through the loss, and the same people who shrugged at the win are suddenly very interested in the loss.

The art of delivering good news is explaining the why behind it. When something works well before your next review, take on the hard task of figuring out exactly what went right and why. Some examples you may want to include: Which segment, motion, or two or three decisions actually drove the success?

Then bring that in-depth analysis to the board, not just the result. Explain to them what moved, why it moves, what it would take for you to extend it, and what return you could get from doing even more of it.

A green number explained methodically to the board stops being a pleasant surprise or worse, a point of apathy, and becomes a strong case for further marketing investment. It also banks the board’s trust in you, which you can spend later, in the quarter, the wind turns against you.

Most marketing leaders never get coached on this, because everyone assumes good news takes care of itself, but it doesn’t always.

I have helped many CMOs learn to deliver a win that compounds into the marketing budget and their standing within the company, rather than evaporating once the next slide is clicked.

If reporting on your good quarters is not something you really prepare for in the same vein as you do for reporting bad ones, you’re not alone at all. But it’s something you should take some time to work on.

06/18/2026

Content development and manual processes made easier. Summarizing convergent information helps you spot things more efficiently. Silence is golden!

06/17/2026

If your QBR (Quarterly Business Review) typically consists of a listing of the campaigns and numbers related to the generation of leads, then you're essentially creating the narrative for the board that you believe marketing can be seen simply as a coin-operated demand engine.

That’s what happens when you reduce the entire marketing function down to just two motions, i.e., leads in and pipeline out.

By doing so every quarter, the executive team and board will eventually see that marketing is simply a vending machine for demand. They will always try to adjust the levers by adjusting your budget. The only questions they will ever ask about your efforts are "Why wasn't the number larger?"

An effective QBR covers five areas, rather than just one.

Market Overview: Begin with what is happening in the marketplace, including trends, tailwinds, headwinds, and changes in customer buying behavior. This is where you will provide your unique perspective on these factors.

Brand Reputation: Focus second on the marketing programs that build your brand and reputation.

Demand Programs: The third focus would include the demand programs (both new logo and growth opportunities within current accounts).

Customer Engagement, Retention, and Advocacy: Fourth would include programs that drive customer retention and advocacy (net promoter scores, customer satisfaction ratings, etc.), preventing the silent churning away of growth created through demand programs.

Sales and Customer Success Productivity: Finally, end with the programs that improve the productivity of sales and customer success teams (fewer, larger campaigns, improved tools, increased average order sizes, higher win rates).

When covering all five of these areas, the perception of the boardroom begins to shift. Marketing ceases being viewed as a cost center that generates leads. It is now recognized as a functional area that impacts brand reputation, demand capture, retention/advocacy, Sales Enablement, and ultimately revenue performance.

After shifting your focus to those five areas, it would be extremely difficult to treat marketing as just a coin-operated vending machine.

If you want help structuring a QBR that does this, it is a good thing to map out before the next one lands on the calendar. I’d be more than happy to help you through it. The link to chat with me is in the first comment.

06/17/2026

To truly succeed, learn to speak the CFO's language. This helps CMOs with financial alignment and strategic decision-making. It was discussed on the Growth CFO podcast. Learn their lingo.

06/16/2026

From the outside, leading the marketing department as a CMO can look like one of the most creative jobs in the company.

The picture most people carry about what marketing does is often based on the most visible work the marketing department handles. The multi-channel campaign that lands, the successful company or product rebrand, the CMO's keynote speech at an important conference, and the company booth that is a hit with the trade show attendees.

These are just a few examples of the glorious work that people will often recognize as “marketing.” That work does require creativity, and it matters, but these visible activities aren’t entirely what decides whether you keep the CMO seat or not.

The actual job is someone who can do all that and also think like a general manager who happens to run marketing.

It is being the person who carries the market into the meeting room, the tailwinds, the headwinds, the change in how customers are buying, because nobody else in the building is watching for it. It is getting into the churn problem or the ideal customer profile, even when someone reminds you that it is not marketing's remit, because you cannot drive growth on top of a leaking bucket.

And it is the relationships, the one with the CFO that lives all year and not just at budget time, the trust across the C-suite you build long before the quarter you need it.

It ultimately comes down to decision-making. In the CMO role, you have to decide on what the marketing department is not going to do. There are many different areas you could focus your marketing efforts.

Prioritize the top 10 by how much each area moves the business. Then, as a leader, you have to say no to the other eight areas. Less is better for most companies. The CMOs who can't come to terms with that find themselves constantly busy and always overlooked.

This is certainly not the kind of work most people envision when they think of a head of marketing. Marketing leadership is far more difficult, quiet, and carries much greater responsibility than its creative image would suggest.

When run properly, however, there is no seat with more control over a company's direction than the CMO's. But the same CMO seat also carries one of the largest targets when things are going badly.

06/16/2026

CFOs understand net present value and internal rate of return, and that translates to valuing your work. It may not yield immediate returns, but consider the long-term value, not just the short-term. Prioritize overall growth.

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