Interview
The Gist
- The MQL Addiction. The obsession with MQLs leads to short-term thinking in B2B marketing. The focus on volume over value has hurt customer relationships and undermined long-term growth.
- The Gumball Machine Mentality. Marketing has become seen as a machine where you simply “put money in and get leads out.” Jon discusses the negative impacts of this mindset, emphasizing that successful marketing requires a strategic, customer-first approach rather than just volume-based tactics.
- The Need for Long-Term Strategies. With B2B marketing evolving, Jon stresses the importance of moving away from the transactional mindset of the past and focusing on building stronger, more meaningful customer relationships for sustained success.
In this episode of The CMO Circle, Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, reveals the significant shifts happening in the B2B marketing landscape — including how the traditional B2B marketing playbook is showing its age.
From the rise and fall of MQLs to the growing need for customer-centric, long-term strategies, Jon dives deep into what’s no longer working and how marketers can adapt. With a focus on evolving strategies, metrics and customer relationships, this conversation will give B2B marketers the tools they need to rethink strategies for 2025 and beyond.
Table of Contents
- Episode Transcript
- How to Work Around B2B Marketing Limitations
- How Marketers Are Approaching AI
- Will Marketing Reach True Autonomy?
- Outdated Tools in the Marketer's Toolkit
- Marketing Automation Stockholm Syndrome
- How Marketers Can Keep Strategies Evergreen
Episode Transcript
Michelle Hawley: Hi, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the CMO Circle. I'm Michelle Hawley, your host and senior editor of CMSWire. We have with us Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio.
Jon has been named the most influential marketing CEO of the year by the Corporate Excellence Awards, one of the 10 most influential tech marketers in the world by B2B Marketing, and a top 10 CMO for companies under $250 million by the CMO Institute.
Today, we're going to be talking about the B2B marketing playbook and why it's going through some big changes.
Hi, Jon. Thanks for being here today.
Jon Miller: Of course, looking forward to the conversation.
Michelle: So I want to jump right into the B2B marketing playbook. You created the original MAP playbook for Marketo, but now you're starting to see some limitations with it. Can you walk us through why that is?
Jon: Yeah, well, I certainly helped create it. I'm not sure I would say it was done exclusively. But, you know, back in the early 2000s when Marketo was first getting up and running, I think a lot of people looked at marketing as the group that, you know, threw parties and made color brochures. And I think the whole kind of demand generation revolution, if you will, did some pretty amazing things to help marketing earn a seat at the revenue table and to make marketing very quantitative and measurable, using things like ebooks to capture leads, lead nurturing to keep in touch with them and scoring to pass them to sales at the right time.
We sort of taught people almost to treat that as a highly measurable machine that can be tuned and optimized. And I think for a while it did work, you know, and we did help marketing earn a seat at the revenue table.
But over the years, I think it started to break down for a couple of key reasons. First off, the success of the MQL became an addiction. People started thinking, well, if some MQLs are good, then more MQLs should be better. It started to create what I call the gumball machine mentality, where people started to view marketing not as a sort of complex process — purposely not using the word "art" right now — but just a complex process that involves emotions and time. They started viewing marketing more like a gumball machine where they thought, "I can just put budget in and get MQLs out." I think that led to a bunch of behaviors that, over time, hurt us.
It led to a focus on short-term thinking as opposed to doing right for the customer in the long term. It led us to doing some things that probably ultimately weren't right for the buyer relationship. It also caused people to just dial up the volume — send more emails, do more ebooks, run more campaigns — and buyers got kind of overwhelmed and then indifferent to those tactics. They learned that if they filled out the form on the website, they were going to start getting unwanted emails and phone calls. So, they started shopping anonymously, not coming to our website and doing many of the things that would almost prevent that marketing automation machine from working.
And then perhaps the biggest problem is that short-term focus caused us to over-invest in demand generation and under-invest in brand and demand creation, which had — and is having — long-term impacts on our ability to generate the results that we want. The irony is not lost on me. In trying to elevate marketing's role, I think in some ways we actually constrained it. We gave marketing a seat at the revenue table, but trapped them ultimately in conversations about MQLs and not about markets, customers, and strategy.
Michelle: You're definitely right about the noise in marketing. Especially if I want to download a report or sign up for something, I always hesitate to give away my email address or my phone number, because you're right — I know I'm going to get a bunch of emails or phone calls that I don't want to answer.
Jon: Yeah, and every one of our buyers knows that as well.
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How to Work Around B2B Marketing Limitations
Michelle: So as far as the current playbook, what are the limitations that we need to work around?
Jon: Yeah, I think there are five that I would point to. I alluded to the first one already, which I just call the MQL trap. It's that budget-in, leads-out mindset that reduces marketing to a lead factory and forces us to optimize for form fills instead of true relationships.
Second is the brand disconnect. 6sense has done some interesting research where they found that 80% of buyers have chosen their preferred vendor by the time they originally reach out to sales. And then a further 80% of the time, that vendor actually wins the selection. Put another way: By the time somebody realizes they have a problem, if you're not on the shortlist, you basically have almost no chance of winning. So all that demand generation you're doing will not work if you don't have that brand awareness, that brand impression.
Third, the trust problem. Again, we already alluded to this. Buyers are tuning out generic outreach and gated content. The traditional tactics that are part of the playbook interrupt rather than engage. More often than not, content marketing has become content pollution. And all too often, the tactics are burning bridges instead of building them — and it's driving buyers away.
The fourth one's a little more subtle, but I call it the strategic cost. The more you think of marketing as a machine and gumballs, the more you're going to get trapped into tactical execution. And the less time you'll spend on doing deeply fundamental things like understanding the market, understanding the customers, building your brand. Over time, even though I wanted marketing to have a seat at the revenue table, it actually perpetuates the view of marketing as a cost center rather than a strategic driver of growth.
The fifth major disconnect is actually AI. And I know we're going to talk about that in a second, but AI is driving some pretty dramatic changes to the playbook that are going to make all the problems we've just talked about even worse.
How Marketers Are Approaching AI
Michelle: As far as AI goes — and we're going to get into how AI is going to fit into your strategy a bit more — from what you're seeing, I think everyone knows they have to start using AI in some way. Are you still seeing people kind of unsure about how to use it or where to use it?
Jon: Yeah, I think most people using AI in marketing so far have been using it for largely the wrong things. You know, we all started like, "Ooh, it can write my blog posts for me!" Yay. Or, "It can draft my press releases." I think we've since come to see that generic prompts like that create generic content — and the last thing we need is more generic content out there.
I think where AI is going to really have an impact is in some ways more subtle. There are two factors. The first one is that AI is going to have a big impact on how buyers buy. Think about it — already today in my Google mailbox, an older version of AI is putting emails into the Promotions tab, which is basically AI saying, "You should pay more attention to this than that."
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Now that I have Gemini in my mailbox, that’s the beginning of AI going even further and saying, "Hey, you got a hundred emails today. I've auto-responded to 16 of them per your instructions. You can ignore 74 of them. Here are the 10 that you need to pay attention to. I've drafted the replies for you." That's coming.
In a world where that’s happening, all of our generic content, all of our generic outreach, isn’t going to get through. It raises a really interesting question: In a world where AI is summarizing and disintermediating our marketing, what needs to happen is we need humans to focus on the things AI can’t summarize and disintermediate — things like understanding customers and markets, building brands that connect emotionally, generating unique, memorable experiences that can’t be summarized, building authentic relationships and community — plus good old-fashioned creativity. Truly original content. That can’t be remixed because it doesn’t exist yet.
Which leads me to where I think the most profound impact that AI will have on our marketing is: Can we actually use it to finally start to automate the automation, and therefore free up the marketers to spend more time on these things that humans can uniquely do.
So today, when you buy a marketing automation tool like Marketo, it's ironic — you have to then hire humans to run the automation. But what if we didn’t need that? What if AI could actually truly automate things? Then our humans could focus on these uniquely human things.
Which is sort of funny, right? In some ways, what it means is that AI in marketing might actually end up making marketing more human, not less.
Will Marketing Reach True Autonomy?
Michelle: Do you think there's ever going to be a point where it's truly autonomous? I mean, AI agents have been a big topic lately, where these agents can go and do things and make their own decisions — but there’s still some degree of human oversight. Do you ever see that lessening over time?
Jon: I think we will — as AI gets better and we get more comfortable, we’ll come to trust it more than we do currently. But, you know, I think the core of what I’m trying to get at here is we need a little bit of a back-to-the-basics approach — good old-fashioned human relationships. And I don’t think anybody should be trusting the outreach to their most important relationships — their most important customers — to AI, no matter how good the AI is. At least not in a way that’s completely automated.
Now, what I think AI can do really, really well is — I like to use the analogy of a DJ. Like, a Spotify DJ is an AI, right? It can craft together a playlist that meets exactly what you want — your tastes, your preferences, your mood, what you’re trying to achieve. But it’s not inventing new songs. It’s taking the songs that the humans have already created and approved — that resonate and connect emotionally — but it's stringing them together in a way that, in some ways, may be smarter than any human can actually do. And it’s doing it for each individual person.
I do think we’re going to move to a world where that’s happening — where instead of running individual campaigns, we think more about creating “songs,” if you will, that the AI DJs can mix to help achieve our goals.
Similarly, I talked about the pain of just building campaigns in a marketing automation tool like Marketo today. What often happens — and we’re getting in the weeds here a little bit — is when a marketer wants to run a new campaign, they create a campaign brief where they describe what the campaign should do. A lot of companies I talk to do this with a workflow management tool like Asana, Jira or monday.com.
That campaign brief gets sent over to an operations team to go build it in the marketing automation system. That step should be skipped. The marketer should create the brief. The AI should then go build the campaign for you and let a human say, “Is this right? Is this what you were hoping to achieve? Do you want to change this email before I start sending it out?”
So I think that’s the world we’re moving toward. And now I’m going to caveat everything I just said with the fact that I don’t think any human — myself certainly included — can truly predict how much things will change if we get to fully generalized intelligence or, let alone, superintelligence.
Michelle: I don’t even know if I can predict what’s going to change now with the kind of technology that we do have. I mean, it’s kind of crazy to think it was just a couple of years ago that ChatGPT came onto the scene, and it’s just been a whirlwind since then.
Jon: Yeah, yeah, totally.
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Outdated Tools in the Marketer's Toolkit
Michelle: So, as far as the technology aspect of this new strategy and fitting AI into everything, what are the current tools in a marketer’s toolkit that aren’t going to work anymore? And how is technology going to have to adapt to keep up?
Jon: Yeah, well, obviously, this is my career — I think a lot about marketing technology. And as proud as I am of Marketo, I tell the story sometimes —we started Marketo the same month that my first son was born, February 2006, and he turns 19 this year. So it’s a really visceral way for me to keep track of how old Marketo is.
HubSpot’s the same age, Pardot’s just a couple of years younger, Eloqua’s a couple of years older. We're talking about pretty old technologies here in the B2B marketing segment. And unfortunately, especially since Adobe acquired Marketo, I’m not seeing a lot of innovation happening there. I talk to CMOs all the time, and what I hear is, “They just keep bringing the price up every year, but they're not bringing anything new to the table.”
So partly, we have these old tools that were built for the old playbook. I don’t think we're going to be able to get to where we need to go with the new playbook using these old tools. Frankly, they’re just not innovating fast enough.
And there are a couple of very specific problems, too. Most people using Marketo or the other marketing automation tools today recognize that it’s really a glorified email system. They keep it around because they need to send emails and feel like they have to have it. But it doesn’t really work to coordinate and orchestrate experiences across channels — and that’s exactly how buyers buy. So we need a system that can truly be more multi-channel.
Second, these tools are inherently lead- or person-based. There’s no account object in Marketo unless you buy their not-so-good ABM add-on. That’s what caused a whole industry of account-based marketing platforms to emerge — because these systems don’t understand accounts. And increasingly, we're moving to a world where it’s not just leads or accounts, but buying groups.
Leads are too narrow. Accounts are too broad. Buying groups are just right. And you need technology that understands buying groups, because that’s how companies actually buy.
This directly relates to not just using these systems for customer acquisition but also for post-sale. Just think about it — your data model in the CRM: once an account becomes a customer, you call the account a customer.
But there may be five other buying groups that are still prospects for other products. And if you don’t have a buying group object or a way to understand that in your system, you’re always going to treat that account as a customer — as opposed to the more complex enterprise that it is.
That really reflects the bias toward new logo acquisition that’s built into the current tools. Last but not least, they’re built on outdated data architectures. They’re very dependent on CRM, while a lot of companies are building cloud data warehouses, CDPs and more modern data stacks that current marketing automation tools don’t really work well with. So those are all at play.
And they’re not AI-focused. At best, they’re slapping AI on to craft emails for you — not doing the sort of full orchestration we’ve been talking about. So yeah, I do think technology needs to evolve and change. I think three years from now we’ll be looking at a potentially very different set of B2B marketing platforms.
Marketing Automation Stockholm Syndrome
Michelle: Do you think as more people make that shift to better platforms or platforms with more capabilities, there’s going to be an issue trying to migrate all of that data over from their old platforms?
Jon: You know, the data is not the problem. Because almost any data in Marketo, for example, is also replicated in Salesforce. Any new system coming in can just sync that data down. Arguably, the existing campaigns and processes are more of an issue. People have built complex compliance rules into these systems, and they want to make sure those carry forward.
But I’ve talked to a whole bunch of CMOs and other marketers about this over the years, and honestly, the real problem comes down to fear. I call it "marketing automation Stockholm syndrome." They’re on this system, and they’re just pretty terrified of switching — partly because there hasn’t been a good alternative, but also because the last thing they want is for their lead flow to suddenly break, or for something else to go wrong. Maybe they accidentally email someone in Germany they shouldn’t because some rule got broken. They're terrified of it.
So I think what’s going to need to happen is people are going to need to recognize the limitations that we’ve been talking about. And it’s going to start with early adopters who say, “You know what? This old playbook isn’t working. This old tech isn’t working. It’s time for something new, and I’m going to bet on being 10 times better than my competition by moving to a more modern, newer platform.”
It’ll happen, right? But yes, people are scared of the change. No doubt about it.
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How Marketers Can Keep Strategies Evergreen
Michelle: So with the B2B landscape changing so quickly, what advice do you have for marketers who want to keep their strategies evergreen?
Jon: Well, I think a lot of it — well, I will say it comes down to one thing more than anything else, which is going to sound really, really simple: do right by the customer.
It’s funny because I’ve been talking to marketers about this for about a year and a half now, about the old playbook being broken. And they ask me, “So what’s the new playbook? What should I be doing?” And it’s brand and long-term focus, and don’t gate your content and there are all these things I can rattle off that they should be doing.
But they all come down to the same thing: Is this the right thing for the customer and the relationship? Or are you doing it to try to maximize some short-term metric?
And I think if you choose "do right by the customer" as your North Star, that’s going to pay off. And that leads directly into doing the things that are right in the age of AI.
As I said earlier, can I build genuine relationships and community? Can I create experiences for my customers and prospects that AI cannot summarize and that are really worth remembering? Am I investing in an engine that will create truly original content and insights — truly creative content and insights?
Do I understand the market? Am I spending enough time to really understand, as a CMO, how to be a driver of the market?
Maybe just to wrap — there are a set of CMOs out there who are renaming their title and calling themselves Chief Market Officers instead of Chief Marketing Officers. What that represents is the fact that otherwise, marketing is the only C-suite function that is named after the process and not the outcome. Right? We don’t have Chief Selling Officers or Chief Financing Officers.
So I get it. And I do think that title of Chief Market Officer is a pretty compelling way to bring up this conversation around the strategic nature of marketing and ultimately the right role of marketing.
But I do want to say — none of this is meant to decrease marketing’s impact on revenue. None of this is meant to say marketing shouldn’t be measurable or revenue-focused. But it’s about redefining what marketing’s impact on revenue looks like — away from short-term MQLs and toward what really, truly drives long-term revenue growth.
And I think if a CMO can have that conversation with their peers and their board, that’s the most important thing—regardless of what your title happens to be.
Michelle: Well, that’s all the time we have. Thank you for being here today, Jon. It was great talking with you.
Jon: Of course. Thank you. Take care.
Michelle: Thank you everyone for tuning into another episode of the CMO Circle. I’m excited to be back for our second season, and we have some great guests lined up for you this year. Check back next month for an all-new episode. And if you’re looking for more great content, we have two other CMSWire TV shows you can check out — Beyond the Call and The Digital Experience.
