Every CMO in a complex B2B business is being asked to do two things at once: rebuild the marketing function and keep delivering growth while they do it. Operating models are being redrawn, AI is changing both how buyers make decisions and how marketing gets done, and boards want commercial value explained in their own language. The plan for a transformation is usually well thought through. What is harder to capture is how the people leading it actually get through it: the trade-offs they make, the people they need to bring with them, and what they would do differently next time. This series exists to capture that.
Across our work with marketing leaders in global technology and professional services firms, we keep hearing the same thing. Transformation rarely fails because of the target operating model on paper. It succeeds or stalls on leadership: how clearly the guiding principles are set, how much effort goes into change management, and how comfortable the CMO is with getting it working before it is perfect.
We started this series to hear that perspective directly from the CMOs doing the job, in their own words.
Why we are asking CMOs
CMOs sit where several pressures meet, and these pressures are rarely discussed together:
- buyers are forming their views, increasingly with AI, well before they speak to sales,
- marketing teams need new structures, skills and ways of working while still delivering at scale, and
- account-based thinking is moving out of specialist teams and into the wider go-to-market model.
Every leader in this series is dealing with all three at once, usually across global, matrixed organisations with long and complex sales cycles.
What we ask, every time
To make the interviews comparable, and to let patterns emerge across very different businesses, we ask each CMO the same seven questions:
- What is the biggest shift you have seen in how your customers want to buy, and what has that changed about what is expected of you as CMO?
- What does the transformation of your marketing function look like right now, and how are you bringing people with you?
- How is AI changing the way you execute marketing and the way your customers evaluate suppliers, and where is it still messy?
- Is account-based thinking still the job of a specialist team, or is it reshaping your go-to-market model?
- How are you proving commercial value in board-level language while your operating model is changing?
- Two or three years from now, what does success look like for your marketing function, and what has to change inside the business to get there?
- What is the one thing you would tell a fellow CMO who is trying to navigate this level of transformation?
We do not steer the answers. We are interested in where experienced leaders agree and where they take quite different routes to the same place.
Where we are starting
Our first interview is with Dr Sarah Thomas, EVP and Group CMO at Capgemini. She set a strong benchmark. Her themes were that AI should augment people rather than replace them, that in-person relationship building matters, that account-based thinking should be built in across the organisation, and that change management is a workstream of its own. We will be watching to see which of these hold across the series and which get challenged. As more interviews come in, we will share the patterns we see.
If you are a CMO leading marketing transformation and would like to take part, get in touch.
For more on how account-based thinking is reshaping go-to-market models, see ‘Account-Based Marketing’ (Burgess, Kogan Page, 2025).
