From tight budgets to lean teams, today’s marketing professionals are accustomed to doing more with less. For sellers who serve the marketing industry, that means nailing your pitch to the chief marketing officer is a make-or-break proposition.
But with packed calendars and more responsibility than ever — encompassing brand, pipeline, and thought leadership — engaging with CMOs has never been more challenging.
How do you connect with these important members of the C-suite and make the most of their time? We enlisted the help of a few experts — including some veteran CMOs — to bring you this authoritative guide on selling to the CMO.
Here are seven tangible tips and helpful insights, all informed by real-world experience, to help you sell smarter and win faster with today’s marketing leaders.
Tip #1: Leverage Their Network
Cold calling is a tried and true sales method, but as you move up the executive ladder it becomes less and less effective. CMOs are constantly bombarded with unsolicited outreach to the point it’s mostly noise.
“I have my phone on silent and generally don’t answer calls because there’s just too many,” says Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, and former CMO of Drata and Salesloft.
Robin Daniels, chief business and product officer at Zensai and three-time CMO (Matterport, WeWork, and Vera), echoes this: “I never answer my phone anymore unless I know who it is.”
What’s the best way to get a CMO’s attention? Use their network.
Ben Daters, a vice president of sales at ZoomInfo, has spent a lot of time selling to marketers. “Very rarely do they take a meeting without checking with their network to either validate before they jump on a call or to get warm introductions,” he says.
For CMOs, their networks are often the first step when researching solutions.
“I’m in a lot of networks, and we constantly share best practice tools. If I need something, I can just ask a question that will light up a conversation — what’s your favorite of this type of tool, or what’s something new that you’re trying? It’s how things get put on my radar.”
These networks are a major source of social proof that marketing leaders look for to reassure them that they’re making the right choice. “When I’m evaluating a vendor, I’m asking if I should trust them. The more stories I hear about them from my peers that relate to what I feel, the more I can trust them,” says Jam Khan, senior VP of portfolio marketing at ZoomInfo.
Tip #2: Cultivate Champions
If selling to CMOs is all about their network, what’s the best way to get into it? Two words: cultivate champions. Think of other CMOs who’ve had experience with your product or end users who can vouch for you to their higher-ups.
“You have to be where they already are and engage with them where they like to be engaged. Start with one or two customers and build in some really great champions. Have CMOs that believe in you and use them to further spread the message,” Daters says.
Internal champions at your target CMO’s company are also incredibly valuable.
“If one of my team members comes in and says they’re looking to solve something and have a technology they recommend, I’ll let them run with it. A lot of times I’ll let my team decide based on their evaluation, although I’ll put my favorites on the short list for consideration,” Sloan says.
Unlike other sales tactics, creating these relationships is not something you’ll be able to shortcut. Building a champion is a long game.
“You’ve got to build trust over time. It never comes if you’re aggressive about it or try to make it happen too quickly. It’s like in any relationship: it just takes time to build the trust and the loyalty.”
Tip #3 Practice Partnership, Not Pitches
The quickest way to lose the hard-won attention of a CMO is to go in with a stale sales pitch. “When they don’t listen but just come in and pitch their deck, I’m done in two seconds,” Sloan says.
What works instead? “Open up the floor. Say, ‘This is what we see with customers and what they’re trying to solve; does this resonate with you?’ And just let the customer talk. They’ll tell you the problem they’re looking to solve. That’s where the conversation should start,” she says.
Instead of going in with an overly prescriptive pitch, your goal should be to have a collaborative conversation that gets to the root of their problem and allows you to act as a consultant.
Daters offers this advice: “Don’t show up and say ‘I’ve identified all of your problems and can fix them.’ Let them own their own credibility, and approach them as a partner. ‘What can I help you solve? Are there gaps we can help you bridge? What can I help you double down on?’”
This collaborative approach is effective, because CMOs want to hear your recommendations. “I want to get an analysis from different vendors as to what they see and what they recommend, and see if there are similarities or differences based on who we’re talking to,” Sloan says.
Tip #4: Address Revenue Pressure Points
Making a big purchasing decision can be intimidating, even for seasoned professionals. As Khan puts it: “Think about a B2B buyer. I’m spending a good chunk of company money. The most important thing I’m concerned with is, am I going to buy the software and then it screws things up?”
Addressing this fear is a valuable method for getting to the heart of a sales negotiation with the CMO. “It’s not a fear of missing out, which is what a lot of marketing relies on, but about a fear of messing up,” Khan says.
This “fear of messing up” and missing revenue targets is the biggest, most consistent pain point for CMOs. There’s a lot of pressure on them to get things right.
“We all know that tenure as a CMO is historically low. It’s because you’re oftentimes a hero when it goes well or a villain when things are not going so well,” Daniels says. “It’s very hard to have that predictability and scalability that your CEO or board wants.”
Acknowledging these fears and how your product can help is an excellent way to initiate a meaningful discussion with a CMO.
“I don’t think enough salespeople focus on the risk or the fear. Because every CMO, whether they admit it or not, is scared stiff of missing their revenue targets. And if you can own and clearly articulate a way to help solve that, then you’re going to catch their attention.”
Tip #5 Make it Easy for Them to Stay Involved
Typically, a CMO will not be the one using your product every day, so they don’t need to be in the weeds of the sales process. But keeping them involved is a good way to build trust and credibility. On a practical level, this means you should have the back-and-forth with your end-users and champions and keep the CMOs informed about the bigger picture.
Expect a CMO to join an early discussion to get your vision and pitch and to see what differentiates your product from another, then again at the end to negotiate the use case.
“I might attend the first meeting and the next-to-last. I want to be educated and get the analysis from different vendors to see what they recommend. I can learn things in the process that I may not have known before,” Sloan says.
Daniels’ involvement is similar: “Since I’m not the one using the platform every day, I would trust others to decide if it’s the best platform for the current moment. I’d be involved to make the assessment based on my knowledge, as the CMO of where the company is going in terms of strategy.”
One key challenge is keeping the CMO involved in the process without overburdening them. Here’s how Daters handles it: “I tell them that I know their time is valuable, so I don’t expect them to be the one to investigate and do all the research and testing. But I always ask if it would be OK if I regularly send them clear, well-thought-out executive summaries with action plans of what we’ve done.”
Tip #6 Share Resources Instead of Asking for Time
You’ve made your way into a CMO’s inbox and got their attention — now what? It all comes down to the CTA. Common sales advice dictates you should ask for a meeting as a next step. And in most cases that works — but it’s no guarantee when you’re selling to the C-suite.
“I always like it when people are mindful of how busy our lives are,” Daniels says. “If you ask, ‘do you just have 30 minutes?’ The answer is ‘No, I don’t really have 30 minutes to spare.’ Every moment of my day is trying to add value and I can’t just jump on a call.”
If you want to reduce friction with your CMO prospects, make the CTA something simple that they can get to on their own time. Daniels’ suggestion: “I prefer either a short video or a short deck, something that gets to the point of what I need to know and what you’re trying to solve.”
Tip #7 Personalize at the Company Level
If you want to ask for a CMO’s time, show them that you’re willing to put in the work. Daniels says that well-done personalization will always grab his attention.
“If a pitch is personalized and they understand my pain for my company specifically, I’ll answer every single time. It doesn’t mean the answer’s always yes, but you get my attention and I’ll respond. The problem is most of the pitches we get — 99.9% — are just this generic stuff that means you don’t understand me, my business, or what I care about,” says Daniels.
Most people think of demographic or psychographic personalization. You see that Robin Daniels is from Denmark and posts a lot on LinkedIn about running, so you mention how it’s a mutual interest and follow up with “Hey, can I send you some information?”
But the kind of personalization that CMOs respond to best goes beyond who they are and is more about what they do.
“If you want to build trust, you have to know my problems really well. It’s about knowing the company more than knowing the person.”
That could mean noticing that a prospect uses a lot of tools for project management and sharing how they could save money and be more productive by replacing their stack with your software.
“That means this person has made the effort, and I trust that they’re going to continue to make the effort to get to know me,” Khan says.
Luckily, making that effort continues to get easier and easier with innovations in sales software. “I’m very biased,” he says, “because one of the great things about ZoomInfo is that we put all this information in people’s hands.”
Get Ready to Sell With Confidence
If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve probably caught a common thread — CMOs value salespeople who put in the effort and prioritize the relationship over the deal. That means when you’re talking to a CMO, you need to come prepared.
Thankfully, there are many tools that make it easier to approach the C-suite with the right information at the right time. Leveraging a mix of data, signals, and AI-driven insights through software like ZoomInfo Copilot can make a significant difference in understanding what truly matters to a CMO. By focusing on the most relevant information and using personalized, value-driven communications, you can build the trust necessary for making meaningful connections.
With the right data, strategies, and tools, you’re ready to sell to the CMO with confidence.