Jon Miller

The CMO Tax: CMOs are the only C-suite leaders who must constantly sell the value of their function. That's a tax on time, attention, and political capital, all paid before the actual marketing begins.

Nobody asks the CFO to justify finance. Nobody asks the CRO to justify revenue. Every C-suite executive defends their decisions, but only the CMO must defend the function itself.

What makes the tax insidious is that it's invisible: it doesn't show up in any budget. It shows up as unnecessary meeting prep, stakeholder management that consumes afternoons, and measurement frameworks built to prove rather than improve marketing.

WHY THE TAX PERSISTS
Marketing is the only C-suite function named after an activity, not an outcome. The CFO owns financial health. The CRO owns revenue. The CMO owns... marketing.

Other execs consume marketing and feel entitled to an opinion in a way they don't feel about finance or engineering.

And marketing is notoriously hard(er) to measure. Sales has bookings; finance has cash flow; product has adoption metrics. Marketing has… leading indicators that connect to revenue, but through a complex chain that can take years to play out — which doesn't tie to the typical quarterly reporting cadence.

THE EVIDENCE
🔺 The CMO Survey (AMA, Duke, Deloitte, 2018): 59.9% of marketers felt pressure to prove the value of marketing to the CEO & board. Not their results; the function itself.
🔺 84% of CMOs report high strategic dysfunction with the C-suite (Gartner, 2025).
🔺 Overall CEO confidence in the CMO role declined to 43%, with overall CMO A-grades dropping to just 15%. (Boathouse CEO Study, 2025).
🔺 CEO-CMO misalignment increased by 20% between 2023 and 2025, with CMOs increasingly being repositioned as executors rather than creators of strategy (McKinsey/ANA, June 2025)

WHAT REDUCES THE CMO TAX
Research from The B2B CMO Project found a consistent pattern among those who have earned genuine C-suite trust: they operate as business executives first and marketers second.

That includes knowing the CFO's cost of capital concerns before walking in with a campaign, leading executive updates with a customer insight rather than a pipeline report, and replacing MQL dashboards with metrics the rest of the room already tracks: pipeline velocity, win rate, NRR, CAC.

Our report, The New Rules for B2B Marketing Leadership in 2026, explains the five imperatives strategic CMOs use to reduce the tax. (Link below, along with a link to a longer version of this article.)

McKinsey found that companies that place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are 2X as likely to achieve 5+% annual growth (McKinsey/ANA, 2025).

That's the return available when the CMO Tax is reduced, when marketing spends its energy on strategy rather than survival.

In a given quarter, how many hours do you spend justifying marketing rather than leading it? What would you do with that time?

h/t Karl Van den Bergh of Illumio for coining the term.

The $285B SaaS selloff has everyone asking whether AI will kill software. I think that's the wrong question.

The better question: which parts of SaaS get replaced, and which become more valuable? And what’s that mean for #martech?

I've spent the last 18 months talking to 150+ mid-market and enterprise companies about their stacks. They're not preparing to rip everything out. But they are rethinking what to buy versus build.

Here's where I think the lines are forming.

WHAT GETS DIY'd
✅ Workflow UI. When one person can spin up a decent interface in days with Codex or Claude Code, they stop tolerating clunky vendor UX. Chat-based interfaces will replace purpose-built screens for more and more marketing workflows. AI agents will use software, not humans.

✅ Integration glue. Custom connectors between your tools (syncing CRM data to Slack, routing leads between platforms, chaining enrichment steps together) are perfect for agentic coding.

✅ Commodity features. Basic “if this then that” logic is wrapper functionality any competent engineer can vibe code in a weekend.

WHAT ENTERPRISES WILL STILL PAY FOR
I predict enterprises will still subscribe to systems of record, and more importantly, Systems of Control.

✅ Marketing-grade trusted data. Not "store all data", the warehouse will handle that. But the layer that determines what's trusted enough for marketing to act on: identity resolution, permission, suppression rules, deduplication. Nobody's going to vibe-code their consent management.

✅ Governed decisioning. This is essential. It's easy to build an AI agent that decides what email to send. It's very hard to build one that knows why your team sends two webinar invites instead of one, why certain contacts are limited to three emails per week, and why last quarter's campaign structure outperformed the one before it.

This "why" — the campaign patterns, the segment logic, the institutional knowledge that lives in your MOps team's heads — is what makes AI useful versus generic. Without it, you get "confident errors": technically correct decisions that are strategically wrong. The AI picks your best-performing campaign for a product launch, not knowing your team learned last quarter that this audience needs a customer story before the pitch; that insight came from three launches and sales feedback, not from any field in your CRM.

✅ Execution infrastructure. For email specifically, AI can draft the HTML, but it cannot manage sender reputation, IP warming, or domain throttling. Deliverability is a domain expertise problem, not a coding problem. (Other channels will connect over via API/MCP.)


The short version: vibe-coding eats workflow UI. But enterprises still subscribe to the systems that keep them SAFE — trusted data, governed decisions, and reliable execution.


Where's the line forming between build and buy in your martech stack?

I had dinner last night with ten enterprise B2B CMOs in New York. We kept circling back to three problems: measurement frameworks breaking down, executive perception of marketing as a cost center, and trust being restructured by AI.

I realized these aren't separate challenges; they're different symptoms of the same fundamental shifts in how B2B buying works.

THE AI ADOPTION GAP
We began going around the table rating AI adoption: everyone scored themselves 7+ in their personal use, but 3 or 4 at work. Individual capability outpaces organizational infrastructure, especially when IT doesn't invest in marketing.

As a result, most teams remain focused on basic efficiency gains, not effectiveness.

THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM
One CMO said: "I feel like we've gone back 25 years in measurement, before the MQL, before Marketo, trying to figure out how to connect with the CFO again."

The old model worked because it was simple. Gumball machine math connected spend to MQLs to revenue. But today, buying isn't linear, and several CMOs reported using account engagement, share of voice, and market share instead.

Plus, there is an attribution double standard: "Marketers are always under pressure to attribute what came out of what went in. Sales, on the other hand, as long as they hit the numbers, wherever that came from, it doesn't matter."

One CMO admitted to framing budget requests as "sales enablement" because that's what gets approved. When the CEO sees marketing as a "necessary expense" rather than a strategic lever, you adapt.

THE BUYABILITY PARADOX
Jann Schwarz and Mimi Turner from LinkedIn led a discussion about "buyability". You don't need the best product; you need to be the most buyable product.

Finance and sales believe B2B decisions are rational, while marketing knows they're emotional. "The questions are like, how do I make sure that I'm not making a big mistake? That's the emotion behind."

In other words, buyers aren't optimizing for the best product; they're minimizing career risk.

THE TRUST CHALLENGE
Buyability comes down to trust, but AI is restructuring how trust gets built, especially as AEO replaces SEO.

Email will soon follow social media's path; with Google's AI inbox, algorithms will determine which messages deserve attention. Email will become an earned channel, not an owned one.

Ultimately, this means Marketing's role shifts from generating demand to building trust with buyers — buyers who are increasingly unknown, researching through LLMs, rarely making shortlist decisions based on word of mouth rather than campaign touches.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE SHIFT
This will require rethinking the marketing stack with three distinct layers: Data for ingesting signals, Decisioning using AI reasoning instead of rules-based automation, and Delivery that extends beyond email to wherever buyers pay attention.


LMK in comments if you want more insights from the dinner!

Conventional wisdom says the best way to convince a CFO to invest in brand is with data. I have a better approach.

Most CMOs make the case with attribution studies, web traffic, or share of voice models. The problem is that presenting data to a skeptical executive tends to make them more skeptical, not less. You're inviting the CFO to poke holes in your data, and CFOs are very good at that. Psychologists call this reactance: the more directly you challenge a belief, the harder people defend it. The smarter the executive, the stronger the reflex.

That’s why I think there's a more effective path, and it starts with a question.

THE TECHNIQUE
Next time you're sitting across from a CFO who wants to cut your brand budget and double down on MQLs, don't open with a data. Ask them to walk you through the last time they selected a new platform — perhaps something like Anaplan or Adaptive Insights, or an HRIS.

Ask it like this:
🔷 How did you first hear about the vendor you chose?
🔷 Before you ever talked to sales, what had you already decided?
🔷 Did you download a gated ebook? Attend a webinar? Click a banner ad?
🔷 Or did it come up at an audit committee dinner, or in a conversation with a peer CFO you trust?

Let them answer, without editorializing.

Most CFOs, if they're being honest, will describe something that looks nothing like a demand gen funnel. They'll describe reputation, word of mouth, and a vendor who was already on their mental shortlist before sales ever said a word.

WHY THIS WORKS
When people arrive at a conclusion through their own reasoning, it sticks in a way no slide deck can match. This is called self-persuasion — conclusions we arrive at through our own reasoning feel like convictions, not arguments we were talked into, and convictions are much harder to walk back. You're not changing their mind; you're helping them use it.

WHAT COMES NEXT
Once you've had that conversation, you can make your ask on different footing: "I'm not asking us to abandon measurement. I'm asking us to measure the right things."

For example, brand tracking surveys — even just 100 targeted respondents from your ICP a quarter — will show directional movement in awareness, perception, and preference. That's not the same as proving causation. But it's the honest version of measurement for a process that's genuinely nonlinear, and it tracks exactly the factors that drove your CFO's own last purchase decision.

I explored this topic and many others on the Passetto podcast with Carolyn Dilks — link in the comments.

What's the most effective way you've found to reframe the brand investment conversation with a financially-minded leadership team?