Category: Show Notes

Feature-and-function decks aren’t winning anymore.

In this episode of Renegade Marketers Unite, Drew sits down with Bob Wright (Firebrick) to break down how B2B CMOs can use positioning to drive growth, shorten sales cycles, and stand out in crowded markets.

They unpack why product-first stories fail, how to get to “one voice” across the company, and what it really means to own a key business problem that buyers care about.

In this episode:

• The three biggest positioning mistakes: product-first thinking, misalignment, and no owned problem
• Creating urgency when “do nothing” is the real competitor
• Why “why you, why now” matters more than “how it works”
• When and how to rethink positioning after PLG, acquisitions, or expansion
• How to stand out in a world of AI sameness
• Building positions that sales actually uses

If your messaging is drifting into “blah blah blah” territory, this episode will help you reset around problems, not products.

Many CMOs face the same dilemma: You’re asked to prove “brand,” then told brand tracking is too expensive. So you invest in analyst relations, adjust PR, navigate layoffs, or shift strategy without a reliable way to show how those moves affect market perception.  

RepuTracker was built to solve that problem. 

Developed for members of the CMO Huddles Leader program, RepuTracker provides a monthly, evidence-based view of your company’s reputation so you can see whether it’s rising, slipping, or holding steady, and why. 

In this episode, Drew is joined by Taran Nandha (Growth Natives) to demo the RepuTracker beta. They show how the tool tracks reputation month to month across multiple signals, then get practical about how to read the output, explain it to leadership, and see whether your moves are showing up in the market.

In this episode: 

• How RepuTracker turns scattered public signals into a monthly reputation score with trends and competitor benchmarks. 

• What it measures across key dimensions: Power of voice, awareness, engagement, perception, and employee sentiment. 

• How sources and weighting work behind the scenes across dozens of platforms. 

• How to use trendlines and recommendations to move from “we dipped” to a clear next step. 

Plus: 

• Why direction over time matters more than one noisy review or spike. 

• How to sanity-check dips using internal context and profile audits. 

• What could come next, from deeper source auditing to tracking visibility in AI search and LLM references.

If you’re curious how RepuTracker works, what signals it pulls from, and how to interpret the output month to month, this episode is the walkthrough. 

AI is now a standing agenda item. It shows up in QBRs, board packets, and 2026 budget plans with a big expectation stamp on it. CMOs are being asked to operationalize it fast, prove value in workflows, and keep risk, governance, and tool sprawl under control.

To get specific about what to prioritize next, Drew brings together Guy Yalif (Webflow), Andy Dé (Lightbeam Health Solutions), and Kevin Briody (DisruptedCMO). Together, they focus on how CMOs can move from scattered experiments to intentional AI adoption across people, process, and technology, and what it takes to make AI a trusted part of how marketing runs.

In this episode: 

• Guy shares an AI fluency maturity model and explains why the shift to operational excellence is a change management challenge. 

• Andy breaks down agentic AI and workflow automation with examples from CI, outbound, RFPs, content, and AEO, using “why, what, how, so what.” 

• Kevin focuses on the people and platform side, from job anxiety and culture to vendor shakeouts and MarTech-level discipline. 

Plus: 

• Centering AI plans on people and fluency so it feels additive, not threatening. 

• Using councils, fast-track approvals, and guardrails to scale safely. 

• Balancing efficiency with human experience and customer acceptance. 

• Treating AI tools like core MarTech, with scrutiny around contracts, integrations, and vendor longevity.

If you want your 2026 AI plan to feel like a strategic advantage instead of a collection of pilots, this conversation will help you decide what to run, what to scale, and what to skip. 

Most marketers worry about whether buyers trust their brand. Brent Adamson, author of The Framemaking Sale, argues that the actual issue sits somewhere else: Buyers do not trust themselves.

In this episode, Drew sits down with Brent to challenge three big assumptions: That more supplier trust is the answer, that buyers have a neat journey to map, and that customer centricity is always the right north star. 

In this episode: 

• Why decision confidence matters more than supplier trust 

• How shifting from “trust us” to “trust yourselves” reshapes GTM 

• How to rethink buyer journeys through the “never again” and spaghetti-bowl lens. 

• Framemaking in practice, from nudges and checklists to maturity models. 

• The three Es, Establish, Engage, Execute, as a shared marketing and sales playbook.

Plus: 

• Escaping the smartness arms race by editing content to reduce anxiety and build buyer self-confidence. 

• Turning social proof into a confidence engine, using “other customers like you…” stories. 

• Making content supplier-agnostic, helping buyers ask better questions and weigh tradeoffs.

If you want your buyers to trust themselves enough to decide, start here. 

If AI is only helping you write copy, you are leaving real leverage on the table. 

Every marketing team is buried in invisible busywork; a trail of repetitive, manual steps hiding inside every task. So what happens when you take one of those messy workflows, map every step, and rebuild it?

In this episode, Drew talks with Dave Brong (Level Agency) about how CMO Huddles transformed a messy, 10-step post-meeting grind into an automated system that transforms hundreds of conversations into structured insight, searchable intelligence, and real business value. 

In this episode: 

• How a manual, repetitive workflow became an automated intelligence engine 

• How transcripts, metadata, and semantic search unlock institutional knowledge 

• The reality: Only ±10% of the system relies on AI (code does the heavy lifting) 

• When to use low-code tools vs. engineers for reliability, privacy, and scale

Plus: 

• A simple method to audit workflows and spot automation opportunities 

• How to balance build vs. buy for AI workflows 

• How to amplify human judgment instead of replacing it

If you are tired of manual follow-up, underused data, and AI hype without impact, this conversation is for you.  

Growth targets keep climbing while cost lines tighten, and planning season starts to feel very personal for CMOs. AI threads through every conversation, zero-based thinking pulls against last year’s baseline, and the goalposts never seem to hold still.  

So the job becomes building a budget you can walk into the room with, own, and defend with conviction. 

To get there, Drew brings together Andrew Cox (Forrester), Lisa Cole (2X), and Alan Gonsenhauser (Demand Revenue). The conversation centers on tying spend to strategy, translating marketing into CFO-ready terms, and giving AI a role in the plan that the numbers can support.

In this episode: 

• Andrew shares Forrester’s view on moving past “last year plus X,” building budgets around corporate objectives and campaigns, and forcing prioritization. 

• Lisa applies a zero-based mindset to business priorities, uses a 70-20-10 program mix for core, flex, and test, and frames marketing as an ATM of Audience, Trust, and Monetization. 

• Alan outlines the signals of strong and weak budgets, tying the majority of spend to growth campaigns and long-term value plans, and maintaining a year-round working relationship with the CFO.

Plus: 

• Keeping tech spend in check, including guidelines for MarTech mix and contract flexibility 

• Positioning brand and PR in financial terms like pipeline influence, win rates, and pricing power 

• Responding to AI efficiency pressure by fixing workflows first and framing value in utilization, speed, and scalability 

• Why the budget should be the numerical expression of strategy, not a defense of legacy spend

If you want to walk into your next budget review with a clear story, solid numbers, and conviction, this conversation will help you get there.