Building Your AEO Strategy to Win the AI Citation with Amy Cook

Leading Marketing Change at a 140-Year-Old Enterprise with Chris Bontempo

Chris Bontempo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Johnson Controls, a global leader in thermal management, mission-critical building systems, energy efficiency, and decarbonization. Prior to joining Johnson Controls, Chris worked his way up at IBM from an Analyst to become the Chief Marketing Officer, IBM Americas. He’s especially passionate about how AI changes the marketing operating model and how marketing can own market intelligence to shape strategy. Chris joins Jon Miller to discuss the exact frameworks he uses to win C-suite trust, defend the marketing budget with the CFO, and turn agentic AI into a genuine competitive advantage. Episode Takeaways * Marketing must own the "voice of the customer" function, not just demand gen. back into the company, and being an energy supplier to the ecosystem. Representing the voice of the customer back into the business is what earns marketing a seat at the strategic C-suite table. * CMOs should focus on the real business conversations, it's whether marketing, sales, product, and services collectively drove a revenue outcome. CMOs need enough financial acumen to defend budget in "secured revenue" terms with the CFO, not lead-volume terms. * Accept a certain amount of chaos as the price of AI experimentation. 100% success means you aren't taking enough risks. If every AI pilot succeeds, they aren't pushing hard enough. Leaders should explicitly normalize this with their teams so people aren't punished or discouraged when early AI pilots fail. * Shift the unit of work from "the tool" to "the workflow," using agentic frameworks to orchestrate multiple tools. Move away from evaluating individual platforms and instead map full processes and let agents determine which tools to invoke. Pair marketing AI engineering talent directly with field marketers, sellers, and service teams to rapidly prototype these workflows together. Standout Quote * “ You have to be able to hang with your CFO in the conversation around secured revenue.” - Chris Bontempo Guest Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-bontempo/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-bontempo/]  * Johnson Controls Website: https://www.johnsoncontrols.com/ [https://www.johnsoncontrols.com/]  More from The B2B CMO Project * Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/]  * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/]  * Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/]  * Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/]  * More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts]

Building Your AEO Strategy to Win the AI Citation with Amy Cook

Amy Cook is the Co-Founder & CMO of Fullcast, the Go-to-Market Cloud built for RevOps leaders by RevOps leaders. Over Amy’s career, she’s led multiple companies through successful acquisitions as a CMO at companies such as Simplus, PathologyWatch, and nClouds. Amy joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss why she ditched MQLs for pipeline-first metrics, turned radical transparency with her CRO into a trust-building strategy, and used AI tools to reposition her brand for the AI answer-engine era. Episode Takeaways * Get as close to revenue as possible. Marketers should actively pursue ownership of pipeline reporting, customer-facing work, and even partnerships/alliances rather than staying siloed in brand and demand gen. This proximity to revenue is the single biggest lever for earning a strategic seat at the table. * Treat individual LinkedIn thought leadership as brand infrastructure for AI answer engines. AI answer engines cite individual LinkedIn profiles far more than company brand pages, so CMOs have an "obligation" to become visible thought leaders themselves and to push their C-suite to do the same. Teams should also prioritize presence on YouTube and Reddit, since both are heavily cited by answer engines. * Treat AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) like the early days of SEO, meaning fast-moving and testable. Google's newly released AEO optimization guidelines (bullet points, short sentences, structured answers) are fundamentally similar to classic SEO/outline writing.  Standout Quote * “ This is our time as marketers to become like the most valued and most trusted person on the C-suite” - Amy Cook Guest Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyosmondcook/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyosmondcook/]  * Fullcast Website: https://www.fullcast.com/ [https://www.fullcast.com/]  More from The B2B CMO Project * Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/]  * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/]  * Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/]  * Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/]  * More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts]

How to Embed AI into Your Marketing Team with Wendy White

Wendy White is the Chief Marketing and Partner Officer at Daxko, where she leads marketing and partnerships for the platform that's powering the member management and operations engine behind so much of the fitness industry. Wendy has been a CMO for a number of companies and held globe-spanning marketing leadership roles at giants like Microsoft and Intel. Wendy joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to discuss how to lead an organizational AI  transformation, what it means for a CMO to lead as a business-first executive, and why a new brand measurement matrix is needed for an era where LLMs, not search engines, are where buyers do their research. Episode Takeaways * CMOs should position themselves as business executives first, and functional leaders second. Strategic CMOs actively weigh in on customer success strategy, sales org structure, and software procurement, which are all outside the traditional CMO scope. The modern CMO who earns a durable seat at the table does so by demonstrating strategic fluency across the entire business, not just owning the marketing lane. * Treat AI adoption as a cultural mandate, not just a tooling decision. This means changing job descriptions, updating career ladders to include behavioral AI capabilities, and making it explicit company-wide that AI is not a choice. Leaders who treat AI as optional will fall behind those who structurally embed it into how people are hired, evaluated, and promoted. * The "follow the sun" model, combined with AI, creates a continuous marketing execution engine. For example, Wendy's team has roughly half of its FTE headcount in India, with AI tools trained on brand guidelines, Gong calls, and campaigns. The result: Wendy wakes up to approval requests, not project kickoffs. This compresses execution timelines dramatically and is replicable for any GTM team willing to invest in AI-enabling offshore talent. * After years of decline, PR is becoming a top priority again for marketers, specifically because LLMs are trained heavily on authoritative published content. Getting your company cited in industry and trade press is no longer just a brand play; it directly influences how AI systems describe and recommend your product. GTM teams should re-evaluate PR investment through this lens immediately. * Brand measurement must be rebuilt for the AI era. Wendy introduced a new brand matrix that includes AI-driven sentiment monitoring (Reddit, G2), direct referral traffic as a brand signal, earned media share, and LLM citation share. CMOs should proactively introduce these metrics before the board asks why brand spend isn't measurable. Standout Quote * “What a modern CMO needs to do is to be really deeply integrated into the overall market and business strategy of the company. Don't sit back and wait for it to be about like, what's the next trade show?” - Wendy White Guest Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendywwhite/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendywwhite/]  * Daxko Website: https://www.daxko.com/ [https://www.daxko.com/]  Mentioned in this Episode * Guillaume "𝑮" Cabane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cabane/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cabane/]  * Matt Heinz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz/]  More from The B2B CMO Project * Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/]  * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/]  * Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/]  * Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/]  * More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts]

The 5 New Imperatives for B2B CMOs with Jon Miller & Sydney Sloan

In this special episode, Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller break down the most important findings for marketing leaders from The B2B CMO Project’s new research report. The findings in this report draw on recorded interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs at companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Sprout Social. Their goal: give CMOs the clearest possible picture of what has stopped working, what the best leaders and operators are doing differently, and exactly what to do about it. Sydney and Jon cover why the old B2B marketing playbook is broken and the five imperatives for modern marketing leaders to succeed. Episode Takeaways * Why the Old B2B Marketing Playbook is Broken: The MQL-driven, content-to-lead-nurture model worked for a generation, but the data now shows it's actively undermining marketing's credibility in the C-suite.  * Imperative 1 - Earn Your Seat by Becoming a Business Executive First: CMOs need to think of their C-Suite peers as their primary team and provide them with the voice of the customer, especially when that means surfacing problems before they’re apparent to others. * Imperative 2 - Prove Marketing’s Value in the Language of the Board: When CMOs report in marketing language, they get treated as a tactical marketing function. When reporting to the board and peers, the best CMOs lead with business outcomes first and treat marketing metrics as internal diagnostics. * Imperative 3 - Invest in Brand as a Strategic Economic Asset: Getting CFO buy-in on brand is very hard when marketers talk about awareness. Instead, connect brand strength to measurable business outcomes: lower customer acquisition cost, higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better pricing power. When marketers speak the language of finance, brand stops being a debate and starts being a priority. * Imperative 4 - Lead Marketing Through AI Disruption: Buyers are beginning their research, discovery, and evaluation in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, not just search engines. Adopt metrics like citation share and share of answer to measure how often your company and products surface in AI-generated responses, and build your content strategy around winning those placements. * Imperative 5 - Build the Organization and Capabilities for the Next Decade: Everyone is figuring out the AI-era at the same time, meaning those who actively engage with peer communities and share learnings will move faster.  Standout Quotes * “ The CMO role is too hard these days to do it alone, so let's do it together.” - Jon Miller * “ We want to look at owning the customer voice, that is my favorite part of being a CMO.” - Sydney Sloan Chapters * 00:00 Introduction & Overview of The B2B CMO Project Research Study * 06:25 Why The Classic B2B Marketing Playbook Stopped Working and How CMOs are Moving Forward * 09:39 1. The Credibility Gap is the Real problem for CMOs * 14:43 2. The Metrics Problem & How to Prove Marketing's Value in the Language of the Board  * 19:49 3. Brand is a Strategic Investment * 25:03 4. Leading Marketing Through AI Disruption * 30:46 5. Build the Marketing Organization & Capabilites for the Next Decade Mentioned in this Episode * The B2B CMO Project Research Report [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/research]: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/research [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/research]  * B2B CMO Survey [https://interviews.g2.com/research/d4aa5130-d54f-4606-800d-ffb8696f71ba]: https://interviews.g2.com/research/d4aa5130-d54f-4606-800d-ffb8696f71ba [https://interviews.g2.com/research/d4aa5130-d54f-4606-800d-ffb8696f71ba]  More from The B2B CMO Project * Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/]  * Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/]  * Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/]  * More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts]

Reframing Marketing ROI to Return on Objectives with Karl Van den Bergh

Karl Van den Bergh is the Chief Market Officer at Illumio, known as the world’s first breach containment platform (built on AI and designed for Zero Trust). Over the course of more than 25 years, Karl has held leadership roles in Marketing, Product and as a GM in Cloud, Analytics and Cybersecurity businesses, including SAP, Gigamon, Datastax, and Tibco. Karl joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to share his insights on why marketing leaders need to communicate with the C-suite using the language of the board, what it means to run a marketing team like a predictable sales org, and how to get buy-in on investing in brand by tying it to Return on Objectives, not ROI. Karl also dives into how to overcome ‘The CMO Tax’ and what his team is doing to stay top of mind, both for customers and LLMs. Episode Takeaways * Earn executive trust by speaking the language of business, particularly sales, first. For example, Karl Van den Bergh leads every executive and board conversation with pipeline contribution and bookings, rather than top-of-funnel metrics, because those are the numbers the C-suite and CFO already understand and care about. Forget about impressions or MQLs; instead, anchor the marketing narrative to revenue outcomes before expanding to broader brand metrics. * Running marketing like a sales organization, with targets, over-assignment of pipeline, and a forecast, creates predictability, which earns trust with the CEO and CFO. That trust is critical for securing investment in longer-horizon brand and awareness initiatives. * Don't create a new category unless you have absolutely no choice. Category creation is extraordinarily expensive and slow, requiring years of market education before revenue follows. * Reframe success internally from ROI to "Return on Objectives" when selling brand investment. Rather than trying to tie every awareness dollar directly to bookings, Karl uses a Return on Objectives framework: define the objective (e.g., be top-of-mind when buyers enter the market), set metrics tied to that objective (web visits, content downloads from target accounts), and benchmark performance against industry standards. This makes non-pipeline investments defensible and credible to peers in the C-suite. Standout Quote * “Advice to all CMOs out there, do not create a category unless you absolutely have to. Because it is so hard.” - Karl Van den Bergh Guest Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlvandenbergh/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlvandenbergh/]  * Illumio Website: https://www.illumio.com/ [https://www.illumio.com/]  Mentioned in this Episode * Anup Singh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anupvsingh/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anupvsingh/]  * Andrew Rubin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsrubin/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsrubin/]  * Brian Gentile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-gentile-b1376/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-gentile-b1376/]  * Rick Wootten: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickwootten/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickwootten/]  * Raghu Nandakumara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghunandakumara/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghunandakumara/]  * Ryan Farsai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfarsai/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfarsai/]   * Profound: https://www.tryprofound.com/ [https://www.tryprofound.com/]  More from The B2B CMO Project * Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/]  * Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/]  * Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/]  * More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts [https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts]