5 Future B2B CMO100  Winners: My greatest lesson

Future B2B CMO celebration: lessons on success

What does success teach you that you misunderstood before? Five Future B2B CMO 100 leaders reflect on career pivots, consistency, positioning, commercial influence and knowing when it is time for change.

At a virtual gathering of recipients of this year’s Future B2B CMO 100, in partnership with Outreach, HotTopics asked a handful of winners to share more about what they had learned over the past year. For B2B marketers it has been a tumultuous 12 months; award-winners would have much to share when it comes to their successes as well as their valuable lessons. Reflecting on the awards celebration we were justified in doing so.

Five leaders and five reflections produced a rather different kind of awards conversation. Meet:

1. Marta George, Senior Field and Channel Marketing Manager, Cribl

2. Andy Grant, Senior Director Channel Marketing, Jamf
3. Maya Price, Global Head of Field Marketing, SNP GROUP
4. James Alliband, Head of Marketing, Risk Ledger
5. Anna Michniewska, Global Senior Vice President Marketing, CoreView

Success is tidier in retrospect than it feels while being achieved. Strategies land and careers progress, and only later do the qualifications emerge: the campaign that worked for reasons you had not anticipated; the promotion that looked better on paper than it felt in practice; the strategy that made perfect sense everywhere except inside the organisation expected to deliver it. Across five stories, these marketing leaders kept returning to that tension despite not having met previously.

The most interesting lesson from success, it turns out, may be within what it forces you to reconsider.

Story 1 from Andy Grant: Consistency is underrated

Andy Grant has spent 26 years in B2B marketing. His principal lesson from the latest of them is almost unfashionably simple: consistency.

Grant joined Jamf to bring together channel marketing teams that had previously operated separately across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. The aim was to create a more coherent global approach, including the unglamorous parts of partner marketing that nevertheless determines all-important funding. Market development funds existed but accessing them could be cumbersome. Partners and salespeople had become accustomed to hearing some variation of: “no, we cannot do that”.

Andy wanted the instinct to change. Within clear guidelines, the question became: “how might we say yes?”

He understood how partners are valuable because they do different things in different places. They reach new industries, territories, and customers; a system designed around excessive uniformity can therefore defeat the purpose of having a partner ecosystem in the first place.

The answer was consistency without rigidity: clearer funding, fewer barriers, and greater freedom for regional teams to act. Grant says the returns have been strong enough to support the case for further investment in FY27.

He applied similar logic internally. Regional structures were aligned and new leaders promoted. Colleagues across the US, Australia, and EMEA began working jointly on programmes, sharing what worked across markets. One recent series of partner marketing calls, he shared, attracted more than 200 attendees across three regions.

Marketing (and the business) has an understandable appetite for the new and far less attention is paid to making an existing system work properly every time. But according to Andy, scale often begins there.

Something to consider: where is your organisation mistaking novelty for progress?

Story 2 from Marta George: Success and fit are not the same thing

Marta George’s story was more personal. She had wanted to work in account-based marketing. She trained for it, found a mentor to support her through it, and eventually became Head of ABM. She built an EMEA strategy that was later adopted globally, established a Centre of Excellence, and helped close several substantial accounts. By the measures that mattered, the programme was working.

Marta, however, was not.

“Everything is working great,” she remembered thinking. “So why was my own sense of purpose weak as hell?”

The answer was not buried in the targets or team dynamics. The qualities that made ABM effective—structure, predictability, repeatability—gradually became the qualities she found most draining. Friends noticed the change before she fully acknowledged it herself, she shared. The person who had once enjoyed talking about the programme at conferences and on podcasts had become much quieter.

Eventually she made a move that, viewed through the conventional grammar of career progression, may have appeared strange: Marta left the senior ABM role and returned to field and channel marketing, this time at scale-up Cribl.

The difference was immediate. There was more ambiguity, yes, and markets behaved differently. Processes were being built while people were already using them, too, and Marta realised that she had missed this kind of disorder. Yet she had not abandoned what came before. The discipline acquired through ABM travelled with her into the new role.

It made me consider that sometimes progress is lateral; in this case it required giving something up. Marta realised that her professional success and personal fit had quietly diverged and did something about it.

Something to consider: are you continuing to do something because it is working for you or working for someone or something else?

Story 3 from Maya Price: When loyalty becomes inertia

Maya Price reached a similar conclusion but by a different route.

She spent 22 years with the same technology company, moving from local to regional to global positions, changing departments, crossing continents, and eventually leading a team of more than 80 people. During that time, the organisation continued to offer challenge after challenge. Eventually, however, the rate of learning slowed.

Although Maya remained feeling comfortable, meetings began to leave her frustrated rather than energised, for a whole host of reasons. The difficulty was that after more than two decades the company had become more than an employer: it had become part of her professional identity. Leaving meant separating the two.

Eventually she did. She moved from an organisation employing more than 100,000 people to a technology company of around 2,000, taking on a newly created global field marketing role. Seven months later, she described it as akin to a professional renewal.

Her appetite for marketing, technology, and data returned, as did her enjoyment of developing people. She was learning every day again—while also discovering that she had accumulated plenty worth teaching. Something else changed too: her imposter syndrome became quieter. In the new environment, Maya felt able to disagree without every contribution becoming another test of whether she deserved to be in the room.

Most interestingly, when asked, she does not wish she had left earlier.

Career chapters rarely come with an ending clearly marked but those where nothing has obviously gone wrong are often the easiest to ignore.

Something to consider: what would tell you that an otherwise successful chapter of your career had nevertheless ended?

Story 4 from James Alliband: Your positioning is not real until the company can speak it

James Alliband’s lesson emerged from a problem familiar to almost every growing technology business: everybody was telling a different story.

At cybersecurity company Risk Ledger, the founder had one narrative, whereas salespeople had developed others; SDRs had their own. In a market Alliband counted as containing more than 40 competitors, that fragmentation presented a problem. So, the company began sharpening its position.

James prefers the term “category evolution" to the more fashionable “category creation”. Risk Ledger was not pretending to summon a market into existence, rather, it was trying to articulate more clearly how its technology changed an existing one. Externally, the work landed. Internally? Old habits proved stubborn.

Salespeople and SDRs returned to familiar language because they knew how to use it, and many were already hitting their numbers. The old story had muscle memory behind it; the new one had a website.

For Alliband, this became the real lesson of the exercise. Marketing had treated internal adoption as one part of the rollout but in retrospect, when asked, he felt it should have been the starting point.

In fact, given another attempt he would make the organisation fluent before launching externally. Employees need time to interrogate the story, understand the objections, and become comfortable expressing it themselves. Only then does a new position begin to belong to the company rather than to the marketing department.

There is a useful distinction between publishing a strategy and embedding one. Companies often treat positioning principally as an exercise in expression, but positioning also encompasses organisational behaviour. A new proposition doesn’t land when the homepage changes; it has landed when the people selling the product stop reaching instinctively for the old explanation.

Something to consider: could your sales team explain your positioning without opening the messaging deck?

Story 5 from Anna Michniewska: Marketing earns influence in the language of the business

Anna Michniewska faced another familiar marketing problem. She joined a private-equity-backed technology company that had experienced repeated changes in senior leadership and was among the weaker performers in its investor’s portfolio. The board spoke the language one would expect: ARR, EBITDA, and “exit multiples”.

Michniewska wanted marketing to matter in that conversation. To do so she changed its vocabulary.

MQLs, impressions, and website traffic receded from the centre of reporting. In their place: opportunities, closed-won business, and pipeline contribution. Through Anna’s stewardship marketing began presenting itself as part of the commercial engine rather than as a neighbouring function producing its own set of indicators.

Over three years, its contribution to pipeline “rose from roughly 10–15 per cent to around half, depending on the quarter”, she shared.

And although those numbers count for a lot, it is what Michniewska did with the credibility they created that is worth celebrating.

She used her influence to advocate for a more generous parental-leave policy across the company’s different geographies. She supported an annual US$2,000 development budget. Marketing and RevOps also introduced an internship programme, which subsequently created another opportunity: aspiring managers within her team could supervise interns and gain experience of managing people before receiving a formal leadership role.

Something to consider: once marketing earns influence inside your organisation, what are you using that influence to change?

Closing thoughts

Taken altogether, the lessons were less conventional than one might have expected.

Andy found value in standardisation, James discovered that an external repositioning depended on internal fluency, Marta walked away from work that was succeeding whilst Maya left a company she still admired. Finally, Anna changed the language by which marketing was judged, using the resulting credibility to extend change beyond marketing itself. Each story contains a course correction.

We tend to ask successful people what they did right—and it’s a reasonable question. The answers produce frameworks to borrow, habits to imitate, and decisions worth studying. But success is tidier in retrospect than it feels while being achieved, and whilst reflecting on what was achieve people sometimes see a situation with far more clarity.

Perhaps the more interesting question is this: What did succeeding teach you that you had misunderstood before?

Meet the next generation of marketing leaders shaping the future of B2B. Explore the HotTopics Future B2B CMO 100 2026 and discover the rising executives redefining what marketing leadership looks like.