The B2B CMO playbook is broken. Here’s what growth leaders are doing instead.

Interviews with 50+ CMOs reveal five operating imperatives for marketing leaders who need to close the gap between strategy and execution.

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The B2B CMO playbook is broken. Here’s what growth leaders are doing instead.

Interviews with 50+ CMOs reveal five operating imperatives for marketing leaders who need to close the gap between strategy and execution.

Get the report

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What the report covers

Based on interviews with 50+ B2B CMOs, including leaders from Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, Sprout Social, and others.

The old B2B marketing playbook gave CMOs a way to measure activity. It also trained the business to judge marketing through activity metrics.

That model has run its course. Buying committees are harder to reach. Brand increasingly shapes shortlists before sales gets involved. AI is changing how buyers research, compare, and decide. And many marketing teams are still organized around channels, handoffs, and metrics built for a different buying process.

The New Rules for B2B Marketing Leadership in 2026, a B2B CMO Project report sponsored by 2X, gives CMOs a sharper way to name the work ahead: earn stronger C-suite trust, report in the language of the board, invest in brand as an economic asset, lead through AI disruption, and build the organization for what comes next.

Most teams will recognize pressure in more than one imperative. The useful move is to find the constraint that, if solved first, would make the others easier.