Competitive strategy in sales is rarely just about the companies you know you’re competing against. The deals you lose, the stalls you can’t explain, and the prospects who go quiet often trace back to three distinct competitive forces: external competitors, internal inertia, and phantom competition. Understanding all three, and building your sales process around them,…
CMO salaries at the top end of the market range from around $300,000 to well over $1 million in total compensation, depending on industry, company size, and how much of the package sits in equity and bonuses. Base salary alone rarely tells the full story. But the more interesting question is not what CMOs earn….
The Anaplan acquisition by Thoma Bravo in 2022 for approximately $10.7 billion was one of the largest private equity plays in enterprise software that year. What it signals for go-to-market planning is less about the deal mechanics and more about where serious money thinks connected planning is heading, and what that means for how marketing…
Switching from CMO to CGO means taking on a broader commercial mandate, typically owning revenue growth across marketing, sales, product, and sometimes customer success. For some senior marketers, it is a genuine career evolution. For others, it is a rebranding exercise that adds accountability without adding authority. Whether the switch makes sense depends almost entirely…
A customer success benchmark tells you where your retention, expansion, and satisfaction metrics stand relative to industry norms. The problem is that most companies use benchmarks to feel good about mediocre performance rather than to diagnose what is actually broken in the customer relationship. If your net revenue retention sits at 105% and the benchmark…
The Solo Stove CMO story is one of the more instructive case studies in recent marketing history, not because it involves a celebrity campaign gone wrong, but because of what the fallout revealed about how brand decisions get made and who carries the consequences. When Solo Stove fired its CMO in late 2023 after a…
A town hall with your CMO is one of the few moments in the corporate calendar where the power dynamic shifts slightly. You have the floor, or at least access to it. Most people waste it by asking nothing, or by asking something so safe it barely registers. The questions below are designed to get…
SaaS growth rate measures how quickly a software-as-a-service business is expanding its recurring revenue over a defined period, typically expressed as a percentage change in ARR or MRR month-over-month or year-over-year. It is the single metric most investors, boards, and operators use to judge whether a SaaS business is healthy, stalling, or dying. Get it…
A non-agency CMO sits inside a single business, owns the full marketing function, and is accountable for commercial outcomes rather than client deliverables. The role looks similar to an agency leadership position from the outside, but the operating reality is different in almost every way that matters. If you have spent your career in agencies…
The IBM CMO Study is one of the most widely cited pieces of research in marketing leadership. It surveys thousands of chief marketing officers across industries and geographies, and it consistently surfaces the same themes: rising complexity, pressure to prove ROI, and a widening gap between what CMOs are expected to deliver and what they…
Practical marketing intelligence
for people who think.
© 2026 The Marketing Juice