Elevating the CMO Role: Becoming a Chief Market Orchestrator with Matt Heinz

#46 - The CMO has the shortest tenure in the C-suite. The most scrutiny. And right now, more opportunity than ever — if you can see it clearly enough to seize it.

Matt Heinz has spent 18 years helping B2B companies build more predictable revenue, and he talks to more CMOs on a weekly basis than almost anyone. In this conversation, he lays out exactly how the CMO role is evolving — from chief MQL officer to chief market officer to what he calls the chief market orchestrator — and what that shift actually demands of the leaders trying to grow into it.

From how you tell your story internally, to where AI fits in the marketing org, to the one place in go-to-market where most companies are leaving the most on the table, this is a conversation worth your full attention.

About Matt Heinz:

Matt Heinz is the founder of Heinz Marketing, a B2B marketing consultancy focused on helping companies with complex buying journeys build more predictable pipeline. He's also the host of CMO Coffee Talk, a community of 3,700+ CMOs and heads of marketing. He has spent 18 years in the trenches of B2B go-to-market strategy.

In this episode, we cover:

• The CMO role evolution — from chief MQL officer to chief market officer to chief market orchestrator
• Why the CMO who best understands the market should own more of the business than most org charts allow
• Revenue predictability: how to approach it from the top down and the bottom up
• The "messy middle" — the highest-leverage gap in most B2B go-to-market motions
• How to tell a smarter story to your CFO (stop showing where you're spending; show what you're buying)
• Where to start with AI adoption — and why the broad training session approach almost always fails
• What the future of marketing org design looks like as agentic workflows take over repetitive work
• The most common places CMOs are still stubbing their toes right now

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) Welcome and Episode Context
• (05:03) Chief MQL Officer to Market Orchestrator
• (12:25) Revenue Narrative and Attribution
• (23:21) Future of Marketing Teams and AI
• (31:58) Where CMOs Keep Stubbing Their Toes

Resources:

• Matt Heinz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz/
• Heinz Marketing: https://heinzmarketing.com

If this episode was useful, follow Growth Activated on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a review — it's the fastest way to help other marketing leaders find the show.

Growth Activated is produced by Mandy Hornaday.

Lead Like a CMO - Group Coaching Lab: Join the Waitlist

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going!
Loved this episode? Connect with me for more insights on B2B marketing leadership and strategies to grow your business.

🌐 Visit my website: growthactivated.com
🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn: Mandy Walker
🔗 Get Your Free Marketing Planning Guide Today!

Don’t forget to subscribe to Growth Activated and share this episode with fellow marketing leaders. Let’s activate growth—together!

Transcript

Mandy Hornaday:

Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Hornaday, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high-performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence, and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

[EPISODE INTRO]

Mandy Hornaday:

The shortest tenure in the C-suite. Constant pressure to prove impact. A mandate to do more with less. And as if CMOs didn't have enough to worry about, AI walks in and everyone wants to know why marketing can't just be automated away. The CMO role has never been under more scrutiny — and has never had more opportunity — at the same time.

Mandy Hornaday:

My guest today is Matt Heinz, founder of Heinz Marketing and host of CMO Coffee Talk. He's spent 18 years helping B2B companies build more predictable revenue, and he talks to more CMOs on a weekly basis than just about anyone I know. In this conversation, we get into how the CMO role is evolving, what Matt calls the shift from chief MQL officer to chief market orchestrator, and what that actually demands of the leaders trying to grow into it. From how you tell your story internally, to where AI fits, to the one place in your go-to-market where most companies are leaving the most on the table.

Mandy Hornaday:

If you're a CMO trying to figure out how to lead with more authority, more clarity, and more staying power, this one is worth your full attention. Let's get into it.

[INTERVIEW]

Mandy Hornaday:

Hey, Matt, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm so excited to have you here today.

Matt Heinz:

Oh, I'm really excited. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Mandy Hornaday:

I love that you host CMO Coffee Talk. Give us a preview of your background and what you're really focused on today.

Matt Heinz:

I've had Heinz Marketing for about 18 years. Our whole focus is helping companies with complex buying journeys create more predictable revenue. Increasingly, that's about helping improve go-to-market campaigns as well as improving internal work design — how the work gets done between go-to-market teams interacting with tools and agentic workflows. It's been a fun ride.

Mandy Hornaday:

And you have a few different shows and communities you run. How did all that evolve?

Matt Heinz:

It's all been organic, honestly. When I first started 18 years ago, it was just me, a laptop, and a bus pass. I'm a trained journalist — I studied journalism and political science in college — so I just started a newsletter and started blogging. What I'm doing now is just a manifestation of content in a lot of different formats. I do a show Friday mornings with Bryan Adamson every week. The CMO breakfasts I hosted evolved into the online CMO Coffee Talk community. It's become a fun habit of engaging with people who are in the work, coalescing what they're thinking and doing, and bringing that back to those groups in different formats — sharpening my own saw along the way to help marketing teams and CMOs navigate increasingly complex waters.

Mandy Hornaday:

I think you're a great case study, and someone I pull inspiration from. Starting this podcast about a year ago has been one of the best things I could have done for my career. The amount of information I've learned just by talking to people who are in the same seat is incredible.

Matt Heinz:

I agree. And I love that we can do this in a more accessible way now. But it does not replace getting in front of people. It does not replace the in-person interaction. Podcasts and video are great, but getting out and having those conversations — understanding not just the experience but the context of the experience — is really important. We don't come into these conversations as marketers and CMOs. We come into them as humans playing those roles. And to help people navigate a lot of change right now — AI is part of that, but it's only one part — you can't just write a playbook. Every company needs to navigate the change management and culture change components of putting this in place. That means you have to address the human side of this as well.

Mandy Hornaday:

What a great transition into what I wanted to talk about — how the CMO role is evolving and where it feels like it's going. For years we've been struggling: shortest tenure in the C-suite, constantly proving ourselves, doing more with less. And now AI walks in and people are asking, can't AI just do that? It's the new version of "can't you just do more with less?" Give me your version of what current state feels like for CMOs right now.

Matt Heinz:

If you think about the evolution of the CMO as an acronym — not that long ago, in many organizations, it really meant the chief MQL officer. Someone who's just supposed to generate leads. What kind of leads? Any lead. Anyone who raises their hand.

Matt Heinz:

Then we said we really need to think about the M in CMO. I'll give credit to Latané Conant, who's the former CMO at 6sense, for saying we're getting rid of the "-ing." We need to own the market. And she's right. One of the most important jobs a CMO has is product-market fit. If the CMO understands the market better than anyone, if they understand the customer better than anyone, they should be highly involved in product strategy. Your sales team doesn't need more leads. They need a market that demands and craves what you're selling. A market that understands the problem you're solving and is prioritizing an answer to that. That's conditioning a market to understand and crave — and that's a different motion entirely.

Matt Heinz:

Then you move from chief market officer to what I would call the chief market orchestrator — someone who is now orchestrating efforts inside and outside the organization to be effective. This is where work design becomes critical. AI, if anything, has exposed the fact that we don't have good workflows as marketers for how this complex work gets done. And unless we can document it, organize it in a more effective way, we can't deploy technology to do more of the jobs it's able to do better than humans today.

Mandy Hornaday:

One of my strengths has always been operational excellence — I always prided myself on that, even if brand visionary wasn't always my thing. And it feels like it's my time to shine now, because AI is really just amplifying problems that have always existed in marketing. And it takes a different skill set. Not every person who grew up in marketing was thinking they'd be a master of process.

Matt Heinz:

Right. And if you're a chief market orchestrator, that means you're not just orchestrating what's happening in the market — you're orchestrating what's happening internally. Like an orchestra conductor: you don't have to be the master of every instrument. But you absolutely need to understand how to create repeatable, sustainable progress. We're 12 minutes into this podcast and we haven't talked about attribution yet, which might be a record. But when it comes to attribution, I don't really care about who gets credit. What I want is a more confident view of what's going to happen next. More predictability: if I do these things, I'll get these outcomes. And it's not just understanding what that is — it's building the workflows and processes that get there repeatedly.

Mandy Hornaday:

And I'll add — I've found where I'm getting the most value from tools like Claude is in areas where I've historically had gaps, like product marketing. It lets me pair my strategic mindset with capabilities I didn't have before. So I think it's powerful, and I agree with the direction you're describing. On that note — revenue responsibility, attribution, these are high on CMOs' minds. Walk us through what you're actually hearing.

Matt Heinz:

Relative to attribution, it's really about impact — understanding the impact of the work being done. You can't take a 12-month sales cycle and say the white paper did it, or the trade show did it, or this email sequence did it. You have to have a body-of-work mentality. So you need to break down the process and create repeatable, predictable outcomes — not just overall, but for specific components of the buying journey. That means understanding the buying journey, understanding the buying group, understanding the dynamics of how they operate. They don't move in one direction. They go up and down. The better you understand that, the better you can communicate uniquely to people at each stage, and the better you can deploy automated workflows to support them.

Matt Heinz:

So it comes down to some very fundamental questions that many companies still don't have great answers to: How well do you understand your audience? The subset of the subset of the market you need to be selling to? How they buy and who's involved? If you can unlock that wisdom and embed it in your systems, in how your sales team sells, in the way you build brand and create product-market fit — you're in a great place. The temptation is to just go faster, create more automation. But if you don't have the fundamentals, you end up with what we see in our inboxes every day right now — AI-generated garbage at ten times the volume. Flooding your prospects.

Matt Heinz:

The second thing is orchestrating go-to-market motions across teams. In many larger organizations, you've got an email team over here, a brand team over here, a social team over there — they all have their own strategies, their own campaigns, their own editorial calendars, and that's just confusing to your prospects. Aligning all of that is critical. And then doing that with your sales team and customer service team, so your customer feels a through-line in how they're engaging and hearing from you.

Matt Heinz:

On attribution specifically — it's about how you orchestrate a more revenue-responsible output from marketing. And the most important thing marketing leaders can do is rethink the story they're telling the organization about marketing's impact. If your story is embedded in a spreadsheet that shows MQLs going up and to the right, you're telling the organization that leads are most important. The best marketing leaders take a bottom-up approach: we need to close X type of deals, and it's going to cost us this amount to close those deals. That's a body of work you can now deploy across sales, marketing, brand campaigns, and so on. Don't give your team a spreadsheet showing where you're spending the money. Position it as: you are buying outcomes. Your CFO isn't pushing back on your budget because she doesn't trust you. It's because she sees money being spent and isn't sure what the outcome is. Tell the story of what you're buying for the organization, not where you're spending it. And let the organization decide: if we don't want to spend this much, we can't buy this many outcomes — are we okay with that? The language and storylines you tell as a marketing leader matter.

Mandy Hornaday:

As you're talking about it, even the word "campaign" — we kind of demean it, but a campaign should really be about how you're penetrating a segment of your market and what you're doing to deepen into it. It doesn't have to just be about MQLs. It could be brand lift, visibility, trust-building.

Matt Heinz:

Not only with storytelling, but I love that you brought up what a campaign actually is. Because in many organizations it's just next Tuesday's email. That's a tactic, that's an execution, that's important — but it's not a campaign. Here's an example. A friend of mine is CMO at Smartsheet, and they're moving upmarket into larger enterprise deals internationally. Good brand awareness in the US, but internationally, they're not getting into RFPs — not enough awareness. The objective: be finalists in more of these opportunities. Long story short, they made a significant investment in Formula One and the McLaren racing team, and they did some remarkable things that generated real PR and goodwill. It was expensive. And the CMO said: we are not going to evaluate this based on MQLs from a landing page. This is a broader, long-term campaign to ensure we're relevant and growing our business internationally. That is a strategic narrative the CEO, CFO, and board can all get behind. And it has been a highly successful program — because they took a big swing, had the budget to sustain it, and told the story upfront of what it was going to take.

Mandy Hornaday:

I want to go back to revenue predictability. We've touched on the fundamentals you need to have in place. For CMOs who don't have the benefit of working with you directly — what's the step-by-step process you'd recommend for someone trying to get a handle on this?

Matt Heinz:

You have to do it from both the top and the bottom. Unless you're brand new in business, you have data that can give you ideas of what's working at a meta and micro level. Even my very first client 18 years ago — we didn't have AI, we didn't have attribution tools, but we used Salesforce to reverse engineer data that told us: if this happens, they're three times more likely to get this outcome. Now you've got AI tools where you can throw a spreadsheet at them and say, where are the trends? It's not perfect, but it's a starting point.

Matt Heinz:

We had a client once selling a CRM system into small business — a lighter Salesforce alternative. All different small businesses were buying it. Where should they focus? We looked at market research and sub-market sizing, but we also looked at their own data. And we found that home services businesses — roofers, contractors, painters — loved this tool. They were more likely to buy, more satisfied, and had six times the lifetime value of the average customer. So we said: there's enough volume here, this isn't fluky. Let's go focus on that market. And that gave us the confidence to increase how much we'd spend to acquire those customers, knowing the lifetime value would bear out.

Matt Heinz:

The other thing: so many companies go after way too big a market. What's the subset of the subset of the market where companies have the criteria most likely to buy from you? Here's an example from a large software company up here in the Pacific Northwest — I'll leave the name out, but they were selling Office 365 subscriptions and Surface laptops into school districts. Their target market was: school districts. So they were going from the top — biggest districts by student count. And we said: okay, but what other criteria would make certain school districts more interesting? So we started looking at things like: do they make technology decisions at the district level or the school level? In LA Unified, one person makes that decision for the whole district. New York Board of Education — 1,400 schools can all do their own thing. You're never going to do an enterprise deal there. Is there a curriculum technologist on staff? Are Chromebook subsidies coming up for renewal?

Matt Heinz:

We built out criteria for what would make an ideal target. And the answer wasn't LA or New York — it was Wichita. Wichita hit every single criterion. And we were able to show that school districts like Wichita closed faster and at a higher rate. Were they the biggest deals? No. But we could win them at a higher rate. Getting narrow and specific on your target market isn't just about informing your marketing campaigns — it informs who sales sells to, your product strategy, your product roadmap. This is the opportunity for a chief market officer to lead the organization strategically.

Mandy Hornaday:

As you talk about the chief market orchestrator role, it almost makes me question: why are we subordinating marketing under a CRO? What you're describing makes it seem like a chief market officer should be overseeing these functions.

Matt Heinz:

I've debated this at great length. It really exposes the philosophy and culture of a company when you see which direction they're taking that. If we blew up traditional B2B org structures and rebuilt them, would we separate sales and marketing? I'm not sure we would. Think about brand management in CPG — if you're the brand manager of Ritz Crackers, you're not just the look-and-feel person. You own Ritz Crackers. The P&L, the revenue, the market share — all on you. Which is basically saying: the person who best understands the product and the market is leading the business. That should be the CMO's job.

Matt Heinz:

In some organizations, the focus is narrow — just bring in customers, hit the number, prioritize exit. Get to the next round of funding or get acquired. If that's your mindset, then maybe you don't really need a CMO. You need a director of demand gen. But if you care about authentically building a sustainable business — where your brand is associated with the problem you solve, the way Kleenex is synonymous with tissue paper — then you need to be thinking about product-market fit. And in that framing, sales is a channel of marketing. That's heresy in a lot of organizations. But if we can put egos aside and put aside fears about career impact, we could have some really interesting conversations about how to better rally around the market and the customer.

Mandy Hornaday:

I'd love to get your perspective on what you think the future of marketing orgs will look like. It's been living rent-free in my brain — especially as I work with larger organizations, say $250M to $1B. Marketing could build a team that's incredibly forward-thinking and fully leveraging AI, but is the business ready to absorb that type of work? If sales is used to a lot of handholding, or individual follow-up, how do you balance pushing your own team forward while meeting the organization where it's at?

Matt Heinz:

That is the question. Because we are still humans with lizard brains and with emotions and egos going through all this. You can build the best possible playbook and workflow for your team, but if egos get in the way of implementing it, or if people are scared and have a thousand ways of pushing back on it — when people push back on change in an organization, it's not because they don't want change. It's because they're worried about paying their mortgage. It gets to a very fundamental Maslow level very quickly when people feel their livelihood is threatened.

Matt Heinz:

AI does that. Change does that. When you go from a lead-based marketing focus to an account-based marketing focus and you tell your digital marketing manager, "I no longer care about the most leads for the lowest cost, I care about the best leads and I'm happy to spend more" — the math, the strategies, everything changed. Even if she was brilliant at the previous job, she's now scared about whether she can do the new one. You have to create an environment where it's safe and okay to break some glass. Where it's safe and okay to take the time to learn something new. Even if you're going a thousand miles an hour, you have to build that space. Not all companies have that culture — but you as a marketer can create it for your team. And marketing has a unique opportunity to help with change management in the broader organization, because we have relationships across functions that most teams don't.

Mandy Hornaday:

What are the things CMOs should avoid when it comes to AI adoption?

Matt Heinz:

One of the worst things you can do is hire an AI trainer to teach people all the features of Claude and then whiteboard a thousand ways you could apply it. You're going to teach people how to use a tool without context or prioritization, and then overwhelm them. These people have a day job. This is all net new. And which tool you train on is irrelevant unless you know the job to be done.

[Editor's note: "Claude" appears as "Clot" in the auto-transcript — corrected here; verify against audio.]

Matt Heinz:

Find one place in your organization where you know and believe AI can have a massive impact — not randomly, but as infrastructure that flows through the business every day. Go fix that part first. If you pick the right place and it has the highest leverage opportunity, your whole org is going to see the impact. It's going to be proof of concept that shows what AI can do and gives the org the energy to do it again. The next one will happen faster. The third and fourth faster still. You create a snowball effect. AI goes from scary to empowering. From a challenge to my career to an accelerator of my career. That's when perspectives start changing and real cultural sea change begins.

Mandy Hornaday:

Is there a universal use case — something that applies to a lot of B2B marketing teams — that you've seen real success with as a starting point?

Matt Heinz:

The most important place for most organizations is what we call the messy middle. You may have a team that's good at generating demand, and a sales team that's good at managing opportunities — but the messy middle is where things fall apart. Someone raises their hand: Are they at the right company? What's their role? How should I respond to someone in that job versus someone else? Who should follow up? What should they see next? What's the context of who they're engaging with at the company? Who else have we talked to there? Is that company already a customer, a lead, a prospect, a competitor? What happens next? In most companies, that's just random. Here's a lead, sales — you figure it out. Go spend an hour in the CRM trying to answer all those questions, and then probably send the wrong message anyway. "Thanks for downloading that white paper. Let's get you into a demo." Wrong answer.

Matt Heinz:

If you understand how your buyers operate — that it's going to take many touch points to get them to challenge the status quo, commit to change, and build consensus in the buying group — those are moments that have to happen before you ever get a sale. We can now orchestrate that at an atomic level. I don't need people making those decisions manually. I can have workflows and agentic engagement with data to help make those decisions and set up people to do their best work. For a sales rep, the core job hasn't changed: who do I call next, and what should I talk to them about? The messy middle — between demand identification and opportunity creation — is ripe for AI. And the improvements in efficiency, conversion, and deal velocity once things are in motion are massive.

Mandy Hornaday:

What are CMOs doing out there that's painful to watch? Where are we still stubbing our toes?

Matt Heinz:

Dashboards are one. We continue to put the wrong data on them. Whether you like it or not, your dashboard tells a story. If you're selling into 8 to 12-month sales cycles and you're still showing people your social impressions or LinkedIn page traffic — I'm not saying those aren't building blocks, but those are not board-level metrics. Because the board will think that's what you're prioritizing. The story you're telling is embedded in your slides and your dashboard, whether you intend it or not.

Matt Heinz:

The other thing: how you position marketing's role in the organization. Even if you've been in the job a couple of years, it starts with your narrative. Starts with your conversation with your head of sales. A small thing you can start doing tomorrow — if you don't have alignment with your head of sales, work to get it. And the manifestation of that alignment is the next time you present at a board meeting, an investor meeting, or a leadership meeting, you do it together. This doesn't mean you're subordinate to sales. It shows alignment with the part of the organization seen as the revenue driver. When you come in coordinated and aligned, people are more likely to line up with what you say you're going to do.

Mandy Hornaday:

I was just listening to a talk by Dave Kellogg last week, and he was talking about the idea of going out and "kissing rings" — getting out and convincing people to see the bigger vision. Made me laugh.

Matt Heinz:

That's right.

Mandy Hornaday:

On the flip side — for CMOs who want to prepare for this broader chief market orchestrator role, where would you encourage them to start? Where are you actively coaching CMOs right now?

Matt Heinz:

Community is so important here. Having a place where you can go and learn from peers. I'm really proud of what we've built with CMO Coffee Talk — which came out of doing in-person CMO breakfasts before the pandemic. The format was simple: get 25 or 30 CMOs in a room, have a lightly moderated conversation, and give them access to each other to share and learn what they're working on. Now take that and expand it to 3,700 CMOs and heads of marketing. Our Friday morning sessions are not recorded. It's a safe place to be vulnerable and share. You can bring cultural challenges and get perspective from people who are struggling with the same things — and from people who are further along in the path and can share what's working. Having that kind of community matters.

Mandy Hornaday:

This has been such a great conversation, Matt. Really opened up my eyes on how I can continue to improve my own role. Thank you so much. I assume people can find you on LinkedIn — anywhere else you'd encourage them to connect?

Matt Heinz:

LinkedIn is a great place to see what I'm doing. I'm also starting to do more on Substack. And if anyone wants to reach out directly, matt@heinzmarketing.com — I'd love to hear from you.

Mandy Hornaday:

Awesome. Thanks so much, Matt.

Matt Heinz:

Thank you.

[OUTRO]

Mandy Hornaday:

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I'd love for you to pass it along to a friend or colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.