Ep. 153 - The End of the Gumball Machine: Why B2B Marketing Needs a New Playbook

Guest: Jon Miller, Co-Founder & CEO of a Stealth AI Startup

Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and former CMO of Demandbase, argues that B2B marketing’s traditional playbook—built on predictable demand generation, MQL scoring, and SDR-driven outbound—is broken. 

The “gumball machine” approach, where marketers expect predictable revenue by simply feeding in budget and campaigns, no longer works. Buyers have evolved, becoming more resistant to outbound tactics and opting for anonymous research. 

To succeed, revenue leaders must shift from short-term lead generation to long-term brand building, customer experience, and relationships.

Key Takeaways:

🔹 The Death of the MQL Machine: Buyers have learned to avoid traditional lead capture tactics, making it essential to rethink how marketing contributes to revenue​.

🔹 Brand Awareness > Lead Generation: The most successful companies focus on being top-of-mind when buyers do enter a purchasing cycle, rather than scrambling to capture leads in the moment​.

🔹 AI Will Kill the Old Content Playbook: The rise of AI-driven search and inbox filters means generic, mass-produced content won’t cut it. Instead, companies need to invest in original research, experiences, and trusted relationships​.

🔹 New Metrics for Marketing Success: Instead of obsessing over short-term pipeline metrics, CMOs should measure brand perception within key accounts, engagement quality, and community strength​.

This episode is a must-listen for SaaS revenue leaders struggling to adapt their go-to-market strategy in a world where buyers don’t want to be sold to.

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Transcript

 Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders of SaaS companies to accelerate growth and enhance profitability.

Jason Myers: Our guest today is Jon Miller. He's been the CMO of Demandbase, the CEO and founder of Engagio, which merged with Demandbase in June of 2020. And prior to that, he co-founded Marketo and he's played a key role in developing the marketing playbook, which became, so prevalent today, like around the predictable revenue model.

But today as the founder of a stealth AI startup in the B2B marketing tech space, he's sounding the alarm that a new playbook is needed, which is why I wanted him on the podcast today. So I know a lot of companies are struggling with this. So Jon, welcome to the podcast. 

Jon Miller: Thank you. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Jason Myers: Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about the old playbook as we establish where that's been and what the problem is with it today. But you help create that at Marketo and you call it a gumball machine. So budgeted leads out, which was great when it worked. But what are the most damaging consequences of this mindset today?

And why did it become so pervasive in the B2B world? 

Jon Miller: Well, I think we should start by answering what do I mean by the quote unquote traditional B2B playbook, and by that, you know what I mean is sort of what we've been doing for the last 15 or so years enabled by technologies like Marketo and HubSpot.

So it starts with sort of the classic content marketing ebooks and webinars and whatnot, and you try to capture leads, you then nurture those leads until you think they hit some magical score that lets you call them an MQL, marketing qualified lead, and then you, you pass it over to an SDR team to qualify, who then passes it on to a sales team. That might be complimented by an outbound SDR team that's sort of identifying target accounts and trying to prospect into them.

So, roughly speaking, that's what I mean by the playbook. And it's highly measurable. We can run campaigns and we can see how many leads we generated and people really liked that measurability. I even went around telling people to build these waterfall models that would say, okay, if you need this much revenue, that means you need this much pipeline, which means you need this many opportunities, which means you're going to need this many leads, which means you need this much marketing, and trying to do that math.

And it was that math that I think led to this kind of gumball machine mentality of, Oh, I can just, run campaigns and I'll get leads. And as you said, it's damaging, that mindset's damaging, I think it's, it's damaging to marketing because it treats marketing as like a more tactical machine that just needs to be optimized and not the kind of complex process of influencing feelings and thoughts and emotions that it really is.

And I think it's damaging to our customer relationships, where we frankly just do too many of the wrong things to, to try to achieve those goals. So yeah, I think in, in many ways. We built a revenue machine, but lost marketing soul along the way. We, made marketing more mechanical I think as a result, we sort of lost some of the meaning.

 I think that's damaging. 

Jason Myers: Yeah. I remember around 2014, I was working in sales and doing some SDR type work and it was awesome. Like we thought we were done with outbound, like we would never have to do that again. now today it seems like there's. A lot more outbound because this whole thing has fallen apart.

Why do you think that it's reached its limits and, what fundamental changes do you believe are necessary today? 

Jon Miller: Yeah, well, I mean, I would put that outbound into part of the problem actually, of the old playbook, and a big part of the problem is just that those traditional tactics just aren't working as well as they used to buyers have sort of grown immune and indifferent.

 They don't want, oh, yeah, another e book, they don't want, yeah, another, email, they've learned that if they download that e book, they're going to start getting a bunch of unwanted emails and phone calls. So they've learned to kind of become anonymous and do their research off of the website.

And it just sort of starts to break down, a lot of the principles of the mechanics of what the traditional playbook is built on. What's going on is, I call a tragedy of the commons because, the tragedy of the commons is an economics term. If you let everybody graze their cows, without any controls, you're going to eat the whole field and then nobody's cows can eat.

That's exactly what marketers do and SDRs do with any new tactic. . We learned, hey, content marketing works, so everybody does content marketing until it doesn't work. Hey, outbound emails work. Everybody does outbound emails, until that no longer works, and so on.

The other reason that's going on, and I know we'll talk about that more in a minute, is, is just a little more subtle. And that's the fact that the traditional playbook is so measurable caused us, I think, to over rotate into tactics that are measurable and under invest in harder to measure things that are ultimately build brand and are, investments that have payback over a longer period of time.

And so that sort of focus on short term metrics actually over time, I think, started to cause us to undermine our long term success, right? So fundamentally, the old playbook doesn't work because one tragedy of the commons. We just abused it till we lost it. And then two, we underinvested in brand.

Jason Myers: So there's a lot there to unpack. One instance is that it's just really not buyer centric anymore. I guess you could have made the, point a couple of years ago that it was cool, you know, buyers would read something and then they would get a call. And some of them would say, wow, that's really, that's really cool.

I was just reading your article like it was magic. So I would argue that back in the day when there wasn't a lot of content, it was a little more buyer centric, but today we're just not having it. Whenever I get cold calls or, stuff in my email, I'm just deleting it.

I'm trying to get off the phone. I can't remember anything that I've ever bought from a cold call, even if it's a warm call, so to speak, the call to reach out based on content,

Jon Miller: I can't believe you still answer phone numbers you don't recognize. I don't.

Jason Myers: Well, look, I'm in sales. I pick up the phone. 

Jon Miller: All right. 

Jason Myers: I'm still hoping that somebody is going to call me. That's changed over the years. 

Jon Miller: Yeah, fair enough. 

Jason Myers: Overall, it's not what the buyer wants, right? So, what do we do?

Because it's not necessarily about content specifically, like content is still, I think an answer. It just has to be a lot more strategic or would you agree? 

Jon Miller: Yeah, well, content can mean a lot of things. But I think that. 

Jason Myers: Well, I should say, I should say it's, it's about putting out helpful content, but not treating it like I've got to generate a lead out of everything that I generate, maybe. 

Jon Miller: That part is absolutely true. Don't treat every form fill as buying intent and frankly, don't feel like you need to gate your content. You don't put the form fills in there, the purpose of the content, is to build a long term brand and emotional connection. Which makes it harder to measure, like, don't get me wrong. Making this transition isn't easy for the marketer, right? But, hopefully over time we can help them understand that it's important. 

Jason Myers: Well, and I think it's difficult for the marketer because they're still getting pressure from, the leadership and other stakeholders to measure everything appropriately.

I mean, I still hear CEOs say, we're not doing it if I can't measure it which is 

kind of 

wrong answer in my opinion. 

Jon Miller: We need to change how people think about measurement, right? I'm not saying marketing shouldn't be measurable, right? I mean, no, nobody will trust us with millions of dollars of discretionary budget.

If we're just like, I'm going to spend it willy nilly with no accountability. But the issue is really one of timeframes. where we need to help the CFO and the CEO and the board understand that marketing isn't a gumball machine. So I can't effectively measure it as I ran a campaign and here are all my MQLs. Instead I need metrics that really show that I'm having an impact in the longterm, that I'm moving needles that actually matter, if you will, so we can talk about what some of those are, but I think that's, that's the difference is we need metrics that really reflect the long term impact. 

Jason Myers: So what's your advice then for marketers that are trying to help leadership change that mindset? Like, how should they approach that conversation?

Jon Miller: I wish I had a magic answer here, to be honest, because as I said a minute ago, this is hard. 

Jason Myers: It is the big problem. 

Jon Miller: There are a lot of entrenched points of view about marketing. And I take some responsibility for that because I was one of the ones going around telling people, this is how you should measure marketing.

It's part of the reason I'm also trying to be such a loud voice now for the world being different. 

Jason Myers: Well, I think like if you, if you look at like what Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, he always says like, you've got to market, today. Like what's appropriate today. So like, even though the model that you created in the past isn't useful anymore, it was back then. And that was absolutely the best way to do it. 

Jon Miller: Exactly, the world's different today and we have to change hearts and minds, and I, and I think that's exactly the clue of what we need to do. I think it, it needs to start with the CMO partnering with the CEO and the CRO and others and beginning with a Socratic conversation, like how has buying changed in the last 10 years?

And CEOs and CFOs and CROs are buyers themselves of stuff. Let's talk about the last time you bought something, right? Where did that deal come from? What was your shortlist? Where did you find out about those companies? What did you think about those companies?

And if you go through this whole conversation about how buying has changed. That's step one. It's like, okay, given all that's true, then what do we think should be the role of marketing? And ideally you socratically have that conversation that leads them towards, maybe it's not about generating leads.

Maybe it's about moving the needle on certain things that will have a longer term impact on growth. This is an essential conversation. I think that we will see CMOs who have the interpersonal skills to have those kinds of conversations be more successful. In the last 10 years, you could argue the most quantitative, analytic oriented CMOs were the most successful. But now it's perhaps the ones that can really manage these conversations.

I'll say one other thing on this topic before we move on, there are some CMOs out there. Who are renaming their title to be chief market officer as opposed to chief marketing officer. And, I think that reflects the fact that otherwise, marketing is the only CXO function that is named after the process, not the outcome, right?

We don't have chief selling officers and chief finance, financing officers, and so, the chief market officer is, I think, trying to basically say, Hey, the role of marketing, isn't to generate leads. The role of marketing is to understand and drive the guide, the market.

And as the CMO, the chief market officer, I'm the leader of that. Personally, I'm a little agnostic on the actual title change. I think it's great if somebody wants to and can call themselves that, but I don't think it's prerequisite. I think what's the prerequisite is to have this conversation about the changing role of marketing.

Jason Myers: So that's really interesting and of course the first time I heard that was from 

Latane Conant 

from 6Sense with her book. 

Jon Miller: And she picked it up from Christine Heckart who I think is the true original originator of the idea. 

Jason Myers: And it is kind of interesting because what we're really asking of

both marketing leaders and I would say like CROs too, is to be more change agents, like, they've got to have to be successful in those roles. I think they have to have some organizational development background to really understand how to facilitate the mindset shift that needs to happen.

Jon Miller: I think that's, that's very consistent with what I'm saying. Yes.

Jason Myers: I want to touch on something you said earlier, too, that I think part of the problem is, is that or when you talk about the chief market officer, so to speak, the reason that we're having to redefine that is because this model. almost put marketing solely into, in some cases, it's totally into service of sales, right?

Which is why it became a lead gen metric, which is where we've gotten stuck. Where I've always said is that companies like a lot of B2B software companies have been traditionally sales led organizations. So you have a, a CEO or a sales leader, that's really strong.

And then, you remember the old sales and marketing VP where they were really the head of sales and marketing would report to them. And back then we're talking like late 90s or so that marketing was really more about branding and awareness because salespeople needed the air cover to be able to get doors opened, or they wanted, some brand recognition when they pick up the phone to make the calls.

And the problem is today, it just doesn't work like that. And we, we had gotten into this rhythm where marketing then became that servicer of lead generation, serving it up to sales, right? And, and at the same time, the reason it worked really well, and it was measurable, like you said, and, and that's the problem and so today now it is we've almost forgotten about all the other stuff that marketing should be doing and we're stuck on the hamster wheel for creating MQLs 

Jon Miller: I think that's exactly right, that's the exact problem that gumball machine mentality, is that it's too narrow a view of what the function should be and ultimately when you follow it too much, it makes marketing seem mechanical and not meaningful. 

Jason Myers: So let's talk about how content itself needs to change. And by content, I'm referring to everything from website messaging to blogs and white papers, thought leadership, or, or even advertisements and things like that. With AI coming in especially like on Google with it, having more AI snippets summarizing, replacing a lot of the content that we create, what are the most immediate risks for marketers that continue to just pump out content like they were in 2015.

Jon Miller: Yeah. I mean, we can't have a podcast in 2025 and not talk about AI, right? But I think exactly as you said, most of the time for last year when people have talked about AI in marketing, what they've talked about is, using AI to generate and personalize content. So, let me write more blog posts, write more emails that are, quote, unquote, better personalized than before.

And I think the whole problem with all that is that it, it's just turns up the noise. When the whole thesis here is we've created too much noise. What do buyers do in the response to too much noise? They find ways to avoid it. And AI is going to be the ultimate way of avoiding the noise. You, you mentioned Google snippets, right?

So like Google today already has a promotions tab, but that's a limited version of AI that's deciding to take some emails and not put them in my priority inbox. We're not that far away when it's going to do so much more and basically just say, Hey, here are the five emails you need to pay attention to.

And I've already drafted the responses for you. There's actually a tool called fyxer.ai FYXER that's already doing that. For your inbox, if you wanted to, and then on search, we're saying the same thing you alluded to this, right? Now when you search for something. You get the AI results at the top, you don't even have to click through the website anymore.

So we're entering a world where people aren't going to go to our website, they aren't going to read our emails, they're probably not going to be reading our ebooks, and that kind of thing. So, so what do we do? Because we still need to build a brand, we still need to stand out. And I think what's going to happen is we need a little bit of a focus on what are the things that AI cannot summarize.

And that's, that's a really important lever point, and so I think , there's probably a lot there, but there's three I like to point to. The first thing are experiences, like a photo of my Hawaiian vacation is not the same as me being actually in Hawaii. You can't summarize experience.

You can't summarize the feeling of being at a conference or an event with other peers and executives and having interesting, meaningful conversations. So as marketers, we need to think about how can we craft experiences for our target audiences human experiences. Today I can't summarize. Related to that, the second one is authentic relationships.

Whether it's you and me talking on a podcast or, actual true human interactions. communities, partnerships, these things, where people actually know people, that's going to cut through the noise. We're already seeing this in the media today, where in some cases, where our news comes from matters more than what the news is.

Same thing, where we get our information will come, from our trusted sources. will matter more. And we're seeing that with people subscribing to sub stacks and medium newsletters, where like, I trust this person to create the information for me, your podcast audience, same thing, they trust you to curate a set of information for them, which leads into the third thing is truly original or creative content that AI can't remix.

I think that falls into three subcatagories. The first is truly creative stuff, like just something totally interesting and unique. Second is true thought leadership, which is what I try to do. Like something that actually brings the conversation forward and there's new ideas.

And then third, and perhaps the most replicable and exciting, I think is original research. Most companies are sitting on a treasure trove of data that, that they could mine to create unique proprietary insights that the AI doesn't know about. Two companies that do this really well today are Gong Labs, where they report on insights about what happens, like what works in sales calls.

Like, do you know when it's good to swear and not to swear on a sales call? Gong Labs can tell you. And then Carta. Publishes fantastic information for entrepreneurs, founders, and investors about all sorts of things, startups based on their data. So these are all examples of, I think, content needs to move in this age of AI. And I'll finish by saying, man, all that probably seems hard. Seems like a lot of work to do some of these things, but that's exactly where AI can take a role, right? I've been in the marketing automation industry my whole career, but the irony of marketing automation is that you had to hire humans to run the marketing automation, right?

Whereas I think the promise of AI is it can we actually start to truly automate. The automation and therefore free us to do these other things that stand out or matter, put another way if the AI can do the ING in marketing, then maybe we can actually as humans focus on the market. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, that's really interesting.

As you were talking earlier, I was thinking there's some real irony here too around AI because we're using AI to avoid all the content and then at the same time using AI to create more content. 

Jon Miller: Yeah, it's that's sort of just some joke going around here. My AI will talk to your AI, or like, my AI will, will summarize the email that your AI drafted.

Jason Myers: So what would the new metrics for success look like then in, in that model? 

Jon Miller: Well, we've talked a little bit about, I think the importance of brand, and I don't think we can really get to the metrics before we, we spend just a minute longer there. Because ultimately we're saying marketing needs to be measurable and it needs to be measurable and it's long term impact on, on revenue.

And I think where that comes in is, in many ways is on brand. My former competitor, 6Sense publishes some really great research data. One of the things that they found in their most recent buyer report is that 80 percent of the time when a buyer starts a sales process. They've already identified their preferred vendor.

Like literally before they start the sales process, they know who they think they want to buy. And another 80 percent of that time, that's who they actually pick. Put another way. 

Jason Myers: Consistent with the trust radius buyer seller disconnect report as well, right? Like they're saying, numbers in that, doing all the research and everything before they even reach out to sales to begin with.

So that would be similar. Yeah. 

Jon Miller: So what it basically says is by the time the buyer decides, Oh, I am going to go buy something. If you are not top of mind and on the shortlist already, you basically do not have a chance, and I think that's really profound because it means all that time and money we spend trying to quote, unquote, capture leads.

Is frankly too late. There's also a rule of thumb out there that says only about 5 percent of our market is in market at any point in time.

Jason Myers: So it's actually smaller than that, right? 

Jon Miller: It's just a rule of thumb, right? It depends on your industry, but the point is most of your buyers aren't target aren't looking to buy right now.

And if you spend all your time and money trying to generate leads. You're going after a very, very small fraction of the universe, instead, how do you focus your time and energy on moving the needle for the 95 percent so that way when they do enter a buying cycle, you will be top of mind and have a shot at winning.

 And that's brand. And by brand, I'm not talking about your logo or your colors, right? What I'm talking about is, what are the thoughts and feelings that your target buyers have about you when you're not in the room, right? Do they even know who you are? And do they think of you in the way that you would want them to think about you?

So with that little diatribe about brands now done, I think we have our first really strong point of view around what measurements and metrics we should be bringing to the table, which is, I think that marketers have dramatically underinvested in brand awareness and reputation, sentiment, longitudinal studies.

I was talking to the CMO of Grammarly. Some of you know Grammarly, it's the tool that your kids use to like, check their grammar, when they're writing stuff, right? But they think of themselves, rightly so, as an enterprise solution, right? So, as a CMO, she has one metric she really cares about, right?

They've identified a set of accounts that they think are ideal accounts for them, and she wants to know what percentage of those accounts think of Grammarly the way she wants them to think of Grammarly. That's the only metric she cares about. And she has talked to her CEO and her board and gotten them to all agree that that's the most important thing.

Because if these people think about Grammarly the way they want them to, they will therefore be on the shortlist when time comes to go buying. So I ask, how do you measure that? She's like, well, you do studies. I'm like, well, aren't studies expensive? And she says, it costs less than sponsoring one trade show, so rather than sort of, 

Jason Myers: Think about that, right? 

Jon Miller: Yes, it costs money, but we're wasting so much money. Throwing it into the gumball machine, I, I think that this is, a really important thing to do. There are some other metrics that I think also matter, I think that we spend too much time in marketing, measuring quantity and we should have a little bit more of a focus on quality.

Are the accounts that we care about actually engaging with us? I think trying to attribute deals to marketing versus sales is one of the worst possible things we can do. Because that's not 

Jason Myers: Because that's siloed thinking, right? Like it's, it's all about creating unaligned incentives.

So that that's where we got into the problem that we have in the first place. 

Jon Miller: A hundred percent. Imagine, depending on what side of the pond you live on, a football or a soccer team, right? Where you were trying to assign credit to who scored the goal between the forward team and the, and the defense, right? So yes, somebody kicked that goal in, right? But they don't have an individual scoreboard. There's one scoreboard for the team, and if you didn't have that, people wouldn't pass the ball. You wouldn't work like an effective team. And I think the last couple of metrics I'll throw out there too many marketing organizations today focus just on new business.

And yet such a huge part of what we do should be about influencing retention customer health and expansion. So I think marketing should be responsible for a set of metrics around that. And then community strengths. As I said, community is such an important part of how we connect with people in the age of AI, so how do you sort of, measure, are you building a community and how engaged is that community?

None of those metrics will have quite the same direct tie. You won't be able to say this lead turned to this deal turned into that much revenue. But I think that's back to the conversation we need to have about the changing role of buying. 

Jason Myers: Last question, like as you've developed this new playbook, what resources like books or frameworks or thought leaders have really shaped your thinking the most?

Jon Miller: Excellent question. been thinking that If you go back to Binet and Field. They wrote some of the classic books on branding and, and how brand investments today pay back over time, how branding investments demand creation investments actually cause lift in demand capture investments.

I think they're worth reading. They've done some good research in conjunction with LinkedIn on the specific impacts of B2B, including recommending that B2B companies should be spending 46 percent of their budget on brand, and 56 percent on demand. That's a very specific number, but it it's much different than where people are in general.

 On the AI side. I like Christopher Penn and what, and what he's doing over at trust insights, he's one of my go to sources that I always look to for what's happening with AI and how is it changing the world of marketing today? So there's many, many more, but I think those are the two that I'd give a shout out to.

Jason Myers: Great. I think that's a good place to land the episode. So if anybody wants to get ahold of you what's the best place to do that or best way? 

Jon Miller: I'm super active on LinkedIn. I post a couple times a week. So obviously follow me there for more ideas of what I'm talking about and as well as from some sneak peeks and hints about what I'm building.

And yeah, if you want to actually contact me, you can message me there as well. 

Jason Myers: Fantastic. And if you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer, take us up on a free offer to do a marketing and messaging review. We're going to look at your website, messaging, content, and advertising, and give you some ideas on how you can maximize those SQL conversions if you're still measuring those, right? Just reach out to me at jm@austinlawrence.com. And please, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. Jon, thanks for joining us today. We're super excited about what's in store next for marketers.

Jon Miller: Awesome. Take care.