A month into a new job, I submitted a campaign plan to my boss and the CMO. The feedback surprised me — not because it was harsh, but because it revealed something I'd been sitting with for years without fully naming it. My CMO and VP both came up through product marketing. Their instinct was to spend time on market research and audience insights first. Mine was to get to channels, execution, and leads as fast as possible. Neither of us was wrong. We just saw the funnel from different ends.
I've spent 13 years in US B2B marketing — starting as a data analyst at a media agency in New York right out of college, and eventually becoming a marketing director at an international adtech company. Along the way I've worked across agencies, publishers, SaaS companies, and adtech platforms. Here's what I've actually learned.
The first thing I noticed about how CMOs are built now versus ten years ago: the product marketing background has taken over. A decade ago, most CMOs came up through brand or corporate marketing. Now the majority are former PMMs. That's shaped what gets valued at the top — competitive positioning, audience storytelling, go-to-market architecture. If you're a growth marketer or demand gen person (like I was), you can feel out of place in rooms where PMMs run everything. The good news is that the two perspectives are genuinely complementary. The trick is learning to speak both languages.
When I made the jump to director, the biggest shift wasn't my title — it was accountability. At the manager level, you can still point to a campaign that performed and call it a win. At director, you're responsible for the entire pipeline. That means understanding where leads are coming from, whether they're being followed up on, and why conversions are breaking down — whether that's a targeting problem, a messaging problem, or a sales process problem.
My first move at every new company is to learn the tech stack inside and out. In B2B, that means getting comfortable in Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot — whichever CRM and marketing automation platform the team uses. I can't manage a pipeline I can't see, and I can't see a pipeline if I'm dependent on someone else to pull the data for me. Being able to build your own reports isn't just a nice skill. It's how you earn authority in budget conversations.
ABM — account-based marketing — is central to how I think about B2B strategy. The idea is simple: instead of casting a wide net and hoping the right people show up, you start with a list. Sales tells you which companies they want to close. Marketing builds campaigns specifically aimed at decision-makers inside those companies. The whole motion depends on alignment — the target account list needs to live in Salesforce, the paid media needs to be actually reaching the right people, and the SDR team needs to follow up on leads within a reasonable window. When the handoff breaks down, it usually breaks down at one of those three points.
What nobody tells you about being the only or one of few minority women in marketing leadership is how much of your credibility depends on being the data person in the room. I don't say that with resentment — it's just real. When you can walk into a meeting and show how a campaign contributed to pipeline, how a channel is underperforming and why, what the attribution model says about where deals actually originate — that's what earns you a seat. That's what makes people listen.
The shift from manager to director also means accepting that you're now accountable for things you didn't directly control. SDR didn't follow up on those event leads. Sales forgot to update the opportunity stage in Salesforce. A vendor burned a chunk of budget with zero conversion. As a manager, you flag it. As a director, you fix the process so it doesn't happen again — and you're the one who has to explain it upward if it does.
One thing I've revised over the years: I used to think the job was about great campaigns. Now I think the job is about building systems that make great campaigns possible. The campaign is the output. The real work is the tech stack, the reporting infrastructure, the cross-functional relationships, the budget negotiations, and the process of teaching a team to think in pipeline terms, not just activity terms.
If you're somewhere in the middle of this journey — manager level, trying to figure out what it takes to get to director — my honest advice is this: get close to the data, get close to sales, and learn to tell a story with numbers that leadership actually cares about. The path isn't always linear, and the industry keeps changing, but those three things have stayed constant across every role I've had.
The best B2B marketers I know are part strategist, part analyst, part diplomat — and they never stop learning how all the pieces connect.
© 2026 Rachel Hong · Accelerator Consulting