Evergreen is a dirty word when it comes to marketing. It implies we aren’t testing, iterating, optimizing, and constantly improving.
Adi HagagGM, MetaMatch by Metadata
Experimentation
The CMO’s guide to
Modernmarketing
Modern marketers are creative, curious, experimental, willing to fail, and obsessed with data and tech. They work best in or with a C-suite with the same ethos.
INTRODUCTION—
Making sense of modern marketing
The playbook that filled pipeline two years ago has stopped working. Here is why — and what the marketers still winning do differently.
Listen to the introductionHighlighted as it’s read · 1 min
0:00 / 0:00
One of marketing’s most important missions is creating a consistent, predictable, attributable pipeline to drive sales. But the demand gen playbooks that worked even two or three years ago no longer deliver the results companies need.
Email inboxes are overwhelmed by spam, so marketers turn to advertising. But an increase in channels, a proliferation of social media sites (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn, X etc) and the introduction of generative AI makes it hard for an average marketer to keep up.
With all of these different channels, variables, and rules, how do you create a single version of attribution truth the leadership team all accepts and trusts?
One pipeline, many stories
Touches arrive from seven channels and converge on one buying group. Switch how credit is counted and watch what reaches the leadership team.
LOOP · ATTRIBUTION
Credit fight: marketing and sales each claim the same deals, so the pipeline the board sees is bigger than the pipeline that exists.
0touches
$0actual pipeline
$0reported
Illustrative loop. Each dot is one touch; each converted buying group adds $25K of pipeline.
BEFORE YOU GO ON
Choose your track
Same guide, two depths. Switch any time from the header — your place is kept.
CHAPTER 01—
Forging a new path
There is no school for B2B marketers. There is no standard playbook for demand generation.
The gistNo playbook will survive contact with your market. Experiment, accept that some tests fail, and keep the learning.
There shouldn’t be.
Many marketers are afraid to experiment and put their necks on the line because of a company culture that will punish failures. Others naturally fear change or unpredictability, or just don’t know what to do.
But the fact is that the only way through uncharted territory is experimentation. There is no one-size fits all approach. It’s what makes marketing so fun, so challenging, so demanding, and so frustrating. It’s why those of us that do it can stay engaged for a lifetime.
Run the year: fail forward
Choose how many experiments the team runs each quarter. Roughly three in ten win; every loss costs a little. Then switch the culture.
Company culture
WinFail (learned)Cancelled before launch
Failures0
Wins0
Pipeline index100
—
Illustrative model: each win lifts pipeline 3% (compounding), each failed test costs 0.4%. A risk-averse culture cancels half of planned tests before launch.
“Optimization is a word that wouldn’t exist if everything worked out perfectly the first time.”Kanika Mirchandani, Digital Marketing Manager of Demand Generation, Own
How to make experimentation safe to try
- Write the hypothesis first. “We expect X to move Y by Z because…” makes a loss informative instead of embarrassing.
- Agree the kill criteria up front. Decide the spend cap and the date at which a test stops, before it starts.
- Report losses in the same meeting as wins. When the CMO walks through a failed test and what it taught, the team learns failure is allowed.
- Diagnose root causes. Poor creative, the wrong CTA, or no sales follow-up are different failures with different fixes.
CHAPTER 02—
The making of a modern marketer
There is a small group of elite marketers who have fun with the chaos and consistently generate more efficiently every year.
The gistSix habits separate them: independent thinking, experiments, board-level data, a tight ICP, technology as leverage, and constant optimization.
Here are some things they have in common. Open each one.
0 of 6 opened
Same quarter, two dashboards
Trait 03 in practice. The say the quarter was great. Switch to the numbers the board tracks.
Illustrative figures for one fictional quarter.
Stop boiling the ocean
Trait 04 in practice. Same $120K budget. Choose who you go after: the whole , the , or your .
Accounts targeted120
Budget per account$1,000
Touches per buying group / month0.8
Fit with what you sellLow
Illustrative: 120 accounts stand in for your TAM; 36 are relevant now (TRM); 12 match the ICP.
Implementation: building a TRM your whole GTM team trusts
Start from closed-won and churned accounts together: the traits that separate good customers from short-lived ones are your ICP. Then ask what share of the TAM you can reach and serve this year — that’s the TRM.
Review both quarterly with sales, CS and product. As Jen Leaver puts it in the voices chapter, misalignment here shows up later as accounts that churn.
Implementation: retiring a vanity metric without losing the team
Don’t delete the metric — demote it. Keep impressions or open rate as a diagnostic for creative and deliverability, but stop setting goals on it. Put pipeline by stage and CAC at the top of every report, and tie each campaign’s brief to the board KPI it is meant to move.
CHAPTER 03—
The business of marketing
In summary, modern marketers are creative, curious, experimental, willing to fail, and obsessed with data and tech.
They understand that the business of marketing (company strategy, , ) must inform marketing the business (campaigns and activities).
The business of marketingCompany strategy · P&L · NRR
Marketing the businessCampaigns and activities
Data-driven companies are…
Pick an outcome. Each square is one unit of likelihood.
23x
more likely to top competitors in customer acquisition
Source: McKinsey, as cited in the original guide
Use the following Modern Marketing Maturity frameworks to assess:
- Are you a modern marketer? (psychology, leadership style, organizational role)
- Is your company supporting modern approaches? (culture, technology, alignment)
- Is your marketing strategy modern? (measurement, targeting, messaging, channels, and motions)
CHAPTER 04—
Modern Marketing Maturity Assessment
Ten scales across three frameworks. For each, pick the step that honestly describes you today — traditional on the left, modern on the right.
YOUR MATURITY PROFILE
Answer all ten scales to see your maturity level, your profile and where to focus first. 10 to go.
CHECKPOINT—
Five questions, one minute
Lock in what you’ve read. Instant feedback after every answer.
CHAPTER 05—
Modern marketers
Thanks and appreciation to all the modern marketers who lent their expertise to framing this report.
There is no tech in the world that can make demand gen effective if you don’t have experimental people constantly changing ads, images, creative, and messaging based on data.
Carlos Mario Tobon CamachoDirector of Demand Generation, Eightfold
Experimentation
Your north star always has to be revenue. Other metrics may help you optimize and iterate, but at the end of the day, the demand gen team has to prove its contribution to NRR.
Corrina OwensChief Evangelist, Purple Cork
Data & revenue
The top 1% marketers are experimental, they have no sacred cows, they optimize for board-level goals such as revenue and CAC, and they always have hard data to prove what is working and what isn’t.
Gil AlloucheCEO, Metadata.io
Data & revenue
When you really understand who customers are and what they care about, it’s much easier to get creative. That’s the bridge between the art and the science of marketing: data feeds innovation.
James GilbertVP of Demand Gen, Bloomerang
Data & revenue
Sales, marketing, product and customer success all have to be on the same page when it comes to TRM and ICP. Otherwise, you’ll see sales bringing in accounts that are likely to churn.
Jen LeaverSenior Director of Demand Gen + ABM, CloudBolt Software
Alignment
Marketers really need to be Swiss army knives with expertise across many marketing disciplines in order to be successful.
Josh CarterDirector of Demand Generation, Pavilion
Strategic role
You don’t want sales and marketing fighting over credit for a lead. Attribution works when it shows us what is and isn’t working, and not when it’s focused on who should get credit.
Julija NoskovaHead of North American Marketing, Pigment
Alignment
I am always asking myself and my team, ‘how do we continue to do cool stuff and what can we learn?’ Optimization is a word that wouldn’t exist if everything worked out perfectly the first time. We have to be here for the ride, not just the destination.
Kanika MirchandaniDigital Marketing Manager of Demand Generation, Own
Experimentation
Don’t be afraid to buck best practices and try new channels. Doing so will allow you to move faster than conventional wisdom allows.
Rowan TonkinCMO, Planful
Experimentation
Given the incredible array of tools and technologies, there is no excuse for relying on manual processes in the modern era.
Roy NaarHead of Strategic Marketing, Atera
Technology
Modern demand gen is not a support function that simply follows orders. It’s a strategic function that serves in an advisory capacity.
Tim HillisonFounder and CEO, Entrypoint1
Strategic role
Quick track shows ten voices. Switch to Deep-dive for all twelve.
THE END — AND THE START
No sacred cows. Just the next experiment.
YOUR READING GRID
Copy-paste playbook
Every interactive moment in this guide places a square. Place all nine and the last one tilts — the experiment that makes a grid a brand.
0/9squares placed
—maturity level
—checkpoint
About GTM Partners
GTM Partners, a data-driven Go-to-Market Analyst firm, helps organizations achieve efficient growth by transforming their GTM strategy. They work with high-growth companies to help them unify their GTM teams and to provide them with lasting strategies and frameworks. With a mission to make Go-to-Market simple, GTM Partners aims to be the voice of the industry for all things GTM.
What GTM Partners offers
- Data and benchmarks collected from data providers, including G2 and Bombora, as well as their community of the world’s fastest-growing companies.
- Research, best practices and design frameworks for strategizing, executing and tooling your Go-to-Market approach.
- Personalized advice and support from experienced leaders and practitioners — GTM strategy, creating a Point of View and GTM project execution across the 8 pillars of GTM.
- Events and networking with industry leaders looking to define the category of Go-to-Market.
Interactive edition presented by Metadata.io · gtmpartners.com
The analysts
Bryan Brown
Cofounder, Chief Analyst
A SaaS pioneer and thought leader in the marketing and sales tech industry. Co-founder with multiple exits (Vtrenz), has led strategy teams in Fortune 100 companies (IBM) and helped organizations scale from point solutions to platforms (Silverpop, Terminus).
Lindsay Cordell
Senior GTM Analyst
A practitioner turned analyst who develops actionable GTM models and blueprints. Has held practitioner and leadership roles across Product, Marketing, Sales, RevOps and Enablement at AT&T, Hearst and Cox, and ran the GTM Center of Excellence at Terminus.
Sarah Allen-Short
GTM Analyst
20+ years of B2B marketing and sales leadership across technology, nonprofit, government and higher education, with a specialty in B2B SaaS — bringing enterprise lessons to startups and scaleups in practical, agile ways.
Sangram Vajre
Cofounder, Industry Analyst
Three-time best-selling author and co-founder of Terminus, The Peak Community and GTM Partners. At the forefront of the Flip-my-Funnel movement and the Account-Based Marketing category; previously CMO at Pardot (a Salesforce company) and Terminus.
APPENDIX
How this edition is built
Information architecture
| Section | Source | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Cover | p.1 | Mark assembles square by square, the guide’s rising arrow draws through it, the last square tilts mint |
| Introduction | p.2 | Read-aloud player · attribution micro-loop (Credit fight vs Shared truth) |
| Choose your track | — | Branching pathway with live read times |
| 01 Forging a new path | p.2 | Fail-forward simulator · deep-dive accordion |
| 02 The making of a modern marketer | p.3 | Six reveal cards · vanity vs board dashboard · TAM/TRM/ICP focus grid |
| 03 The business of marketing | p.4 | 23x / 19x / 7x square multipliers |
| 04 Maturity assessment | p.5–7 | Ten five-step scales, trait comparisons, scored profile, focus-first actions, copy/download |
| Checkpoint | — | Five-question quiz with stamps and recap |
| 05 Modern marketers | p.8–10 | Twelve voices, theme filter, agree + share |
| Finish | p.11 | Reading grid result, CTA, About GTM Partners, analysts |
Colour, type and accessibility
| Token | Value | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Orange | #FF7A00 | Logo squares, fills, primary CTA (ink text, 7.9:1) |
| Mint | #3CEFCF | The tilted square, completion, “correct” |
| Orange ink | #B93F0B | Links and labels on paper (5.9:1) |
| Mint ink | #0B7563 | Positive deltas on paper (5.6:1) |
| Ink / night | #141414 | Text (18:1), night bands |
Poppins (display, echoing the wordmark), Inter (text and UI), JetBrains Mono (numerals), Atkinson Hyperlegible (dyslexia mode). WCAG 2.1 AA: keyboard support on every control, visible focus, ARIA radiogroups and live regions, reduced-motion and calm-motion modes, no autoplaying sound.
Gamification: the reading grid
The Metadata mark is a 3×3 grid where one square breaks rank. Nine interactions each place a square; the ninth always lands top-right, tilted and mint. Tiers: Copy-paste playbook (0–2) → Testing the waters (3–5) → Modern marketer (6–8) → Top 1% (9).