In high-stakes ABM plays, a peer-to-peer model is highly effective. A message from your CTO to their CTO, or your CFO to theirs, carries more weight and builds trust more rapidly than a salesperson's outreach. This executive engagement should be a core part of the ABM strategy.

Goldcast's CMO structures her week to serve her team: a strategic leadership sync, 1-on-1s framed as "how can I help remove blockers?", and no-agenda skip-level meetings to gather unfiltered feedback. This leadership model prioritizes enabling the team over top-down status updates.

A CMO's primary job is not just external promotion but also internal marketing. This involves consistently communicating marketing's vision, progress, and wins to other departments to secure buy-in, resources, and cross-functional collaboration.

Staying current is a core leadership responsibility, not an afterthought. Wrike's CMO treats external learning—reading articles, listening to podcasts, attending events—as a scheduled, non-negotiable part of her job. She blocks her calendar weeks in advance to ensure this strategic time isn't consumed by daily tasks.

Don't wait for prospects to reveal they're evaluating others. Assume they are and ask directly, "What companies are you looking at right now?" This normalizes the behavior, demonstrates your confidence, and allows you to frame the subsequent comparison on your terms rather than reacting defensively.

When starting a senior role at a complex company, a new leader should formally contract a 'learning agenda' as part of their onboarding. Prioritize a listening tour focused on frontline operations and culture, rather than headquarters, to understand the business before implementing changes.

To give the board tangible visibility into marketing, MasterCard's CMO sets up demo kiosks outside board meetings. During breaks, board members can interact with new campaigns, watch videos, and speak with the marketing team. This experiential approach builds confidence and understanding far more effectively than a slide deck alone.

To rally senior leaders around a brand reinvention, AT&T's CMO had them share stories about brands they personally admired. This exercise revealed that brand love stems from product and service—not just ads. It successfully reframed brand building as a collective, company-wide responsibility.

To achieve true alignment with sales, product, and finance, marketing leaders should avoid marketing jargon and subjective opinions. Instead, they should ground conversations in objective data about performance, customer experience gaps, or internal capabilities to create a shared, fact-based understanding of challenges.