Field notes from CMO++ — Strategy, positioning & operating notes for B2B

Strategy

Your Brand Now Has Two Audiences: Humans and Machines

Why the next era of brand building will require marketers to be emotionally compelling to people, and evidentially legible to AI.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Sep 30, 2026·12 min read

Operating

The Kitchen Gadget CMO.

We keep buying appliances. The customer is still waiting for dinner. On martech sprawl, half-used AI, and why the missing layer is orchestration, not capability.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Sep 1, 2026·7 min read

Strategy

The discount that never ends.

Promotions on their own may no longer move demand. The consumer did not get tired. Our selling did. On reference prices, experience goods, and why the exit from the promotional spiral is real but narrow.

Sakshi D. Bhatia·Aug 28, 2026·7 min read

Strategy

The "Hyper-Personalization" Delusion in B2B

We know the buyer's name. We still don't know the decision. Why individually personalised outreach can make a buying group less likely to agree, and what to build instead.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 27, 2026·6 min read

Strategy

It’s About Time You Retire Your Campaign Calendar

The campaign calendar was a brilliant solution to a problem we no longer have — human throughput. Here is why the campaign is being demoted from the operating system of marketing to an application that runs on it.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 25, 2026·6 min read

Operations

How I'd build a marketing org chart that's relevant today

Every box on your marketing org chart was once a rational answer to a real constraint. The constraints are gone. The boxes are not. Here is the work chart that replaces them.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 20, 2026·6 min read

Strategy

Meet the hidden buyer who never fills out a form

The person who kills your deal is often invisible to every system you own. They read everything, answer nothing, and say one sentence in a meeting that ends your quarter.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 18, 2026·7 min read

Leadership

Stop celebrating hours saved with AI. It is an AI ROI trap.

Time and cost savings are input measures. Neither has ever moved a market. The three layers of AI ROI, and why most marketing business cases live in the wrong one.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 13, 2026·6 min read

Leadership

The CMO is not disappearing. But the old version of the role might be.

Marketing activities can be distributed. Accountability for the customer cannot. Why the future CMO is an orchestrator, not a campaign owner.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 9, 2026·6 min read

Strategy

The most expensive line item in marketing isn’t media

Every time strategy changes hands, it loses resolution. The real cost in marketing is not media or agency fees, it is the translations between thinking and doing.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 5, 2026·6 min read

Brand

What is CMO++? The short answer, from the founder

CMO++ is senior marketing leadership plus the team that executes it. Here is what that actually means, in plain language.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 4, 2026·2 min read

Brand

CMO++ or a full-time CMO? A simple way to decide

A full-time CMO is a bet on a person. CMO++ is a bet on a system. Here is how founders should choose between them.

Sakshi D. Bhatia·Aug 3, 2026·2 min read

If you think AI will fix your marketing, you're barking up the wrong tree

AI isn't breaking marketing. It's exposing what we've spent years learning to work around — fuzzy positioning, contested data, and eleven days of approvals.

Shahana Sen Mishra·Aug 3, 2026·4 min read

Brand

The CMO++ operating model, in three layers

Strategy, orchestration, execution. Twenty-five years of building marketing functions taught me that the failure is almost always in the middle layer.

Sakshi D. Bhatia·Aug 2, 2026·2 min read

Operating

The operating rhythm that lets a small marketing team ship like a big one

Most B2B marketing teams don't have a velocity problem. They have a rhythm problem. Here's the weekly cadence we install in every CMO++ engagement.

Sakshi D. Bhatia·Jan 29, 2026·2 min read

Strategy

Positioning is not a tagline. It's the operating system.

Most B2B companies confuse messaging with positioning. The cost shows up two quarters later, in pipeline that won't close and a team that can't explain why.

Shilpa Rao·Jan 22, 2026·2 min read

Operating

When an embedded CMO and marketing team actually works (and when it doesn't)

An embedded CMO and marketing team can compress a year of strategy into a quarter, or quietly waste both sides' time. The difference is almost always set in the first two weeks.

Arjun Mehta·Jan 15, 2026·2 min read

Operating

How to design a marketing team's first ten hires

The first ten marketing hires set the ceiling for everything that follows. Most founders hire the wrong shape — generalists when they need specialists, and specialists when they still need range.

Sakshi D. Bhatia·Jan 12, 2026·3 min read

Playbooks

The 90-day marketing roadmap, demystified

Every consultant promises a 90-day plan. Most of them are colour-coded calendars. Here's what actually belongs in one, and what doesn't.

Shilpa Rao·Jan 8, 2026·1 min read