From Demand Gen to Market Maker: How Strategic CMOs Lead ICP Shifts and Drive Transformation

In the latest CMO Series session, Oana sat down with John Schneider, VP of Platform & Portfolio Marketing at UKG, to unpack a question a lot of marketing leaders are wrestling with right now: what separates a demand generation leader from a truly strategic CMO?

John’s answer was sharp and memorable: “Demand gen moves leads. Strategic marketers move multiples for the business.”

That idea anchored the entire conversation. Rather than framing marketing as a function responsible only for pipeline efficiency, John argued that the best marketing leaders shape company trajectory, influence enterprise value, and help determine where the business should play and how it should win.

Here’s the big takeaway from the session: when growth stalls, the answer is not always “more leads.” Sometimes the real need is a full go-to-market reset.

Strategic marketing is about enterprise value, not just lead volume

John shared that one of the most important lessons in his career came from learning to distinguish between surface-level pipeline health and underlying business quality.

At Betterworks, he joined a business that did not appear to have a lead problem. On paper, lead volume looked healthy. But once the team examined those leads more closely, they found a different story: smaller deals, limited expansion potential, and weak long-term defensibility in a crowded market.

That forced a bigger question: was this really a demand problem, or was it an ICP problem?

For John, the answer was clear. The business needed to narrow its focus, shift toward HR leadership, and reposition from a standalone goals product to a broader performance enablement platform. That meant accepting short-term disruption in exchange for stronger long-term revenue quality.

As John put it, “Your lead volume might go down, but there’s benefits that immediately emerge… average deal size goes up, your renewals improve, your overall revenue quality is better.”

That is the heart of strategic marketing. It is not just about creating more activity at the top of the funnel. It is about building a business the market values more highly.

The danger of optimizing a broken system

One of the strongest themes in the conversation was that too many companies respond to missed targets by defaulting to more campaigns, more events, and more pipeline generation.

John warned against that instinct.

“When you start missing revenue targets, especially in net new and renewals combined, if it starts happening over multiple quarters, it is not a pipeline problem. It’s a structural problem.”

In other words, if the business keeps missing the number, marketers should resist the temptation to simply turn up the volume. More spend will not solve a go-to-market model that is fundamentally misaligned.

Instead, John recommends diagnosing the deeper issue before investing another dollar into demand generation.

John’s framework: relevance, resonance, retention

To help leaders identify when they are dealing with a structural issue instead of an execution issue, John shared a simple but powerful framework: relevance, resonance, and retention.

Relevance

The first question is whether the business truly has product-market fit at scale.

John challenged marketers to ask whether they are winning only early adopters who tolerate rough edges, or whether they have actually crossed into the mainstream. If the answer is still early adopters, no amount of demand gen can fix the problem.

“If you haven’t crossed into the mainstream, there’s no amount of demand gen that’s gonna fix it.”

Resonance

The second question is whether the message actually lands with the buyer.

John emphasized that most companies do not have a messaging distribution problem. They have a clarity problem. They are active in market, but not distinctive enough to earn attention or preference.

“Companies typically don’t have a messaging distribution problem. They have a clarity problem.”

For product marketers especially, this means returning to the core “so what?” question: why should a buyer care, and why should they choose you over the alternatives?

Retention

The third and perhaps most revealing signal is retention.

For John, slipping renewals are one of the clearest indicators that something is wrong in the business. That could mean the company is overselling, underserving, or attracting the wrong customers entirely.

“If renewals are slipping, the market is telling you something very important.”

Taken together, these three lenses help marketers spot when the issue is not campaign performance, but structural go-to-market misalignment.

How to know it is time for a reset

Oan pushed on a question many executives are asking right now: when do you stop optimizing pipeline and decide it is time to reset the go-to-market?

John pointed to a few warning signs.

One of them is what he called “heroics.” If sales leaders talk about how they can still sell a mediocre product with just a bit more air cover from marketing, that is usually a sign the company is relying on unsustainable effort instead of a repeatable growth model.

Another signal is repeated pressure to do “more, more, more” without diagnosing what is actually broken. More campaigns may create motion, but they do not fix poor fit, weak positioning, or churn-prone customers.

His advice was direct: “Before you spend another dollar on demand gen, you have to diagnose where the real leak is in the structure.”

Winning the board requires cross-functional alignment

A go-to-market reset is not something marketing can carry alone. John was clear that if he is proposing a major shift, he wants product, sales, and marketing aligned before it ever reaches the board.

“It is not a campaign strategy. It’s not a marketing shift. It is a company shift.”

That alignment matters because the board is not just evaluating a new positioning statement or revised campaign plan. It is evaluating a change in company direction, which affects roadmap, sales motion, customer success, and future valuation.

John also stressed the importance of predictive KPIs during these transitions. If the business is going to go through a temporary dip as it narrows focus or moves upmarket, leadership needs early indicators that prove the strategy is working.

Without those signals, even the right move can look like a failure too early.

Validate a new ICP before you bet the company on it

One audience question asked a critical question: how do you validate a new ICP before committing to a full repositioning?

John’s answer was grounded and practical. Start with proof, not aspiration.

“If the product is not selling, if the customers are not saying they use it, if the analysts are not validating it… you better be very cautious.”

He encouraged leaders to look for concrete evidence: real customers already using the product in that way, references willing to speak, successful pilots, analyst validation, and enough traction to show the opportunity is more than anecdotal.

He even offered a useful threshold: if fewer than ten customers can credibly validate the use case, that is probably not enough evidence to justify a full go-to-market pivot.

Yes, marketers can test landing pages and messages. But they cannot manufacture product-market fit.

Moving upmarket is more than changing the website

The discussion also turned to a challenge many B2B companies face around moving from a broad or horizontal motion into enterprise.

John warned that one of the biggest mistakes companies make is adopting enterprise language before they are operationally ready for enterprise buyers.

“It’s so easy for marketers to make the website look darker, more professional language. Oh, we’re enterprise now.”

But enterprise buyers do not buy a design aesthetic. They buy confidence.

That confidence comes from product readiness, security and integration capabilities, customer references, analyst validation, sales enablement, and customer success maturity. If those foundations are missing, marketing can create demand the business is not equipped to convert or retain.

Oana added an important point here as well: even when the product is ready, onboarding and customer success must evolve alongside the sales motion. Enterprise growth requires coordination across the entire business, not just sharper messaging.

Good churn vs. bad churn

Another useful part of the conversation centered on churn during ICP shifts.

John acknowledged that changing who you serve often means shedding customers who no longer fit the future of the business. That can be painful, but it is not always a bad thing.

“There’s obviously good churn and bad churn.”

Good churn, in John’s framing, happens when lower-value, high-support, non-repeatable customers fall away as the business aligns around a stronger, more scalable ICP. If the company is moving toward stickier, mandate-level enterprise use cases, that tradeoff can improve both unit economics and valuation.

What matters is whether the company is aligned enough to make the change real. One of John’s favorite signs of true alignment is when sales starts rejecting deals that do not fit the ICP.

That is when the shift moves from executive theory to operating reality.

Marketers should lead the model, not wait for permission

As the conversation wrapped, Oana asked what advice John would give to CMOs considering a positioning or go-to-market pivot right now.

“Don’t wait for a sales plan. Don’t wait for a top-down forecast from finance. You lead this.”

John encouraged marketers to build assumption-based models that remove emotion from the conversation. Instead of debating opinions, define the assumptions: TAM, expected market share, ACV, contract length, competitive pressure, and the cost of inaction.

That process helps transform a subjective conversation into a strategic one.

He also made the case that marketing is uniquely qualified to do this work. No function has the same cross-functional visibility across buyer research, market trends, pipeline health, sales feedback, customer signals, and positioning.

For marketers who still feel they need permission to lead strategy, John’s perspective is a useful reset in itself.

Final thought

This session was ultimately a reminder that modern marketing leadership is not about squeezing incremental gains from the same machine forever.

AI will continue to improve execution. Campaigns will get faster. Content will get cheaper to produce. Targeting will get smarter. But as John noted, “execution [is] getting commoditized and really the judgment becomes the differentiator in marketing.”

That judgment is what defines strategic CMOs.

The leaders who stand out over the next few years will not be the ones who simply generate more leads. They will be the ones who know when to challenge the ICP, when to reset the go-to-market, when to align the company around a sharper position, and when to trade short-term volume for long-term enterprise value.

That is the shift from demand gen leader to market maker.