Report · 11 min read
What CMOs actually buy
Nine chief marketing officers on the anatomy of a decision: who they trust, what they ignore, and the exact moment a vendor loses the room.
The purchase order is the least interesting part of a purchase. By the time procurement is involved, the decision has usually been made three conversations earlier, in a room with no vendor in it. This report reconstructs those rooms.
Across nine interviews, the pattern is consistent: senior buyers are not evaluating features, they are evaluating risk to their own reputation. A tool that fails quietly is survivable. A tool that fails loudly, in front of a board, is not. Every piece of proof you publish is either reducing that fear or ignoring it.
The second finding is about speed of comprehension. Seven of nine said they decide whether a vendor is serious within roughly ninety seconds of landing on a website. Not whether to buy, whether to keep reading. Typography, clarity of claim, and the absence of stock enthusiasm did more work than any case study.
Third: peers outrank content. But content is what peers forward. The referral engine most teams want is downstream of publishing something a smart person would be proud to share with their own name attached.