Bryan Law is the Chief Marketing Officer of Nerdio, the all-in-one Microsoft Cloud management platform. Bryan previously led global marketing teams at Google, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, and SentinelOne, to name just a few. He’s passionate about building distinctive, memory-building brands that translate into efficient pipeline creation, backed by data-driven decisioning and pragmatic AI adoption. Bryan joins co-hosts Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to dig into why B2B brands need to focus on their mental availability, how synthetic AI research can speed up uncovering customer insights, and how marketing leaders can jumpstart their tenure at any new company.

Episode Takeaways

• CMOs who lead with business acumen, not marketing tactics, earn faster credibility with the C-suite. Bryan deliberately frames his role as a business leader who uses marketing as a tool, fluently speaking the language of revenue, pipeline, and growth targets with finance and sales before discussing campaign strategy.
• When entering a new company as the CMO, it is critical to be very intentional about identifying who the key stakeholders internally who are going to make or break your success, and then how you can win them over quickly.
• Understanding the customer’s pains, wants, and needs quickly is vital to your role as a CMO. One way to do this is by carrying out extensive customer interviews right when you join a new company. A way to speed that process up is to use synthetic AI to model your customers and uncover deeper insights.
• The concept of Mental availability, which is understanding the buying triggers that cause customers to think about your category, and which brand associations fire in their minds instantly, is widely used in B2C but almost entirely ignored in B2B. Bryan uses this framework to find uncontested territory: buying situations that customers care about that no competitor owns. Marketing teams should map their category's buying triggers, assess which are already owned by competitors, and build messaging campaigns around the white space.

Standout Quote

• “ I always try and think about my role is first as a business leader and then secondarily as a marketer.” - Bryan Law

Guest Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanbasdenlaw/
• Nerdio Website: https://getnerdio.com/

Mentioned in this Episode

• Kim Storin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin/
• Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: https://marketingscience.info/

More from The B2B CMO Project

• Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/
• Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/
• Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/