Six focus areas keeping B2B CMOs up at night

Over the past two months we’ve hosted dozens of B2B chief marketing officers for breakfast (including of course bacon) to share ideas, best practices, hard lessons and priorities for the coming new fiscal and calendar year.
The discussions at each CMO breakfast range widely from strategic to tactical topics, from professional development to managing culture and marketing technology stacks.
But despite the wide variety of topics discussed, the same six focus areas come up every time.  And given the tone and tenor of the conversation, these are clearly the areas taking up the most time.
(If you want to join a future CMO breakfast this fall in Salt Lake City, Denver, Austin, Boston, NYC, Phoenix and other planned markets, please let me know and I’ll send you an invite.  Special thanks to Outreach for literally buying the bacon to make these meetings possible!)
Here they are (in approximate order):
Sales and marketing alignment: Not just