“There’s no way I can do anything with this budget.”
That was Sangeeta Prasad’s first reaction to B2B.
She’d spent her career on the other side — brand management at Procter & Gamble, then American Express and JPMorgan Chase — where marketing budgets were roughly 100x what she found waiting for her when she became the first CMO at Russell Reynolds Associates.
Years later, at Slalom, she got approval for a company-wide campaign funded at 100x anything the company had spent before.
The campaign generated 32M+ impressions and coincided with a 50% increase in average modernization deal size and a 58% increase in modernization deals per month.
But Sangeeta couldn’t have walked in on day one and gotten that be approved.
She had to build the evidence ladder that got her there.
Small business-aligned bets produced evidence. Evidence built trust. And trust unlocked bigger investments.
And it started with a shift in what she was actually selling.
“Its not a marketing campaign or activity you’re selling. You’re selling the outcome that’s going to be an improvement for the company.”
Here’s the four-step playbook she used to turn business outcomes into bigger marketing bets.
Key takeaways:
Find where the idea will get stuck. Executive approval and organizational adoption require different kinds of buy-in. Learn leadership’s definition of business health. Use the numbers they already rely on instead of expecting them to translate marketing metrics. Make the investment legible to finance. Clarify what marketing headcount provides, what additional dollars activate, and the risk attached to the bet. Decide what success unlocks before you run the pilot. Every small bet should create evidence for a specific next ask. Step 1: Learn the business and map the room Your first few months as a new marketing leader can feel frustratingly light on… actual marketing.
Spend time learning how the organization works. How does it make money? Where does leadership want to grow? What problems keep showing up? What has the company tried before? What does each executive need to accomplish this year?
Sangeeta describes this period as doing “less of pure marketing, more of all these other things.”
Before you start selling the plan, figure out where it’s likely to get stuck.
Both of Sangeeta’s first-CMO roles opened with a rebrand, but the resistance came from different places. At Russel Reynolds, the CEO had the vision, but long-tenured leaders needed convincing. At Slalom, leadership was already on board; the challenge was getting individual markets to activate the new brand consistently.
Executive approval and organizational adoption are two different problems. Figure out which one you have before you start trying to solve it.
“You have to educate, and then you have to be a marketing evangelist,” she says. “You have to have the confidence of your convictions to get the organization to rally behind something the company has never done before.”
She sorts a company into three groups:
people excited by change, the large group waiting to see what happens, and the people who’d rather keep doing what they’ve always done. “Getting leaders who have the large voices, the big influence in the company, to become your voice when you’re not there is super important.”
Do this: Map the business priorities to the people who own them. For each one, note who is already open to what you’re proposing, who needs convincing, and who has enough influence to bring others along.
Your first evangelists sit at the overlap of high influence and high openness.
Step 2: Delete the marketing slide “Marketers often make the mistake of talking in marketing language,” says Sangeeta. “These are the impressions, the campaign did this, all these marketing metrics. They [leadership] don’t care.”
The answer isn’t swapping impressions for a slide labeled “revenue.” The people approving your spend already have their own numbers for judging the health of the business. Learn what those numbers are and connect your case for marketing to them.
“Be as good a listener as you are a talker,” Sangeeta says.
Do this: Before your next budget or campaign pitch, look at every metric in the deck and ask: would the person approving this investment use this number to describe the health of the business?
Step 3: Explain what they’re actually buying “My leaders didn’t realize that hiring a CMO or marketing team is not an investment,” Sangeeta says. “The investment is truly the dollars you put into the campaigns.”
What Sangeeta had to teach leadership was the difference between paying for marketing capability and investing in marketing activity.
In HR or finance, she says, hiring the people may be the investment. A marketing team still needs dollars to put its work into market.
Sangeeta makes that distinction explicit with finance early and stays transparent about “the good, bad, and ugly.” That means talking about risk, too.
Her pitch on a first-time campaign sounds like this: We expect 10x ROI. We’ve never run this before, so it could return 0 or it could return 100. Leadership has to weigh the risk of the investment against the growth it could generate.
Naming that risk gives finance and leadership something concrete to evaluate instead of asking them to take marketing’s potential on a wish and a prayer.
Do this: Bring finance in before the pitch. Map out what additional dollars would activate, the business outcome you’re pursuing, and what you’ll learn even if the bet doesn’t work.
Step 4: Build the evidence ladder
“You start with the smaller investments,” Sangeeta says. “You don’t make a huge investment. You pilot it. You try it. You pivot. And once you get a few results, you can start investing bigger and doing broader things.”
The important part is deciding what happens after the pilot before you know whether it worked.
If the results hit the threshold you agreed on, what does that evidence unlock? More budget? Another market? A new channel? A larger creative concept?
Otherwise, a successful pilot can become permission to run... another small pilot.
That’s what happened at Slalom.
When Sangeeta arrived, small LinkedIn campaigns were all she could get approved. So that’s where she started: running them, gathering results, and giving leadership a chance to see what worked before she asked them to fund anything larger.
Eventually, she proposed Zero Legacy, a company-wide campaign around legacy transformation. It went across channels, including paid media and commercial activation.
This time, the ask wasn’t small.
“We invested 100x more than we would have invested in any campaign prior to that.”
That investment would have been difficult to sell when Sangeeta arrived. By then, she didn’t have to sell it from zero.
“My CEO and leaders had seen the impact we’d made to date and increased interest from our customers, so they were willing to take the risk.”
The result:
32M+ impressions across web, PR and social 50% increase in average modernization deal size 58% increase in the number of modernization deals per month 144% larger deal size than Slalom’s average for 2025 Do this: For every pilot you run, decide what the next rung is before the results come in.
If this works, what will you ask for next? More budget? Another market? A new channel? A larger creative concept?
Name it while the pilot is still running.
The track record earns you creative liberties Two first-CMO roles, two rebrands. In both, Sangeeta watched skeptics come around once they could see what the output.
At Russell Reynolds, that credibility bought her something a traditional executive search firm wouldn’t have dreamed of making: a cartoon series that gently made fun of how clients talk about executive search firms. Clients asked for copies.
The ladder never really ends. Every rung earns you the right to make the next ask. And with enough evidence behind you, that next ask can get a whole lot more interesting.
FAQ What do you do when your first small bet doesn’t work? Figure out why it didn’t work, tell leadership what you learned, and use that to decide whether to adjust, try again, or move on.
How do you keep small pilots from becoming a permanent excuse to underinvest in marketing? Agree upfront on what success looks like and what happens if you hit it. If the pilot delivers, the conversation shouldn’t reset to whether marketing deserves more investment. You’ve already made the case for the next step.
When should you stop piloting and make the bigger bet? When you have enough evidence that leadership is willing to take the risk. You don’t need certainty, just enough proof to justify a bigger investment.
Once you have leadership buy-in, how do you get the rest of the organization to follow? Use the leaders you’ve won over to help carry the message. Ask them to explain why the change matters, then keep showing people what’s working along the way.
