B2B Marketing and AI trends with Sydney Sloan - Chief Marketing Officer at G2

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Sydney Sloan, the Chief Marketing Officer at G2. I'll be covering four primary topics with Sydney today. First, looking at how marketing budget allocation for B2B tech companies is trending in 2025 Second, look at how peer reviews are evolving in their impact on B2B SaaS purchases. Then, we will pivot to the growth in AI, as measured by the categories, vendors and reviews on G2. And lastly, I'll be asking Sydney a little bit about the opportunity to exploit the power of AI for B2B marketers in 2025 and beyond. So with that, Sydney, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey becoming my guest here on the Metrics at Major Up podcast.

**Sydney Sloan** (1:26)
Thank you so much, Ray. It's great to be here. Yes, I am currently the CMO at G2.
This is my fourth stint of being a CMO. So I say I grew up at Adobe about 17 years, mostly in product marketing roles across a lot of the different product lines except creative. So the business, enterprise side of the house, and then stayed in the content collaboration space, company called Jive, and then I was a CMO at a company called El Fresco. And then most people know me from SalesLoft days because I was very involved in a lot of sales in MarTech communities, and that was just a great ride to being at SalesLoft. Did a quick stint in security over at Drata doing GRC and landed here at G2.

**Ray Rike** (2:11)
Well, were you at SalesLoft when Chad Gold was a CFO there?

**Sydney Sloan** (2:14)
I was SalesLoft, Chad Gold CFO, and Chad Gold was CFO at G2 as well. Another reason we're coming.
Yeah, Chad's amazing. He's been on your podcast and I think at one of your events too. Go to Market's best friend at CFO.

**Ray Rike** (2:28)
Well, connections in this industry are so important. In fact, one of the ways we got to know each other was Kerry Lee Dietrich, Bill Macias and John Miller and I recently did a B2B marketing productivity and budget benchmarks. And that's where I wanted to start here, to study if that's okay. And what the research showed that we did in November, December was that there was a reinvestment trend going on for CMOs. Across the entire population of the research, the actual percent of revenue allocated to marketing last year was 9 percent. That's increasing to 10 percent. Now, of course, that's different by company size. But I want to get your perspective. Are you seeing that same trend that there's a reinvestment to growth and marketing happening right now?
You've heard about Liveflow. It's the easiest way to automate spreadsheet FP&A. Liveflow updates QuickBooks Online and Xero Actuals in your models without breaking your formulas. Finance leaders are transforming everything from forecast to board reports into live 24x7 control centers. Some are even avoiding switches to expensive ERPs with no formula, real-time consolidation. Thousands of companies are making life easier with Liveflow. Join them at liveflow.com/metrics, that's liveflow.com/metrics.

**Sydney Sloan** (3:51)
I think that follows the trend of, you know, we were at growth at all costs, and then we pulled back to profitability. And, you know, in our level setting, we just were looking at some benchmark research this week. And, you know, average growth rate of 19 or 20 percent is now the average in like the 100 million dollar range of businesses. And so, you know, I think that balance between pulling back really hard, which made us cut a lot of programs. I'll talk about the impact of brand and the bad decisions that were made as it related to where the money was being invested. But now this, OK, let's look back at growth. Let's get confident that making an investment in marketing does have a direct impact to revenue. But I think the question is, where do marketers spend that incremental and what's smart investments for them?

**Ray Rike** (4:46)
Well, that's a perfect transition to one of the other data points we found. And we asked, number one, how are CMOs and B2B tech companies allocating their budgets across people, programs and technology? We went one layer lower, Sydney, and we asked, OK, for your programs, how are you allocating that budget? And DemandGen was number one in almost every size of company, anywhere from 30% to 38% of program budget went to DemandGen. But then we saw events actually as companies grew, they were spending more money on events. And I know you've seen this data, so I wondered if you had any insights into other kind of macro trends that you either see or thinking about in 2025 of where marketing budget is being allocated more than before.