Executive Level

CMO School

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) face a range of significant challenges that can impact their effectiveness and success. These include:

  • Developing and maintaining a strong relationship with the CEO and board while adapting to various organizational stages
  • Leveraging AI and other technologies to enhance strategic value and drive growth
  • Navigating the complexities of budgeting, attribution, and demand generation to maximize ROI

To address these challenges, our school provides targeted sessions with industry experts. You'll gain practical skills in building strong CEO relationships, integrating AI into your strategies, and optimizing demand generation and your budget.

By the end of the school, you'll be well-prepared to excel as a CMO and drive impactful results for your organization.

School details

Enrollment type: Live

Session dates: Feb. 5th - Mar. 26th

Schedule: Wednesdays from 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EST

Open to: Executive Members

Andrea Kayal - CMO School

Andrea Kayal, Dean

Andrea Kayal is currently CRO at Help Scout. Prior, she was CMO at Electric, where she served the Marketing, Sales Development, Business Development, and Partnerships teams. She has over two decades of experience overseeing GTM strategy, demand generation, brand message and design, product, content and customer marketing, customer retention, and more. Additionally, She actively advocates for women's advancement in tech and LGBTQ rights.

Connect with Andrea

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"This was absolutely eye-opening for me. I've spent most of my career in sales leadership roles. My favorite part of CMO School was being the only 'Sales-ish' leader in my cohort class and discussing Sales & Marketing alignment with a crew of Marketers. Game-changing to see the perspective from their eyes."

Brandon Roberts
GM & CRO of North America, Xplor

Course curriculum

This school is designed for marketing leaders seeking advancement into the C-Suite, first-time CMOs looking to learn the ropes, and established CMOs seeking to expand their skills.

Please note that curriculum topics and/or session order may be subject to change.

Session 1:
Role of the CMO +
Boardroom Best Practices

Led by Andrea Kayal, CMO of Help Scout

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Develop a bi-directionally fulfilling relationship with the CEO
  • Set yourself up for success from the start by establishing foundations and asking the important questions before you accept a job
  • Better focus yourself and your priorities as Chief Marketing Officer
  • Adapt your board deck based on the stage of your organization
  • Anticipate and learn what your board wants to see from you

Session 2:
Applied AI - Elevating Marketing's Strategic Value & Driving Growth

Led by Liza Adams, AI Advisor & Fractional CMO at GrowthPath Partners

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Structure your team to maximize AI's potential
  • Achieve tangible impacts with AI-driven marketing
  • Evolve from AI exploration to scaled integration
  • Position yourself as a strategic, customer-centric leader

Session 3:
B2B Marketing That Doesn't Suck

Led by Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Understand and avoid common marketing failures
  • Audit your brand personality, content, events, etc.

Session 4:
Planning for Success:
Budgeting & Attribution

Led by Brandon Young, CMO at Garner Health

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Sell your budget internally
  • Use benchmarking data to build your budget
  • Using budgeting structure (modeling) to build a good budget
  • Re-budget and re-forecast

Session 5:
Where and How to Apply Generative AI Across Your GTM Workflows

Led by Elaine Zelby, Co-founder of Tofu

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Identify broad areas where generative AI can be applied across marketing and sales workflows
  • Generate a list of opportunities for personalization across your company's marketing efforts and ideas for how to get started
  • Measure the results and ROI of AI tools and experiments
  • Have a framework for thinking about team construction and where to apply human resources vs AI

Session 6:
How to Build, Engage, and Monetize an Owned Audience

Led by Anthony Kennada, Founder & CEO at AudiencePlus

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Define a Brand Strategy that inspires your audience
  • Produce content in an authentic way that establishes trust
  • Leverage rented channels to capture attention
  • Build an owned audience of subscribers
  • Prove the value of audience engagement on outcomes

Session 7:
Product Marketing

Led by Maureen West, Senior Consultant at Carema Consulting

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Use product marketing to create consistency, clarity, and momentum for product and feature launches
  • Improve your product launches by developing a messaging house, building an end-to-end project plan, creating an internal communication playbook, and more

Session 8:
Ecosystem-led Growth

Led by Alex Poulos, CMO at Crossbeam

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Identify if ecosystem-led growth (ELG) is right for your organization
  • Understand the impact others in the class have seen from leveraging ELG
  • Leverage different ELG plays for marketing

Bonus Session:
Demand Generation

Led by Jen Spencer, CEO of SmartBug Media

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Understand different demand generation failures, to know what not to do
  • Improve your demand generation immediately with two action items
  • Be comfortable with failure

This is a pre-recorded session.

Expected Results

By the end of this school, you will have the knowledge and skills to be able to:

  • Use benchmarking data to build your budget and sell it internally
    Build out and structure demand generation, product marketing, customer marketing, and content to better drive customer acquisition and revenue growth
  • Calculate the ROI on marketing efforts using the 7 keys, including asking for organizational goals upfront and getting sales buy-in first
  • Drive sales and marketing alignment by creating joint responsibilities and defining joint KPIs
A woman smiling during a conversation.

Course FAQ

This program is included in the cost of a Pavilion Membership. Not a member? Join now.

At this time, this program is open to Pavilion Members only. Join Pavilion to enroll for free.

This school starts on February 5th, and lasts 8 weeks.

Live, virtual sessions occur weekly on Wednesdays from 3 pm - 4:30 pm EST.

Last day to enroll is February 4th.

Yes, there will be cohorts for this school. Cohorts meet once per week at a selected day/time during the duration of the program. Due to Pavilion University's peer element, students engage more, strengthening their ability to recall and apply learning.

Yes, 80% class and 80% cohort attendance is required. We recommend that participants attend the live sessions for the optimal learning experience. Though, watching session recordings counts toward attendance for those with scheduling conflicts or in time zones where live attendance is a challenge.

Yes, there is a final exam at the end of this school. A passing score of 80% must be attained in order to receive your certificate.

After successfully meeting attendance requirements and passing the final exam, you will receive a certificate that you can add to your Licenses and Certification Section on LinkedIn.

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