Zoom's CMO Rebuilt The B2B Funnel For A Market She No Longer Controls

Most B2B buying now happens where marketers cannot see it. Buyers form preferences through peer conversations, Reddit threads, and AI answer engines long before they talk to a vendor, and Gartner finds that 67% now prefer a rep-free experience. The old funnel of awareness, consideration, and preference no longer describes how decisions are made. The rebuild that matters is aiming go-to-market at rooms the brand does not control, where the citing, recommending, and trusting actually happen. 

Kimberly Storin has spent her first eighteen months at Zoom building the framework for exactly that, and it starts with accepting that the brand no longer owns its own story. Storin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zoom, where she leads global marketing and communications across brand, product marketing, and enterprise go-to-market. She came up through mergers-and-acquisitions consulting before moving into marketing, with leadership roles at IBM, AMD, and Dell along the way, and she treats brand less as an aesthetic exercise than as a readout of what a business is ready to claim. That instinct shaped how she entered Zoom, a brand so recognizable it became a verb, yet still boxed in by the perception it earned during one specific era.

"Marketing is the voice of and the voice to the market. That's our job," Storin says. She talked to 50 customers before she formally started, wanting to ground the strategy in what users and partners actually thought about the platform rather than what the org assumed. What she found was preference that ran deeper than the category suggested, later confirmed by the company's own brand-health and NPS data.

The perception gap Zoom is spending to close

Everyone knows Zoom from the period that made it a household name. Few people register that the same company now sells contact center software, webinars, events tooling, and a recruiting platform. The distance between what people remember and what Zoom now sells is the problem Storin was hired to close, and she measures against it directly. In a single quarter, her team saw a 16-point increase in the number of people who understand Zoom as an AI-first company, a shift that matters as much as pipeline for a business trying to move past a single-product reputation. "We're not just video conferencing anymore, although that still is so core to who we are and what we're selling. But it is the other areas, the breadth and the depth of portfolio," she says. She pairs those brand-health signals with revenue contribution and marketing pipeline, both of which have climbed over the last four quarters, so that softer perception gains stay tethered to business outcomes.

Storin refuses to treat brand and demand as competing line items. Brand investment earns its budget when revenue justifies it, and the two sets of numbers are read together rather than defended separately.

Why the funnel had to be rebuilt

The ex-consultant in Storin built a framework that scraps the one most marketers still recite without thinking. Awareness, consideration, and preference assumed the brand controlled the path. AI-mediated discovery breaks that assumption, because the buyer's research now happens across sources the brand has no hand in. Her model asks instead whether a brand is being found, being present, being believed, and being preferred. "It's not that traditional funnel that we've always thought of. In a lot of ways it's ceding control to other people telling your story," she says. Being found remains largely owned work, showing up across the right channels and media mix for every buyer segment. Being present and being believed are where the shift bites, because those depend on third-party voices, reviews, customer stories, Reddit, and independent creators, which are precisely the sources AI engines surface when they answer a buyer's question.

The consequence is a different relationship with control. Word of mouth becomes a flywheel that feeds both the human buyer and the answer engine, and the brand's job shifts from dictating the message to earning a place in conversations it does not host. Storin is blunt that this now means marketing to agents as well as to people, since the citations an engine picks up are what a buyer sees first.

Handing the story to people who are not on payroll

This is the part that makes trained marketers flinch. A five-page brief shrinks to one sentence, handed off to a voice the brand doesn't employ and can't edit. Storin has leaned into that discomfort on purpose, and she frames the goal as becoming the company that creators, reporters, and analysts actually want to work with. 

Zoom recently announced a collaboration with Nayeema Raza, a former New York Times editor turned independent journalist whose podcast Smart Girl Dumb Questions now carries a Zoom-partnered series on the future of work. Raza also hosts Zoomterviews, a social-first interview series spotlighting the company's Solopreneur 50 winners. The relationship works because it stays hers. "The more that she understands our business strategy and the more that my marketing team can communicate and articulate that business strategy crisply, the more that we can have those one-sentence briefs," Storin says. Raza's editorial independence is the point, not a compromise, which is why outlets covering the deal framed it as a template for how major marketers now work with independent journalists.

Zoom's Zoombassadors program takes a different route to the same trust problem. Rather than recruit creators by follower count, the company sought out small-business owners who happen to make content, so the endorsement carries the credibility of lived experience. "They understand the pain points of the target audience that we're trying to reach and are able to speak in their own language to the value proposition, even without us having to feed them that content. They are the target audience," Storin says. She contrasts that deliberate B2B approach with the organic wins Zoom gets in its consumer-facing core, pointing to Timothée Chalamet's self-produced Zoom call promoting Marty Supreme, coverage the brand never had to engineer.

The org chart is quietly reorganizing itself

Storin believes marketing will eventually run on a workflow-based operating model rather than a purely functional one, and at Zoom the shift is already visible in how work gets assigned. The ideas for where to embed AI come from the teams doing the work. Zoom shipped roughly 2,500 feature and product announcements last year, each one needing a name, most of them low-stakes for revenue. Product marketing raised its hand, and the team built an agent trained on Zoom's brand guidelines and product taxonomy to handle the naming that does not move the business. "We've basically reduced the friction, stripped out a ton of time, and allow this agent to name a majority. Not all, because you still have to have a human to prioritize where the impact is," Storin says. The point is not headcount reduction. It is clearing low-value work so people can spend their hours on the deliverables that drive the business, the kind of workflow redesign McKinsey ties to the small share of companies actually capturing value from AI.

New role shapes are emerging from that pattern without anyone formally rewriting the org chart. Integrated marketers are becoming orchestrators who coordinate both agents and people. Discipline experts are becoming deeper specialists. Brand teams are becoming governors, the check against AI slop and content that is not factual and true. Storin is candid that a large company cannot flip to this model overnight, and that functional management still has to coexist with workflow-based work for now.

What Storin hires for now

Knowing how to work the AI is the low bar, available in a digital-native 23-year-old or a veteran who has put in the time. What Storin screens for sits underneath the tooling. Curiosity, empathy, agility, and calculated risk-taking are the attributes she treats as non-negotiable, because a great marketing engineer who cannot read a market or tell a story leaves you with nothing but a capable agent. "We live in a transformational era, and those are the attributes of transformational leadership," Storin says. She has watched enough companies swing too far toward the technical hire to know the discipline of marketing itself cannot be automated away.

That hiring philosophy only pays off inside a culture that lets people act on their curiosity, and Storin is emphatic that Zoom's does. The company runs on what she calls the speed of Zoom, a non-hierarchical culture where a developer, a marketer, or a salesperson can bring an idea straight to her or to CEO Eric Yuan. The same open posture extends to how the team lives in the weeds of social every day, answering support questions and feeding product signals back to the business. In an era where discovery, trust, and even the org chart are being handed to forces outside the marketer's direct control, the one thing Storin is unwilling to cede is proximity to the customer.