Today’s MarTech Top Voice: Becca Toth, CMO at SugarAI
Marketing leaders face a different challenge today than they did even a few years ago. Technology stacks have expanded, buyer behavior has shifted, and AI has found its way into nearly every part of the customer journey. The question is no longer whether organizations should automate. The real challenge is how to connect data, technology, people, and customer insight into a growth engine that drives measurable business outcomes.
For CMOs, that responsibility extends far beyond campaign execution. Marketing now sits at the center of revenue strategy, customer experience, pipeline creation, retention, and expansion. Success depends on the ability to align teams, surface meaningful signals, and turn intelligence into action across the entire go-to-market organization.
In this edition of the MarTech Top Voice Interview Series, Sudipto Ghosh, Head of Audience Growth and Content Intelligence at Intent Amplify, speaks with Becca Toth, Chief Marketing Officer at SugarAI, about the next phase of revenue marketing and the growing role of AI within modern MarTech ecosystems.
The discussion explores how marketing organizations are evolving from channel-focused execution to revenue orchestration, why customer experience has become a growth lever across the lifecycle, and where AI-powered automation delivers the greatest value for marketing and sales teams. Becca also shares her perspective on ABM, ABX, customer retention, marketing leadership, and the skills marketers need as AI becomes part of everyday operations.
For CMOs, revenue leaders, demand generation teams, and marketing operations professionals, this conversation offers a practical look at how high-performing organizations are building connected MarTech environments that support smarter decisions, stronger customer engagement, and sustainable growth.
Hi Becca, welcome to the MarTech Top Voice series.
MarTech Insights (MTI): You originally planned to pursue law school, but your first role in software marketing changed that direction completely. What drew you into marketing, and what experiences helped shape your approach as a revenue-focused marketer?
Becca Toth: Early in my career, I anticipated pursuing a legal profession and had accelerated my education by completing both my undergraduate and master’s degrees in four years. As I evaluated next steps, I chose to gain professional experience before committing to another academic program. What began as a planned “steppingstone” ultimately became a defining career opportunity, exposing me to the technology industry at a time when enterprise software companies were rapidly evolving and creating new opportunities for business professionals.
That decision changed the direction of my career. I joined a small software company as a marketing coordinator, despite having little formal marketing experience and an academic background focused on business and pre-law. The advantage of being part of a smaller organization was that job descriptions were often more of a starting point than a boundary. I had the opportunity to contribute across a wide range of initiatives — from coordinating trade shows and building email campaigns to supporting database marketing and sales programs. More importantly, I gained a front-row seat to how the business operated. I saw how marketing influenced revenue, how sales and marketing worked together to create growth, and how customer needs shaped strategy. That exposure gave me a much broader perspective than I would have gained in a more specialized role and ultimately sparked my interest in building and leading high-performing marketing organizations.
It was during those early years that I became fascinated by the relationship between marketing and sales. I enjoyed seeing how strategic marketing efforts could create momentum in the market and ultimately translate into tangible business outcomes. Spending a year in a sales role managing an OEM partnership with Epicor Software further strengthened that perspective. It gave me firsthand experience with the realities of the sales process and a deeper understanding of how marketing and sales must work together to drive growth. Seeing both sides of the equation helped shape the way I think about go-to-market strategy and revenue generation.
Those experiences ultimately led me to revenue marketing — a discipline that sits at the intersection of strategy, storytelling and business performance. I was drawn to the challenge of building market awareness and demand while maintaining a clear connection to pipeline, revenue and growth. For me, the most effective marketing has always balanced creativity with accountability, aligning closely with sales and the broader business to achieve measurable outcomes. That philosophy has guided my approach to marketing leadership throughout my career.
Recommended MarTech Insights: MarTech Top Voice Interview with Christa Patrylak, CMO at Sparq
MTI: You’ve spoken about finding your passion at the intersection of sales and marketing, where marketing activity directly influences pipeline and revenue outcomes. How has that perspective shaped the way you lead teams, measure success, and work alongside sales organizations today?
Becca Toth: That intersection has shaped almost every aspect of how I lead. I believe marketing performs best when it is deeply connected to the revenue engine, not operating as a separate function that hands off leads and moves on.
For a long time, the focus of revenue marketing was centered on scaling campaigns, leads, channels and automation. Those things still matter, but the market has changed — buyers don’t move through linear funnels anymore; they engage across ecosystems. They self-educate, often through AI. They validate through peers, communities and third-party sources. They expect personalization without friction and relevance without repetition. And they may be very far along in the buying process before they ever talk to a vendor.
Because of this, marketing success has to be measured more holistically. Pipeline is important, but so are buying signals, engagement quality, account progression, customer expansion, retention influence and the ability to activate the right team at the right moment.
Working with sales today is much less about a handoff and much more about orchestration. Marketing should help identify where there is momentum, what buyers care about, what messages are resonating and where sales should focus. The goal is to create a shared operating model where marketing, sales, customer success and partners are all working from the same intelligence and moving in the same direction.
MTI: AI has become a major theme across CRM, automation, and customer engagement platforms. At SugarAI, how do you build a market narrative that feels meaningful and differentiated instead of simply following industry trends?
Becca Toth: The key is to avoid treating AI as the story itself. AI is everywhere right now, and the market is full of broad claims about productivity, automation and efficiency. Those are important, but they are quickly becoming tablestakes.
At SugarAI, the more meaningful narrative is about what AI makes possible for revenue teams. The future isn’t simply more automation or more content. It is the ability to turn fragmented data and buyer signals into timely, coordinated action.
That is where we see a major shift happening. Go-to-market organizations have become much more complex. Sales-led motions coexist with product-led growth. Customer marketing influences pipeline. Partners shape buying decisions. Communities influence perception. Data exists everywhere, but clarity often does not.
Our narrative is centered on helping organizations move from disconnected systems and siloed execution to more intelligent revenue orchestration. AI should help teams understand what is happening, what matters, what action to take next and how to create a more relevant customer experience.
For us, differentiation comes from connecting AI to the realities of revenue growth. The value is in helping teams move faster, engage buyers more intelligently and create more durable growth across the customer lifecycle.
MTI: Traditional ABM strategies were heavily centered around account targeting and pipeline creation. Today, many organizations are shifting toward ABX, with a stronger focus on the overall customer experience. How do you see this evolution changing the future of B2B marketing?
Becca Toth: I don’t see ABX replacing ABM — I see it as the natural maturation of it.
ABM taught organizations to focus on the accounts that matter most. ABX builds on that foundation by recognizing that revenue growth depends on more than pipeline creation. In today’s environment, customer retention, expansion and advocacy often have as much impact on growth as net-new acquisition. The most successful organizations will stop thinking about marketing, sales and customer success as separate functions and instead focus on creating a unified customer experience that drives long-term value for both the customer and the business.
MTI: Customer expectations continue to evolve in an increasingly digital and AI-driven environment. How do you see customer experience influencing long-term growth for SaaS companies trying to balance automation with genuine human engagement?
Becca Toth: Customer experience is one of the most important drivers of long-term SaaS growth. Acquisition still matters, but durable growth increasingly depends on retention, expansion, advocacy and the ability to create value across the entire customer lifecycle.
At the same time, customer expectations are changing quickly. People expect relevance, speed and personalization, but they don’t want to feel as if they are being pushed by impersonal automation. They want digital experiences that are efficient, but they also want human engagement when it matters.
The role of AI and automation should make the experience more intelligent, not less human. AI can help teams identify patterns, surface signals, anticipate needs and personalize engagement at scale. But the goal should be to equip people to have better, more timely and more meaningful interactions with customers.
For SaaS companies, this means customer experience can’t be treated as a post-sale function, it must be part of the growth strategy. Marketing, sales, customer success and product all influence whether customers see value, expand their relationships and become advocates.
The companies that get this right will use automation to remove friction and use human engagement to build trust; that balance will be essential to long-term growth.
Recommended MarTech Insights: MarTech Top Voice Interview with Vibhor Kapoor, Chief Business Officer at AdRoll
MTI: Marketing teams today are expected to deliver highly personalized experiences while improving efficiency and scalability. What does your current AI-powered marketing automation ecosystem look like, and where do you believe it creates the greatest business impact?
Becca Toth: Today, we view AI as an embedded capability across our marketing automation ecosystem rather than a standalone technology. It supports everything from audience segmentation and content creation to campaign orchestration, lead scoring and performance analysis. The goal isn’t simply to automate tasks — it’s to help our teams make better decisions, move faster and deliver more relevant experiences at scale.
The greatest business impact comes from improving both personalization and efficiency simultaneously. Historically, organizations often had to choose between highly personalized engagement and scalable execution. AI is helping bridge that gap by enabling marketers to tailor messaging, content and experiences to specific audiences while reducing the manual effort required to do so. That allows teams to focus more of their time on strategy, creativity and customer engagement rather than operational execution.
MTI: You’ve often described AI as a tool that enhances human capability rather than replacing it. What skills, mindsets, or leadership traits do you believe marketers need to develop to remain effective in AI-enabled organizations?
Becca Toth: AI will change the work of marketing, but it will not eliminate the need for strong marketers, and in many ways, it raises the bar.
As AI makes execution easier, the uniquely human skills become even more important. Marketers need a combination of skills including strategic judgment, customer empathy, creativity, analytical thinking and the ability to connect activity to business outcomes. They also need to be comfortable working across functions because growth is no longer owned by one team or one channel.
One of the most important mindsets is curiosity. AI-enabled organizations will move quickly, and marketers need to be willing to test, learn and adapt. They also need discernment. Just because AI can produce something does not mean it is the right message, the right strategy or the right customer experience.
Leadership also becomes more important. Modern marketing leaders must help teams move beyond activity-based thinking. The question is not simply, “How much did we produce?” Its, “Did we create relevance? Did we identify momentum? Did we help the business move faster and engage customers more intelligently?” Marketers who thrive will be those who use AI to amplify their thinking, not replace it.
MTI: Marketing is becoming more connected across the entire customer lifecycle, from demand generation and pipeline influence to retention and expansion. Looking ahead, what do you believe the marketing organization of the future will look like over the next five years?
Becca Toth: The marketing organization of the future will operate less like a campaign factory and more like the intelligence layer of the go-to-market engine.
For the last decade, revenue marketing was largely organized around execution: generating demand, optimizing channels, converting leads and measuring attribution. Those capabilities still matter, but the next decade will be organized around coordination. Marketing will play a larger role in signal detection, journey orchestration, cross-functional activation, AI-guided decision-making and revenue lifecycle management.
That is a significant operational shift. Buyers are moving across more channels, more communities and more sources of influence than ever before. Customer relationships are also becoming more complex, with retention, expansion and advocacy playing a larger role in growth.
Future marketing teams will need to bring clarity to that complexity. They will need to connect data to action, technology to experience, signals to timing and teams to outcomes. The modern CMO will not simply be a storyteller or demand generator. The CMO will be an architect of revenue orchestration.
The companies that build this capability will move faster, engage buyers and customers more intelligently, and create more durable growth. Revenue marketing is no longer only about generating demand but orchestrating growth itself.
Recommended MarTech Insights: MarTech Top Voice Interview with Natalia Vasilyeva, EVP Marketing and Strategy at Anzu
For media inquiries, you can write to our MarTech Newsroom at Sales@intentamplify.com
About Becca Toth
Becca Toth is chief marketing officer at SugarAI, where she leads the company’s global strategy with a focus on driving revenue growth, strengthening brand differentiation and delivering customer centric experiences. With more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software and B2B marketing, she is known for building high performing teams and executing integrated strategies that accelerate demand generation and customer acquisition. Prior to SugarAI, Becca served as chief marketing officer at Hyland, overseeing global marketing across products, industries and regions while helping scale brand awareness and support rapid business growth.
