Career
The Boston B2B Marketing Scene
Boston is a quietly excellent B2B marketing town. Here is the network that actually matters and how to plug into it.
Boston gets less B2B marketing attention than San Francisco or New York, but the talent density is higher than either on a per-capita basis. HubSpot, Wayfair, Toast, Klaviyo, Drift, Mendix, Acquia, EverTrue, Iterable, and dozens of mid-stage B2B companies have built and exported world-class marketing leaders.
The communities that matter: the Pavilion Boston chapter (formerly Sales Hacker), the Boston Product community, ProductCamp Boston, MarketingProfs B2B Forum (when it lands here), and informal CMO dinners hosted by VC firms (General Catalyst, Bessemer, Battery, OpenView). The local chapter of the CMO Club is small but influential.
If you are new to Boston B2B marketing, start by attending one Pavilion event and one VC-hosted dinner per quarter. Build a five-person peer group of CMOs at companies one stage ahead of yours. The community is small enough that two years of consistent showing up makes you a known quantity to recruiters and founders alike.
The recruiter ecosystem in Boston is strong: Charles Aris, True Search, Heidrick, and a handful of boutique firms (Daversa, Caldwell Partners). Most CMO searches in Boston B2B run through one of these. Make sure each of them has your name, your story, and your current criteria on file. They are the front door to most C-level openings.