# Kimberly Storin

Kimberly Storin is a CMO who writes about marketing strategy, creator partnerships, sponsorships, and building brand campaigns around business goals.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kimberly-storin/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin
- Median of last 9 posts: 110 reactions, 20 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: leadership
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

Useful for explaining how CMOs evaluate creator and sponsorship deals against business goals.

- Best for: Senior brand leaders or creator partnership campaigns needing buyer-side perspective on sponsorship fit.
- Not for: Consumer creator work, product tutorials, follower-count selection, or direct-to-consumer sales campaigns.
- Check first: Confirm availability and whether they offer a public sponsorship, rate card, or booking policy.

### Takeaways

- Creator pitches should start with the brand's business problem, not the creator's personality.
- Brands should buy courage rather than risk mitigation.
- Sponsorships earn their place in moments audiences remember.

## Main ideas

- **Creator pitches should start with the brand's business problem, not the creator's personality**: Storin's repeated advice to creators is to stop leading with who they are. Ask what the brand's business actually needs before pitching, read recent earnings reports to find the pressure the buyer is under this year, and know whether you are selling broad mental availability or credible reach inside one micro-segment. The question she says creators keep bringing her is how to go from a $30K deal to a $300K one, and her answer is that a bigger following alone does not get you there.
- **Brands should buy courage rather than risk mitigation**: Storin relays an argument from Daniel Granger, founder and CEO of Oxford Road, who spoke to her team: marketers who make risk mitigation their primary objective have already sabotaged the campaign. Granger's advice was to treat creators and podcasters like salespeople you have hired, give them room to work (his phrase, repeated by creators, was 'let us cook'), and start with as much freedom as possible before adding restrictions. He also suggested spending enough to move the baseline and measuring with a 'how did you hear about us' survey that asks which show, using predictive text for show-by-show visibility.
- **Sponsorships earn their place in moments audiences remember**: Storin argues that sponsorship value comes from attachment to specific, memorable moments rather than logo exposure. Her model has two parts: being found, through a sponsor read that puts the brand in front of listeners, and being present, through the product appearing inside a conversation the brand does not control. She notes in one case that the show was already using the product before the sponsorship existed.
- **Make B2B marketing emotional and funny, then prove it moved revenue**: Storin describes a personal mission to make B2B marketing emotional, resonant, and fun. She pairs that with two business outcomes the work still has to deliver: a shift in what people think the company is and does, and sustainable long-term revenue growth. Her method is to build the campaign as a sequence and route every comedic beat through a real product capability.
- **The budget case is about the next dollar, not the last one**: Storin frames the modern CMO as a capital allocator who competes against product, sales, and R&D for the same money, and says planning season is where that role gets tested. Her advice is to stop walking in defending past spend and instead bring three things: one chart that puts brand perception, pipeline, and revenue on a single timeline to show whether brand moves pipeline and where demand spend is working; market insights about where buyers move before they ever talk to the company, including the dark funnel and the AI answers shaping their shortlist; and explicit trade-offs, since every big bet is funded by something that was stopped.
- **Build an M, not a ladder**: Storin describes the path to CMO as an M shape rather than a straight line: two deep legs of real specialization connected by a broad base of generalist knowledge and strategic judgment. The trap, in her telling, is that the specialty which earned a first promotion is also what keeps someone there, because people hire for what they have already seen you do. Her method is to go deep in one leg for a few years, deliberately move to a second knowing you will be a beginner again, and keep a running record of what transfers between domains so the connections become a career narrative.
- **Turn a customer cohort into owned campaign content**: Storin describes building an application-driven program and then converting it into an unscripted docuseries rather than a set of one-off testimonials. The series is organized around tensions the audience recognizes, and she ties her own interest in the subject to being a small business owner herself.

## Work to read

- [Most creators pitch brands with a vibe, not a growth strategy](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_most-creators-pitch-brands-with-a-vibe-rather-activity-7512864885958131713-2Ri_)
- [The biggest problem in marketing is a lack of courage](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_the-biggest-problem-in-marketing-is-a-lack-activity-7515891293311643648-4QgE)
- [Good Hang sponsorship: Be Found and Be Present](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_the-best-part-of-every-good-hang-episode-activity-7516494630734008320-TYfv)
- [Jay Schwedelson goes all in on Zoom](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_jay-schwedelson-is-going-all-in-on-zoom-activity-7514329597954506753-dsf2)
- [The path to CMO isn't a straight line—it's an M](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_the-path-to-cmo-isnt-a-straight-line-it-activity-7521939081258344448-fMbJ)
- [The CFO funds the next marketing dollar, not the last one](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kimberlystorin_the-cfo-funds-the-next-marketing-dollar-activity-7519403067054841856-jOqe)

## Brand relationships

- **Zoom** (employment)
- **Good Hang** (sponsor)
- **Eventastic** (sponsor)
- **Major League Baseball** (sponsor)
- **Smart Girl Dumb Questions** (disclosed_partnership)
- **John Henion** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Oxford Road** (mention)

## Partnerships

Kimberly Storin works the buying side of creator partnerships, not the selling side. The reviewed posts show a CMO who commissions host partnerships, ambassador programs, show sponsorships, and branded series at Zoom, and who describes what they expect a partner to bring. Storin also endorses giving creators as much freedom as possible up front and adding restrictions later, rather than briefing by command-and-control. Nothing in the evidence is a public sponsorship offer, rate card, or booking policy from Storin personally, so read the formats below as the structures Storin has described publicly and the requirements that follow from them, not as a menu a brand can purchase.

## Alternatives

- Jennifer Brown: Choose Jennifer Brown when the session needs a clear argument for treating creators as long-term brand builders rather than paid placements. Their posts take a position a creator audience can carry into a negotiation: judging a single post against click-through, CPM, or short-term conversion thresholds misses what produces durable results — audience trust, message alignment, consistent visibility, repetition, and storytelling that compounds. The second post sharpens the usage-rights conversation: if a brand sees enough value in creator content to put advertising spend behind it, that reinforces why those rights have value, so exposure is a benefit and paid usage is a separate commercial asset. For a track about moving from smaller deals to larger ones, that is the vocabulary creators need when a brand offers reach instead of a rights fee.
- Jamie Gutfreund: Choose Jamie Gutfreund when the track needs the market and organizational picture around creator commerce. Their posts describe fragmentation directly: brands split affiliate, social, paid media, PR, and ecommerce across teams so nobody owns the outcome, illustrated by a brand that mistook its own paid creator campaign for organic enthusiasm and offered the same creator free products. The post cites affiliate marketing at an estimated $241 billion in U.S. commerce, with affiliate spending growing 11.3% against 6.7% ecommerce growth, and quotes LTK's Amber Venz Box and WPP Media's Patricia Marangé on why a single owner with enough seniority matters. They also run a conference session on creator commerce and publish a side-by-side market map of the platforms in the category, which maps closely onto a platform planning its own event track and wanting speakers who already draw that audience.
- Caroline Moylan: Choose Caroline Moylan when the session needs someone who executes growth work and can show measured results. Their posts describe a fractional growth engagement for a financial services company where website traffic grew 21% month over month (430% overall) to more than 6,500 users and 8,300 sessions, the founder's LinkedIn impressions rose 1,650%, and 47 qualified leads came in, alongside a claim of ranking first on Google for all brand terms. The second post argues that premium DTC brands are testing LinkedIn for the consideration stage, citing 59% of B2B buyers consuming creator content on LinkedIn more than on any other platform and 94% of B2B marketers saying LinkedIn influencer marketing drives direct sales. That is useful material for a track about where creator budgets are moving next.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/