Telia Lithuania CMO: B2B Is More Challenging Than B2C

Interview with Lithuanian CMO of the year Vaida Jurkoniene from Telia.

Vaida Jurkoniene has spent two decades in marketing, with senior roles at Kraft Foods (Mondalez), TEO, Omnitel and Telia. She has been with Telia for more than nine years and now serves as Head of Marketing and Communications at Telia Lithuania. Earlier this year, she was named CMO of the Year 2025 by the Lithuanian Marketing Association, and will represent Lithuania in the European Marketing Leader 2026 process.

In this interview, she speaks with Hando Sinisalu about what makes a strong CMO, why B2B marketing often demands more patience than people expect, how sales and marketing can work better together, and where she sees marketing budgets moving next.

You were recently named CMO of the Year, so let me start there. If you had to hire a CMO yourself, let’s say you were the CEO or company president, what would you look for? What makes a good CMO today?

It’s never just one thing.

These days I often hear people say that experience no longer matters, but I don’t agree. I think experience is still very important, because every lesson helps. Marketing is one long experiment. You are constantly testing, and there is never one clear formula for how to do it well. So experience matters. Over the years, you learn a lot.

Then there are the personal qualities. In my case, one thing that has helped me is persistence. To be honest, being a survivor in marketing is quite rare. Patience matters too – patience in difficult situations, and an understanding that you are the one building your own reputation. In marketing, you are always proving yourself. You are also constantly explaining the value of marketing to the people around you: what it can do for the organisation, how it can help the business, and how it can act as the voice of the customer. For me, marketing is the voice of the customer.

That means you have to serve the customer properly, in every sense. It also means investing time and effort in relationships, especially with the CEO and CFO. If you join a new organisation, or if a new CEO arrives, you have to work hard to build that relationship. You need to understand the numbers and understand the company well enough to have an equal conversation with the leadership team.

It cannot be a case of doing your work and then simply coming for approval. That does not work. Trust takes time. You need regular conversations with your CEO to understand how they think, because the CEO sets the tone of the company. You may have your own views, but first you need to understand theirs. Then, over time, you may influence that thinking or you may change your own view as well. So it takes patience, effort and the ability not to get frustrated every time you feel that people do not fully understand marketing or undervalue it.

How much does a CMO need to remain a marketing expert? And how important is it to be a manager and leader of the team? What I hear from CMOs in bigger organisations is that over time they lose touch with the craft and become more like managers or internal politicians than marketing specialists.

That risk exists, of course. But it is also partly in your own hands, and I make a conscious effort not to lose touch.

I’m not a control freak, but I stay close to the work. My team knows when it makes sense to involve me, and I also ask them to keep me informed and to teach me. We share knowledge, and I stay hands-on in many areas. I still feel like a member of the team.

I’m involved in the bigger decisions, not every small one, of course, but I really try to balance leadership with involvement. I don’t think you can afford to become detached and simply play the role of team leader. Marketing is not as clearly defined as functions like finance or HR. It changes all the time. That is exactly why you need to stay close to what is happening.

And once you are in a senior marketing role, you usually see a broader picture than your team members do. That means you can guide them and point to areas they may not yet see. At the same time, they help keep you sharp.

Telia has both business customers and private consumers. If you compare B2B and B2C marketing at Telia, which is more challenging for you, and why?

B2B is more challenging.

One reason is that, in our case, B2B is a segment, while B2C carries more of the overall brand role. That brings both benefits and disadvantages. If you do it well, B2B can benefit a great deal from B2C because the brand is already known. Awareness is there, so in many ways the top of the funnel is already built.

But it has to be managed carefully. On the B2C side, you can often be bolder, more emotional and more creative. In B2B, there is usually more pressure around trust, reputation and business relevance.

And within B2B, the complexity differs depending on the audience. Enterprise customers need one kind of approach, while smaller companies need another. With enterprise clients, it is much more about relationship-building, and marketing often supports that by preparing strong materials, content and events. Events, especially, are becoming more difficult.

Why do you say events are becoming more difficult?

They are still valuable, but there are simply too many of them.

At least in Lithuania, after the pandemic everyone wanted to go out again, and the market filled up with events. Prices came down, access became easier, companies became more willing to pay for employees to attend, and in a way that reduced the value of the event itself.

If you want to create a strong event now, you really have to work for it. You have to build interest beforehand, warm people up before they arrive, and make sure there is a clear reason to attend. That makes it much harder than it used to be.

You probably know the large Telia digital event in Estonia. As far as I know, you do not organise something similar in Lithuania. Your strategy is different. Why did you choose not to build that kind of public mega-event?

Because our aim is different. We want a much closer setting for relationship-building with our customers.

Our event is free and invitation-only. It is a VIP event for our customers, and networking is a major focus. In Estonia, the format is more open. It is still a Telia event, but it is more public, and anyone can buy a ticket. We have chosen to keep our event exclusive.

Some time ago, we had a format that was closer to that, but it created tension between those who were invited for free and those who were not. At some point we decided to be very clear about what this event is for. It is about building relationships with key customers, and we want to stay focused on that.

It works well for us at the moment. It also allows us to create very focused content for CEOs, decision-makers in companies, government representatives and partners. It is not only about customers. It is also about the wider circle around them.

In B2B, one of the biggest challenges is sales and marketing alignment. Very often, sales see marketing as a support function – the people who prepare slides, bring business cards and T-shirts, and help with execution. Meanwhile, marketers say that marketing is more strategic because it understands the customer and creates value. What is your view? How do you get sales and marketing on the same page and reduce this unnecessary competition?

Sadly, this problem is very real.

I also have to admit that a lot depends on the marketing person working in B2B. In previous roles I had marketing people whose attitude was basically service, service, service. And of course they were loved by the B2B sales team. But in many cases the approach was wrong, and the execution could have been much stronger and much more effective if marketing had taken more of a lead.

Today I have a very ambitious person in B2B marketing who came from a start-up background. In start-ups, marketing is central, so she is a fighter. She is really trying to change that relationship.

It works in both directions. In some situations, especially with large customers, marketing does need to support sales closely. But in other cases, especially in the smaller segments where digital is becoming much more important, marketing should take a stronger lead. We still underestimate digital in B2B. When demand generation is the task, marketing has the skills for that.

So again, a lot depends on the person. But in general it comes down to building trust. Marketing has to prove itself. People need to see the value you bring, how you think, how you explain things. In a way, you have to sell yourself first.

Let’s stay with B2B. What is the biggest challenge for you there? What keeps you up at night?

The complexity. Telia has a huge portfolio, maybe 80 products. So the question is: how do you sell that level of complexity? My focus now is on understanding priorities and building strong value propositions.

As I said, large enterprise customers need one kind of approach, and each segment needs its own value proposition. You have to be able to answer a very basic question clearly: why Telia? What exactly is the value we bring to this customer? Sometimes I find that we still cannot answer that simply enough. And if we cannot explain it clearly ourselves, how can the customer understand it?

So one of the biggest tasks is to define the value proposition by segment, prioritise the portfolio, and come up with clear messages and strong sales arguments.

Another major issue in B2B is targeting. It is a huge challenge. You often do not know who the real decision-maker is or how to reach them. We are trying to solve that too.

Even in a local market like Lithuania, where people often assume everyone knows everyone, it is still difficult. If you think about the smaller business segment, we are talking about tens of thousands of customers. How do you identify the right ones? How do you find them?

And then, of course, there is the wider problem of attention. There is so much noise. You can send emails, direct mail, whatever you like, and people still may not notice.

Telia is an international company. How much do you reuse best practice from Sweden or Estonia, and how much do you need to create locally in Lithuania?

In reality, very little is centralised beyond the identity system.

We share the brand identity, the logo and the general system for how the brand should work. But beyond that, execution is local. One reason is that our product portfolio is different. Some core products are the same, but especially the more complex IT part of the business – which is strategically important for us now – is different. The language is different, the culture is different, and the market is different.

I’m happy to have a strong brand identity system because it would be expensive to build something like that on our own.

When you look at broader trends, agencies are complaining that AI and freelancers are taking work away from traditional creative agencies, while brands like Telia are building stronger in-house operations. At the same time, media is becoming more fragmented, with less money going into traditional channels and more going to platforms like Google, Meta and influencer marketing. When you think about your own budget, where do you see spending increasing in the future, and where do you expect it to decline?

Content is becoming more important, definitely.

Previously the big conversation was SEO. Now it is also about how content performs in new search environments and recommendation systems. That requires a different mindset. You need more content, and you need content written in different ways. You need to show authority, show expertise, use proof, use facts and figures, and make it easier for systems to understand what you stand for.

That means content becomes a kind of factory. You need the ability to produce a lot of it, consistently. And that changes the discussion around agencies as well.

I do not believe a large corporate brand can function well without agencies, but I do think we need a new way of working with them. We need to be much clearer about where the agency creates real value and what can be done in-house. Agencies are already using AI to improve efficiency, but clients do not necessarily see lower prices because of that. It is similar to what is happening in IT and software development. Everyone talks about efficiency, but the bills do not always reflect it.

At the same time, we are under pressure to find savings everywhere. Inflation is still there. Media costs keep rising, so we can do less and less with the same money. That pushes us to be more selective.

My view is that agencies should be used for the things that really require outside perspective: strategic work, major content pieces, conceptual thinking, guidance and consultancy. If we stay completely inside our own category, that is not healthy. Agencies can bring a broader view and knowledge from other industries. That is still valuable.

But a lot of the tactical production work, the constant stream of smaller assets and content, can be done in-house.

So if content is getting more attention, where do you think spending will come down? TV?

I still believe in TV. At least in the Baltic countries, TV is relatively affordable compared with the impact it can have. It remains one of the strongest channels if you really want to persuade people. It gives you sound, image and storytelling. It is still the most powerful medium in many ways.

So we are trying to defend that investment. Of course, we are being pushed to reduce it slightly, mainly because it no longer reaches younger audiences as effectively. That means we do have to shift part of the budget into online channels such as YouTube and Meta, simply because our target audience is broad. We need to reach both younger and older people. Everyone needs a connection.

We may reduce TV a little, but not dramatically. The bigger task is to work more effectively overall and free up money to invest elsewhere.