- The Beat by Rockstar CMO
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- Cross The Tracks
Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.
Hello!
Thanks for opening this email, I hope you’ve had a good week.
I regularly listen to the Forrester “What it Means” podcast, which covers a wide range of B2B topics, this week, for example, they were talking about mainframes, which was surprisingly not as dull as it sounds.
However, more relevant to this newsletter, last week, they were having a deep conversation about “transforming revenue processes to be more customer-centric” in a very Forrrester’ey-type way, covering two of the hot topics du jour for marketing, revenue operations and making customers the centre of our world.
The revenue operations topic pulls at the thread of marketing and sales working together, and bringing this up means we are moments away from talking about the rise of the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) and the death of the CMO (which I covered last week). And when it comes to customers, how far does marketing go in the ongoing relationship with them?
Typically, we are driven, funded and measured on the acquisition of customers, and naturally, if we are honest, as we have no budget or motivation from the business, our commitment to the customer journey fades after the sales are made.
As I’ve often shared, my marketing mantra is creating ART (Awareness, Revenue and Trust), and in truth, most CEOs and leaders I’ve worked with would rather it be RAT, as revenue comes first.
Anyway, back to the Forrester podcast, as I listened, my mind drifted to the idea that B2B marketing needs to be cross-functional.
Cross-functional marketing is already a thing. It typically describes a team within marketing made up of different marketing functions, sometimes described as “tiger teams” or campaign teams. A group of marketers with different skills, from different organisational silos within the marketing team, like demand, creative, product etc.
However, what I am thinking of as “cross-functional” is beyond marketing and crossing into other business functions.
Why is there a buzz about revenue operations? As I mentioned, revenue is what leaders care about, so why do we, as marketers, stop measuring once we’ve flung a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) over the wall to sales?
We need to understand what happens after that, get into the business of sales, specifically apply our measurement smarts and provide a service to the business that you might call revenue operations.
While we are knocking on other departments' doors, let’s get our cross-functional game on with customer success and account management. We all know the value of case studies and advocates, so how can we help nurture customers to that stage of the journey?
That’s what I think is cross-functional marketing. We think of marketing as a service to the broader business.
And, it's a great excuse to use one of my favourite jazz funk tunes as the subject line for this: Maceo and the Macks' “Cross the Tracks.” It was originally released in 1975, but my memory comes from 1987. It was also in the soundtrack for the video game GTA: San Andreas, which maybe makes it cooler!
Thanks again for opening and reading this far, I hope you like the links below and please hit reply if you have any ideas or feedback.
Enjoy your week!
Cheers!
Ian
Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO
Street Knowledge
Some good stuff on this week’s topic….
Our Beat
Some content from closer to home.
