Natural Mystic

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 watched the new movie about Bob Marley, One Love this weekend. It’s excellent, so I had to pick a tune from the great man to give this newsletter edition its title. So, welcome to “Natural Mystic”.

As I tried to shoehorn a marketing topic into the song title and the idea of “natural mystics,” I obviously thought of Forrester and some recent research that I recently stumbled upon.

BTW - if you listen to the podcast, you’d have heard some of this rant.

As Mr Marley says:

I’m on dodgy ground comparing Forrester to Bob Marley, but I heard some new terminology their CMO advisory practice uses to describe our practice: “Frontline Marketing.”

In this recent blog post, John Arnold, Principal Analyst, suggests that all of us cool kids should be grooving to this as “the evolution of B2B growth teams”, and I’d love to know what you think.

Here is their definition from the same blog post:

If you follow my work, you’ll have probably read or heard me rant about my view that marketing’s job is to create ART: Awareness, Revenue, and Trust.

So when I read “responsible for buyer audience engagement and pipeline and revenue outcomes”, I thought, isn’t that just the job of ALL of B2B marketing?

What the f**k is everyone else doing?

Maybe there is semantics here - as the blog post says, “most accountable”.

So, are they referring to the people in marketing who care the most about engaging the buyer and revenue? Presumably, then, the demand or campaign team?

This is mated to Forresters’ term “lifecycle revenue marketing,” which is apparently the union of Demand Generation and ABM. I would probably also argue that this is just good B2B marketing.

Anyway, according to our Forrester natural mystic, lifecycle revenue marketing “is not executed by one team or leader but rather by a coalition of frontline marketing functions working together to break through silos and achieve revenue growth together.”

Ummm… marketing done by the marketing team?

I’m usually a fan of Forrester's work, but is this another trend, like Agile marketing, that is just good B2B marketing? Are either of these terms really necessary?

For example, the author goes on to say this:

Ummm… a well-run marketing team creates growth?

Maybe I am missing something, and there is a difference between frontline marketing and the folks who don’t have an active connection with the audience. Maybe back-office marketing? The people in marketing operations?

My view, as I’ve shared with marketing teams I’ve led is a bastardization of a quote from Jan Carlzon, the longtime CEO of the Scandinavian airline, SAS, he said:

I suggest that:

Maybe that’s frontline marketing?

I’d love to know what you think, maybe I’ll ask Jeff Clark when he’s back on the podcast.

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

Groove on for more on this week’s topic….

Our Beat

Some content from closer to home.

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

I could have chosen so many Bob Markey tracks; for example, I picked “So Much Things to Say” for the podcast, but go on, channel your inner natural mystic this Monday.