CMOs: The B-to-B Marketing Model Is Changing. Are Your Marketing Disciplines Evolving With It?

B-to-b marketing is under the gun to change, and quickly, to respond to changing sales and market needs. Instead of simply changing the boxes on an org chart, the new marketing model requires a new approach that considers the disciplines and competencies that will be required. Six core disciplines are undergoing change:

Strategy: The discipline that builds the go-to-market (GTM) marketing framework. Compressed planning cycles and the need to react quickly will elevate the importance of strategy as a competency over the next five years. Five to 10 years ago, most CMOs had a strong agency background. This is less true today, and we are seeing more business-savvy people with a deep understanding of strategy.

Communications: The discipline that builds a framework for strategic marketing positioning, which will transform how we manage social media and content. Communications has the opportunity not only to be the developer of content and social media, but to create operational strategies and frameworks that will enable enterprise content strategy and social media operations.

Portfolio: The offering, strategy and interlock discipline. There is more than one way to go to market. The discipline of product marketing is moving toward persona- and solution-based portfolio marketing, which will require more enablement. Portfolio marketing will continue to drive interlock across core enterprise GTM processes.

Demand: The discipline that creates and enables demand creation. This discipline will require closer integration across inbound, outbound and sales-driven demand. The rearchitected demand waterfall and the demand center model are essential to create a holistic view of all demand sources and to gain leverage through shared program execution capabilities.

Operations: The discipline that provides the framework for marketing infrastructure and measurement. The role of marketing operations is broadening. Increased investment in marketing automation and marketing resource management technologies will be required in order to scale operations, enable global processes and provide new market and buyer insights.

Delivery: The discipline that provides the capability to deliver marketing to multiple channels. Delivery refers not to a department but a capability within marketing roles – i.e. how we deliver marketing. Marketing delivery is changing rapidly; the way in which we publish content today is very different from how we’ll be doing it in the future – with mobile, the Web and other types of social media.