Editorial
The Gist
- Evolve marketing roles. Frontline marketing redefines traditional B2B roles, focusing teams directly on revenue and engagement outcomes.
- Simplify team structure. It proposes a unified team approach, potentially streamlining operations but risking oversimplification of specialized roles.
- Watch and evaluate. While Frontline B2B Marketing merges various marketing aspects, its true effectiveness in simplifying processes remains to be seen.
I have been digging into a term Forrester has recently been using: “frontline marketing,” and I can’t decide whether we need to pay attention to it or let this one pass when it comes to B2B marketing.
I’m normally a fan of Forrester's work. As a longtime CMSWire reader, you might recall the buzz around "persuasive content" that the good folks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried to ignite a decade or more ago. I, for one, was excited, and I still own the .com domain.
But it didn’t stick, and I’ve just spent an unfruitful 45 minutes trying to find any contemporary reference Forrester has made to the term in the intervening years. Oh yes, of course, there are plenty of old gated reports from back in the day, but after a little buzz, everyone seems to have moved on.
Related Article: Master Your B2B Content Strategy Like a Pro
Defining Frontline B2B Marketing
So is frontline B2B marketing a flash in the same Forrester pan?
In this Forrester blog post, Principal Analyst John Arnold describes frontline B2B marketing as “The Evolution of B2B Growth Teams,” and, as Arnold seems to be a mover and shaker in Forrester's B2B CMO Strategies practice, he’s a chap worth listening to.
If you’ve not come across the term yet, here is the definition:
“Frontline marketing is Forrester’s term that encapsulates the B2B marketing teams responsible for buyer audience engagement and most accountable to pipeline and revenue outcomes.”
Initial Skepticism and Agile Marketing
My first reaction was a little skeptical.
In B2B marketing, aren’t we all “responsible for buyer audience engagement and pipeline and revenue”?
Being skeptical about this sort of thing isn’t unusual for me. For example, I am not a huge fan of agile marketing; I think a good B2B marketing team are naturally agile, as is the whole practice of marketing. We didn’t need to learn this from the more structured world of software development (a world I am very familiar with as a former developer and product manager).
Related Article: How an Agile Marketing Process Makes Good Marketing Teams Great
The Role of Accountability in Marketing
If you’ve read any of my stuff before, you may know I bang on about the goal of B2B marketing is to create ART (awareness, revenue and trust), so I am not sure I see the point — aren’t we all frontline marketers? Like we are all agile marketers?
But I think the key to this is the phrase “most accountable” in Forrester’s definition.
While the whole marketing team may be marching to the beat of creating ART, it's likely that within the structure of a large marketing team, there will be a group more accountable as the hunter-gatherers of revenue.
Related Article: How to Troubleshoot Your Third-Party Demand Gen Program
Comparing Marketing Teams and Strategies
I’ve seen these teams called “demand generation,” “growth marketing,” or maybe “field marketing,” which, in common with how Arnold describes "frontline marketing," are critical to the success of our marketing investment.
They are the tip of our marketing spear.
Or, as Arnold refers to them, “a linchpin in the company’s core B2B customer-obsessed growth engine strategy," which is a bit more Forrester than talking about spears.
I’m also not a huge fan of account-based marketing (ABM) being a thing; like my occasional rant on agile marketing, it should be a natural marketing motion for some B2B categories to be target account-focused. And so, another positive I’ve picked up from Arnold’s work is that it smooshes together “demand, account-based, field, and customer marketing.”
Related Article: I’m Not a Growth Marketer
Potential and Challenges of Frontline Marketing
Splendid, one ring to rule them all?
I think I might be warming to this.
Jan Carlzon, the longtime CEO of the Scandinavian airline SAS, is quoted as saying, “If you're not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” In the past, I have nicked it and bent it to fit my view of marketing, saying, “If you're not creating ART in marketing, your job is to be serving someone who is.”
I wonder if this is the sentiment of frontline marketing. Like the Carlzon quote, it describes a way to focus the team on serving the customer and business goals. “If you're not working in frontline marketing, your job is to be serving someone who is.”
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This should impact how we organize our teams. I’ve created demand generation, field and growth teams in the past, then had product marketing, marketing operations, content and creative teams support them (would they then be called “back-office marketing” in this model?). I can visualize a similar org chart, a head of frontline marketing seems like it could be a thing.
It also tightly tied to the Forrester-coined term “lifecycle revenue marketing,” which, of course, is:
“A customer-obsessed growth strategy for frontline marketing that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle and the full range of buying motions and opportunity types, from initial purchase to retention, from transactional to transformational.”
Implications for B2B Marketing
I can’t claim to be fluent in Forrester, but translated, I think this means that the remit for our frontline team includes not just the various demand generation and growth marketing techniques, tools and activities that I implied earlier with my reference to the "tip of the spear" but also customer marketing and retention.
In fact, anything we do and anyone that touches anyone, from the cradle to the grave of our prospect and customer relationships.
Questions still remain: Does this also includes channel and partner marketing and how much of the product marketing discipline does this marketing super-group also absorb?
Related Article: ABM in 2022: Make It the Year of Smarter Account Based Marketing
Conclusion: To Adopt or Not to Adopt Frontline B2B Marketing?
But, I am torn.
On the one hand, I’m attracted to the idea of simplifying the discipline of B2B marketing, as it’s bloated with acronyms and sometimes conflicting best practices and tearing down the silos that have sprung up as a result. So, I can see this as a cleaner organization and approach.
However, because that definition encompasses so much of what we do, you could argue that it just describes good B2B marketing, and we’d still need to have disciplines and departments within that and that it doesn’t really help makes things simpler, it’s a just another layer of, frankly, bullshit we need to contend with as B2B marketers.
Whichever it is, it’s worth a watch. I realize that Tolkien may not be the best example to use as an analogy for simplifying a story, but I’d welcome “one ring to rule them all.”
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