By Peter O'Neill

I like I like to be prepared. Next Monday I give (present? perform?
recite?) my first Forrester Teleconference about field marketing. See http://www.forrester.com/rb/teleconference/field_marketing_professionals_must_adapt_to_new/q/id/6065/t/1

As I am busy on other tasks the rest of the week, I have completed my slides and prepared speaker notes already. I have had some
meetings with field marketers over the last weeks and I’ve put together my
thoughts into this teleconference but I hope that I will kick off some more
discussions among us. I plan to do many more structured interviews with field
marketing professionals over the next months and then build a whole library of
research about how to leverage social computing, better understand how the job
is changing, and even help to develop a new job description, mapping tasks and
priorities in a similar manner to how my illustrious Forrester colleague Tom
Grant has worked the Product Manager role. Remember the Forrester tagline in
this context: “making leaders successful every day”.

Next week I will try to paint a picture that the rate of
adoption of digital marketing for B2B technology buyers and sellers is becoming
a self-fulfilling prophecy: that B2B technology buyers show a strong social
Technographics profile: and vendors and service providers are investing in
digital marketing.

But does it all make that much sense? Are we moving that
quickly into a world where companies only communicate and compete in the cloud?
A virtual world where the most critical success factor will be the creativity
of web agencies and designers, hopefully briefed appropriately by product
managers and marketing people.  A virtual
world where there does not seem to be the need to have someone in the field
communicating out or inbound.  Is field
marketing about to be dis-intermediated????

So, here is in invitation. If you would like to contribute
to my research on this topic, you have the chance here to contact me directly. I
look forward to hearing from you. 

Always keeping you informed! Peter