Hello, everyone! I joined Forrester a month ago, in July, and I must say that I am in awe of this place. I am extremely thrilled to join the B2B marketing executive services team. Here, I will partner with CMOs and marketing leaders and support them in their marketing strategy, planning, and transformation initiatives.

Organisations worldwide are embarking on a journey to excel in an environment rife with fast-evolving marketing and customer dynamics. It is critical that they accelerate at-scale product launches and build a structured yet agile, innovative, and efficient marketing engine. They must align marketing to business objectives to fuel the growth agenda. I am excited to cover the topmost priorities for global marketing executives and CMOs at customer-obsessed organisations.

We find that organisations increasingly consider marketing as a strategic partner in growth and not just a cost function. Marketing must build differentiated brand experiences and thought leadership, driving revenue pipeline and influencing business growth. As marketing platforms, processes, and frameworks continue to evolve and the martech landscape becomes increasingly complex and cluttered, it mandates evolution of capabilities within the regional and corporate marketing teams to leverage them well.

A CMO’s role is challenging to say the least. Global business is becoming fiercely competitive. With the potential impact that marketing has on business growth, the stakes are very high, and thus, marketing needs to be right the first time, every time, and continue to deliver value. On the other hand, a CMO must focus on building high-performance teams that are not just aligned to business goals but also are passionate about growth and tuned to scale.

As a former CMO, these are some of the top areas that consumed my attention:

  • Marketing strategy, transformation, and planning: As a CMO, I was always looking for ways that I could drive greater alignment with business objectives while collaboratively working with sales, product, and the revenue functions within the organisation to partner in growth objectives.
  • Striving to design a future-ready, innovative, and high-performance marketing organisation within my company: This also involved a focus on building an efficient operating model that can scale, in view of the growth expectations, in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.
  • Articulating marketing’s contribution to business goals: This entailed making impactful communication on the message of the brand to both internal and external stakeholders, as well as building strategies for content, campaigns, and messaging across diverse channels and media that are effective and impactful.

These priorities, along with brand and communications, campaigns, and content, are likely to be key focus areas for your organisation. There is tremendous value in what marketing brings to the table and the possibilities it can unlock for your firm. I am excited to work closely with all of you — marketing executives and CMOs — on areas that consume your attention and are your key priorities by partnering with you on marketing initiatives and growth and leveraging Forrester research. Looking forward to speaking soon!