Times Like These

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

This week I have spent a fair amount of time buried in The B2B CMO Project, which is a research and community initiative founded by Jon Miller (best known as the co-founder of Marketo) and Sydney Sloan (former CMO of Salesloft and G2), which I believe they kicked off in March with a blog and a podcast.

But specifically, I have been noodling through a research report they published called “The New Rules for B2B Marketing Leadership in 2026” which is based on interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs at companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Sprout Social.

The reason - we’ve decided to cover this report on the next episode of the podcast, where Jeff and I will pick out our 5 f’in’ things that we liked from the report, and you can hear that on Saturday.

But aside from the shameless plug for the podcast, the reason for sharing it here is to wonder: are the rules for B2B marketing in 2026 really that new?

When David Meerman Scott wrote his seminal “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” back in 2007, as the blurb on the cover says, “The internet and social media have transformed the way companies communicate with consumers”.

That was a real change.

And I know that because I just plucked my 18-year-old copy from the blue section of my bookshelf, since I have followed the cool kids by keeping my books in color order - who doesn’t?

It might seem like a minor quibble, especially given its authors’ credibility, but in 2026, have the fundamentals really changed?

Don’t get me wrong, the report is excellent; it’s a great read, and the quotes add credibility and color from top-notch CMOs, and I’ve long enjoyed Jon Miller’s take on modern B2B marketing; it’s a fantastic compendium of a lot of what we are all reading and seeing in the discipline.

But really it’s a harbor tour of what we’ve all been talking about for at least 5 years. The hits are all there: the CMOs’ alignment with the C-suite, speaking their language and metrics, defending marketing’s reason for being, the value of investing in brand, the death of the MQL, that only 95% of your audience are not in market, and even personalization gets a little run-out.

Ah…. I hear you say, it’s AI, that’s a fundamental change that requires new rules - but is it?

Well, even according to this report, it’s not that fundamental, as yes, there is an excellent section on AI and a mention of it in the executive summary; it is not one of those hysterical reports that tells us the sky is falling down - it focuses on “Why the old playbook is finished”.

Meaning the playbook that tools like Marketo and HubSpot taught us - marketing automation, MQL-based funnels, lead scoring, demand generation programs.

Which we can go along with; this is not working - but if we consider that marketing’s job is still to stimulate demand, I am not sure if CMO alignment with the C-suite and speaking their language is going to help when marketing is not contributing to the commercial imperative to sell more stuff.

I wonder if this isn't “new rules” at all, but should be a return to “the rules from before we all got a bit fucked up on marketing automation”.

It is a sobering up.

Not just marketing, but all business leaders need to be in the same 12-step program that gets us all off the MQL crack pipe.

Otherwise, good luck with “Replace MQL reporting with a business-outcome dashboard focused on brand awareness and pipeline”.

It’s not about singing kumbaya with the C-suite, but a fundamental change across the revenue department back to the fundamentals.

As you might have gathered, I am a little conflicted; it’s an excellent report. I’d encourage you to take a look, but this week’s subject line comes from the Foo Fighters, Times Like These, for the lyric “It's times like these you learn to live again / It's times like these, time and time again”.

Time and time again?

What do you think? Hit reply, let me know.

Have a splendid week!

Cheers,

Ian

Classic Foos from 2002, did I mention I met them in or loocal bar on M Street in Washington when I lived and worked there? No? Maybe over beer….