Strategic Foresight Is The CMO’s Real Job. Everything Else Is Execution.

Revenue Rehab

This week on Revenue Rehab, Brandi Starr is joined by Laura Patterson, a data-driven growth strategist and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, who believes strategic foresight—not campaign execution—is the CMO’s real job, and she’s here to prove it. In this episode, Laura challenges the industry’s fixation on activity and trend-chasing, arguing that revenue leaders must shift their focus from reactive marketing to proactive market-making by interpreting the signals that shape the future. By exposing the pitfalls of “random acts of marketing” and sharing actionable strategies, Laura makes a compelling case for why true leadership demands more than just looking in the rearview mirror. Ready to step out of the weeds and into bold strategy, or will you stick to business as usual?

Episode Type: Problem Solving Industry analysts, consultants, and founders take a bold stance on critical revenue challenges, offering insights you won’t hear anywhere else. These episodes explore common industry challenges and potential solutions through expert insights and varied perspectives.

Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:

Topic #1: Strategic Foresight is the CMO’s Core Mandate [00:00]

Laura Patterson asserts that the true role of the CMO is strategic foresight—actively interpreting market signals to drive the business forward—instead of focusing on executional tasks like campaign management. “If your strategic plan is just a mirror of historical data, you're not owning the market, you are in fact reacting to it,” she argues. This challenges the conventional wisdom that CMOs should be operational leaders, pushing the audience to reimagine marketing leadership as market-making rather than maintenance.

Topic #2: Countering CEO and Board Pressure to Chase Trends [00:08:33]

Laura tackles the challenge many CMOs face from CEOs and boards demanding action on the latest trends (e.g., AI), even when it’s not strategically aligned. She insists CMOs must lead with business value, stating, “If you're going to be the leader, then you have to be willing to take a little risk and have a response that says... what about what we're trying to achieve for the organization?” The discussion centers on how revenue leaders can reframe these conversations to focus on business goals, even when faced with top-down mandates to pursue shiny objects.

Topic #3: Using Market Signals for Proactive Strategy [00:17:21]

Laura advocates for harnessing both internal and external market signals—such as airline reservations or box orders—as tools for strategic foresight, rather than relying solely on the company’s own lagging indicators. She challenges the common practice of dashboard-driven decision making, asserting that by the time trends appear in company data, "you're already kind of behind the eight ball." The debate explores how CMOs, especially in smaller organizations, can identify forward-looking market signals to anticipate change and shape strategy, not just react.

The Wrong Approach vs. Smarter Alternative

The Wrong Approach: “They try to reverse engineer. What I mean by that is they try to reverse engineer what they're doing to an outcome that is a mistake. Right. It doesn't start at the bottom, it needs to start at the top.” – Laura Patterson

Why It Fails: Reverse-engineering from current activities up to business outcomes leads to weak alignment and rationalizes existing work, rather than ensuring marketing efforts are directly tied to organizational goals. This approach results in disconnected tactics, poor measurement of impact, and a continual cycle of busyness without meaningful progress.

The Smarter Alternative: Start with clear business outcomes and define success at the top level—then build your marketing strategies and initiatives to directly support those outcomes. Measure and communicate value based on how each initiative contributes to creating customer value and competitive advantage, rather than backfilling activities into justifications after the fact.

The Most Damaging Myth

The Myth: “If we just do more campaigns, adopt more tools, generate more content, we'll eventually hit on something that works. And that is the myth that activity equals progress. Right? And that's not true.” – Laura Patterson

Why It’s Wrong: Laura explains that this belief leads companies to chase trends, pile on campaigns, and stay busy with random acts of marketing—all of which result in misalignment, wasted energy, and diluted impact. Instead of delivering on strategic business outcomes, marketing teams become stuck in endless execution, masking the absence of a clearly defined, customer-centric strategy that truly drives growth.

What Companies Should Do Instead: Companies should pause and get serious about evaluating their marketing work through the lens of impact and deliberate, value-driven moves. Focus on creating a customer-centric strategy that’s rooted in core competencies and value propositions, and ensure every activity aligns directly to measurable business outcomes—rather than defaulting to more activity for its own sake.

The Rapid-Fire Round

1. Finish this sentence: If your company has this problem, the first thing you should do is _ “Stop. Pause and take a breath. Audit whether your marketing activities directly link to business outcomes. If you can’t draw a clear line, it’s time to halt unnecessary spending and effort until you have that clarity.” – Laura Patterson
2. What’s one red flag that signals a company has this problem—but might not realize it yet? “If your marketing measures don’t tie back to actual business results and you’re only reporting on activities or outputs, that’s a major warning sign you’re stuck in execution mode.”
3. What’s the most common mistake people make when trying to fix this? “Reverse engineering—trying to justify existing marketing activities by retroactively connecting them to business outcomes—instead of starting from the top with what business success looks like, then working downward into strategy and execution.”
4. What’s the fastest action someone can take today to make progress? “Take your top three marketing initiatives and ask: Do we know exactly how each one creates customer value and competitive advantage? If you can’t answer with a confident ‘yes’ (or rate them a 9 or 10), it’s time to rethink those priorities immediately.”

Buzzword Banishment

Laura’s buzzwords to banish are "pivot" and "AI powered." She criticizes "pivot" for being overused, often without a true understanding of what it really entails, even admitting she's guilty of using it herself but with proper intent. "AI powered" is singled out because it's become ubiquitous in every conversation, to the point where it has lost clear meaning and is used without critical examination of its actual value or application.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurapattersonvem/

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marketingtransformation

• X: https://x.com/VisionEdgeMktg

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/VisionEdgeMarketing

• Podcast: https://visionedgemarketing.com/whats-your-edge-latest-episodes/

• Website: https://visionedgemarketing.com/

• Email: [email protected]

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