B2B marketing is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the proliferation of data and the resulting changes in buyer behavior, marketing technology growth will be inevitable. Frontline marketers are now tasked with keeping up with buyers who increasingly prefer self-guided, anonymous buying journeys, and who are more likely to be part of a buying group rather than an individual lead. To address these shifts, Forrester is introducing lifecycle revenue marketing (LRM) as a framework that enables customer-obsessed frontline marketers to truly embrace the customer throughout their entire lifecycle across the full range of buying motions and opportunity types.
However, addressing these changes in buyer behavior has been challenging for many marketers who have turned to primary marketing technology platforms like marketing automation and account-based marketing, along with a variety of point solutions to fill any gaps in features and capabilities. This approach often leads to complexity, budget bloat, and feature overlap between these technologies. As we enter a new period of economic uncertainty, the overlap of features and limited budgets is forcing marketing leaders to make difficult decisions.
To address these challenges, Forrester predicts that the leaders of marketing automation platforms (MAP) and account-based marketing (ABM) platforms will graduate from their respective markets into a new category platform called the "B2B marketing revenue platform." This new technology in marketing will align to the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall™, enabling frontline marketers to embrace customers not only through acquisition but also retention, cross-sell, and upsell. To address the changes in buyer behavior, the modern marketing platform should include a comprehensive buying group orientation that moves beyond leads and accounts, propensity, fit modeling, and analysis capabilities to focus high-value opportunities, data management capabilities that allow marketers to select the data they prefer from independent sources, omnichannel capabilities that deliver true real-time buyer enablement, and full lifecycle performance assessment to measure marketing impact and influence.
The Emergence of the B2B Revenue Marketing Platform report provides an in-depth view into the challenges that marketers are facing, the specific areas in which both the leading ABM platforms as well as the MAP platforms continue to innovate, and why this collision of marketing technology platforms is inevitable and imminent. By aligning LRM with marketing enablement platforms, organizations can better address changes in buyer behavior, reduce complexity and feature overlap, and achieve more efficient and effective marketing outcomes.
Download the report here.
