Putting the Revenue in Marketing Technology

As B2B marketing continues to evolve, addressing shifts in buyer behavior has become a top priority for marketing leaders. These shifts, driven by the proliferation of data, include the rise of buying groups and the preference for self-guided, anonymous or pseudonymous buying journeys. After working closely with our practitioner and tech service provider clients and surveying the broader B2B community over the past several years to understand and analyze these shifts, Forrester is now 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.  

To keep up with changes in buyer behavior, many front-line marketers have turned to two primary marketing technology platforms (Marketing Automation and Account-based Marketing), accompanied by a variety of point solutions to fill any gaps in features and capabilities within their primary technology stack. However, this approach is often cumbersome and complex, and the scope-creep resulting in growing feature overlap between these technologies is causing budgets to become bloated and unsustainable. As we enter a new period of economic uncertainty, the overlap of features and limited budgets are forcing marketing leaders to make difficult decisions.
 

Aligning LRM and Marketing Enablement Platforms 

The result of this economic uncertainty, changes in buyer behavior, as well as organizations embracing a comprehensive LRM– aligned approach, will result in a new technology category platform that addresses the needs of the modern front-line marketer.  Forrester believes that the leaders of the marketing automation platform (MAP) and account-based marketing (ABM) platforms will graduate from their respective markets into a new category we are calling the “B2B marketing revenue platform.” This platform will align to the B2B Revenue Waterfall, enabling front-line marketers to embrace customers not only through acquisition, but also retention, cross-sell, and upsell. To address the changes in buyer behavior, we believe 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. 
• Full lifecycle performance assessment to measure marketing impact and influence.  

Forrester clients can access our new B2B Revenue Marketing Platform report, that provides an in-depth view into the challenges that marketers are facing, as well as the specific areas in which both the leading ABM platforms as well as the MAP platforms continue to innovate, and why this collision course is inevitable and imminent.  I also encourage you to read the companion reports on Lifecycle Revenue Marketing which are linked below. 

Read Lifecycle Revenue Marketing Is The Future Of Frontline Growth For B2B Organizations to understand the way B2B marketing leaders must adopt lifecycle revenue marketing as a systemic change. 

Read Lifecycle Revenue Marketing Demands Collaboration Among Growth Teams to unpack the way demand, ABM, and customer marketing capabilities will need to unify to build long-term value among growth teams.