How B2B Organizations Can Prime Themselves For Growth

B2B marketing decision-makers say that addressing changing buyer behaviors is among the most important priorities for their organization’s marketing strategy over the next 12 months. That’s because buyer behaviors are changing significantly and wreaking havoc on frontline marketing programs. For example, more buyers are self-guided and expect to be left alone. More buyers are unwilling to share their personal information and are extending their purchasing processes. And more buyers are relying on purchase influencers who work outside the buyer’s company. These behaviors are the new normal, and B2B marketers will need a new approach to grow revenue competitively.

Frontline Marketing Is Most Susceptible To Changing Buyer Behaviors

All marketing teams share some responsibility for addressing changing buyer behaviors and influencing revenue. But frontline marketing teams that are directly accountable for pipeline and revenue, such as demand marketing, account-based marketing, and customer marketing, are most susceptible to changing buying behaviors. For them, failure to meet pipeline or revenue objectives could mean termination.

Frontline marketing teams must overcome three major challenges that threaten their ability to engage buyer audiences across the customer lifecycle. Coordinating across siloes marketing teams is among the three most frequently identified challenges with implementing marketing programs and campaigns for B2B marketing decision-makers. Creating a single view of the customer is also a top challenge. And B2B marketers are challenged with adapting their programs to support all their buyers’ buying motions and all their organization’s opportunity types.

Lifecycle Revenue Marketing Is The Future Of B2B Growth

Frontline B2B marketing teams have advanced their tactics, technologies, and processes significantly in recent years. But frontline marketing teams need to be primed for growth, with a more cohesive approach if these advancements are to progress longer-term. The approach needs to break through siloes. It needs to increase the ability to engage buyer audiences across the customer lifecycle. It needs to apportion adaptive programs for all frontline revenue scenarios. And that approach, in Forrester’s view, is lifecycle revenue marketing (LRM).

LRM is a customer-obsessed growth strategy for frontline marketing that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle and the full range of buying motions and opportunity types, from initial purchase to retention, from transactional to transformational. The main benefits of an LRM approach are:

• To help interlock siloed frontline marketing capabilities in concert with the end-to-end customer lifecycle.
• To give frontline marketers the vantage point necessary to extend engagement by perceiving and sharing anonymous and known audiences.
• To allow the marketing program mix to flex to engage accounts, buying groups, or individual buyer audiences for lifecycle objectives such as seeding demand, capturing demand, and surfacing revenue opportunities out of customer adoption, loyalty, and advocacy initiatives.

To learn more register to attend Forrester’s B2B Summit North America here.

This post was written by Principal Analyst John Arnold and it originally appeared here.