Key insights from the Guides include:

• Organizations with strong alignment among their marketing, digital and customer experience (CX) teams report 1.6X faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4X better customer retention;
• As AI deployments become ubiquitous, firms should invest in building policies and frameworks around data access, usage, sharing, storage and retention to retain customer and employee trust;
• CX leaders often struggle to build momentum and drive action from their mapping efforts;
• Leaders should inventory and replace their bespoke applications and isolated infrastructure that only serves one or a few applications; and
• Platform teams are cross-functional product-centric teams that build and maintain tooling, infrastructure and services, enabling other IT and business teams to build, deploy, and manage their applications.

“Optimistic budget expectations will serve leaders well as they enter 2025, but they need to be super thoughtful about investing in areas that support their firms’ overall growth,” said Sharyn Leaver, Chief Research Officer at Forrester, in a statement. “While leaders should continue to experiment with more advanced AI capabilities in 2025, those shouldn’t be the only experiments they pursue. They should prioritize investments that benefit their entire firm and help establish long-term trust with customers and partners. Forrester’s Budget Planning Guides provide detailed guidance on where leaders should invest, pull back and strategically experiment to succeed amid continual, rapid change.”

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While we were on-site at the event, the B2B Marketing Exchange Podcast team was able to snag an interview with Davidson post-keynote to dive deeper into all things content, where she outlined the move away from lead-based marketing. While you’ll have to wait a few more weeks for the season 10 release to hear the interview in full, hosts Kelly Lindenau and Klaudia Tirico decided to share a little sneak peek of what you can expect when the episode drops.

Kelly Lindenau: A lot of people are afraid to experiment, whether it’s due to a fear of rejection or — potentially worse — approval. And as humans, we tend to have a fear of failure and decide to remain status quo. So, what would you say to people who are a little hesitant to try something new?

Phyllis Davidson: The edict is here to fail fast and move forward. While leadership might be reluctant to experiment and take risks, it’s in their best interests to try something new. You have to remember that true experimentation means trying something against a benchmark in a way that’s not meant to be scaled — this means sending a completely new piece of content to a portion of your audience and seeing how they react. And depending on what happens, you then move forward with delivering it to a wider segment of your audience or trying something else.

Content is more complicated than changing the color of a banner; it takes time to put together — that’s one of the biggest reasons why people are reluctant to experiment.

Lindenau: While practitioners are experimenting with content assets, how can they determine if their changes are working or not?

Davidson: We need to really understand how our content engages our audience, not just how it contributed to developing a lead. The days of looking at things through a lead standpoint are (hopefully) continuing to fade away as we look at more important factors, regarding influence and impact: Content intelligence. Content intelligence involves understanding what people are engaging with, when they’re interacting with it and what actions they’re taking afterward.

As I look across all the technologies that support the content lifecycle, there are elements of content intelligence already built in. More and more, we’re seeing vendors use that terminology from various business intelligence data tools already built into their platforms. I’m also seeing the rise of a few standalone point solutions around content intelligence. The best tools out there will not only provide the basic data but also go a step beyond that and provide insights directly to marketers to inform their next actions.

Lindenau: Let’s drill down into data — what role will data play in informing content intelligence?

Davidson: Content intelligence is the data — it’s just a step beyond the raw data. Content intelligence works to bridge the gap between the data itself and the insights it provides. For example, if you create a white paper that was distributed to particular personas, you can understand if it’s actually engaging the audience and people beyond that persona, as well as when it’s engaging them. Are they more engaged when marketing shares it? How about when sales sends it along? There are so many great questions that, if answered, can inform our future actions.

Here’s the other piece: Getting content intelligence insights in as real time as possible allows us to tweak our programs while they’re underway. That’s really important, because we’ll have the opportunity to improve any asset that’s in the field.

Lindenau: What does content intelligence look like, and what role will technology play?

Davidson: Most likely, it’ll be a set of capabilities, because there are so many different ways to conduct content intelligence. The core product will influence where content intelligence sits: Anybody with a digital engagement platform likely already has content intelligence features and, at some point, it’s possible those will be key features that folks look at when comparing solutions.

There’s also room for point solutions in this area — over time, point solutions often get absorbed into bigger platforms, and that’s OK. But I always give the same piece of technology-related advice: Whenever you go out and look for something new, figure out the capabilities that already exist in software that you own.

For more insights into Davidson’s keynote and content experimentation, make sure to subscribe to the B2B Marketing Exchange Podcast. We’ll be dropping the full interview when Season 10 starts!

The post How B2B Practitioners Can Leverage Content Intelligence To Experiment With Marketing Assets appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Quick Scoop:

• Former Forrester analyst Allison Snow is Demand Spring’s new VP Strategy & Chief Analyst.
• Prior to this new role, she served as VP of Product Marketing at Bizzabo.
• She will be responsible for driving market awareness, building a high-performance team and more.

Demand Spring, a revenue marketing consultancy, appointed Allison Snow as VP Strategy and Chief Analyst.

Snow joins the company from Bizzabo, where she most recently served at VP of Product Marketing. Prior to that, she held the role of VP Customer Marketing with Definitive Healthcare. Snow also spent four years as an industry analyst at Forrester Research, where she advised C-level B2B revenue marketing on best practices and commercial growth strategies.

“I am incredibly excited to join Demand Spring, and to bring my background and experience to our clients to help them drive market awareness, build high-performance teams and construct messaging and positioning that differentiates their brands,” said Snow in a statement. “The years I have spent in marketing leadership positions, and as an industry analyst advising Forrester clients, will help our clients make better and more informed decisions with data-driven strategies.”

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Forrester’s recently published research report, “Navigating The 2023 Downturn: B2B Marketing Executives,” further explores how to maximize interactions with your marketing team/talent, customers, board, partners and other company functions to drive growth. This further solidified the recommendations from our prior analysis, highlighting focus areas for the following stakeholders as critical to driving growth:

1. Team & Talent

Contrary to the prevailing sentiment that organizations are cutting staff, 39% of B2B marketing decision-makers at high-growth companies actually planned to increase their personnel budget between 1% to 9%. Further, the share of high-growth companies that planned to increase their personnel budget by the same percentage range jumped to 66%, up from 59% in 2022. (For comparison, 32% of flat-to-declining companies planned to increase personnel budget by 1% to 9% in 2022, which increased to 52% in our most recent survey.)

Additional qualitative feedback revealed that three specialist roles were top of mind: Marketing/RevOps, account-based marketing (ABM) and brand strategy/management. Further, high-growth companies were more likely to increase personnel budget for these specific roles, while flat-to-declining companies were more likely to decrease budget.

2. Customers

Companies can accelerate growth by embracing an experience-led approach that places customers at the forefront and focuses on connecting multiple “experiences” — customer, employee, brand and digital — to provide a more engaging and seamless experience. Interestingly, a new priority emerged in the top five to support customer experiences: Continued adoption of digital approaches.

This held true for both high-growth and flat-to-declining companies. There are opportunities to converge audience experiences for efficiencies in the technology, processes, skills and more. The result will be increased engagement that drives exceptional customer experiences.

3. The Board

Marketing executives should change the narrative with the board on how marketing “success” is defined. Since marketing qualified leads (MQLs) fall short as an indicator of marketing’s impact to the business, ending MQL reporting is a great starting point for evolving the performance-metric status quo.

It’s more important to connect marketing activities to business outcomes, as buying group engagement is a better indicator of buying propensity. To connect those actions, organizations must educate the board on the importance of buying groups and marketing’s role in creating and advancing opportunities within them. For high-growth companies, the top three most important objectives marketing is measured against are ROI, revenue lift and market/competitive/customer intelligence.

4. Your Partners

“Achieving B2B revenue and growth via the partner ecosystem/channel” emerged as the new No. 1 marketing priority for high-growth companies. In fact, 56% of high-growth companies planned to maintain or increase their personnel budget for channel marketing. It’s also understood that people alone can’t run a partner ecosystem, as 25% of high-growth companies plan to expand usage of through-channel marketing automation solutions (as opposed to 9% for flat-to-declining companies). Leveraging your partner ecosystem through established relationships, brand recognition, subject matter expertise and/or increased “feet on the street” can be a force multiplier to accelerate revenue growth.

5. Teams Outside Of Marketing

Sales, product, marketing and customer success alignment has been the call to action for driving revenue growth and profitability for years. Companies will grow revenue faster and be more profitable when the revenue engine functions are aligned. In the current economic environment, it’s particularly important to connect siloed functions — experience is critical to digital-savvy buyers who prefer to self-serve, and lack of alignment is readily apparent.

High-growth companies recognize this need, with nearly one-third (32%) planning to improve marketing alignment and collaboration with other departments, including sales and product. Only one-quarter of flat-to-declining companies ranked improving alignment and collaboration as a priority.

B2B CMOs and marketing teams must continue to relentlessly resist reactive business decisions that disrupt the balance between short-term and long-term growth. Comparing year-over-year data, our recommendation is to follow the insights from high-growth companies regarding targeted talent investment:

• Increasing the focus on the customer and buyer experience;
• Evolving the definition of marketing success to business outcomes;
• Engaging your partner ecosystem; and
• Improving cross-organizational alignment.

Barbie Mattie is a VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester.

The post How High-Growth Companies Are Navigating The 2023 Downturn appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Quick Scoop:

• Former Forrester analyst Mary Shea has been appointed co-CEO of Mediafly.
• Shea joins Mediafly after serving as Outreach’s Chief Evangelist for two years.
• Shea will work alongside CEO and Co-founder Carson Conant to advance the company’s growth.
  

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Mediafly, a provider of revenue enablement solutions, appointed Mary Shea as co-CEO. She will collaborate with current CEO and Mediafly Co-founder Carson Conant to help advance the company into the next phase of growth and innovation.

“I am thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO,” said Conant in a statement. “I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her extensive knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend and her vision for B2B buying and selling. Mary brings deep empathy for sellers’ day-to-day challenges and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers. She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”

Shea has decades of experience in sales tech and has been credited with helping to shape the salestech landscape. Prior to joining Mediafly, she was Chief Evangelist at Outreach, a sales execution platform, for two years, after working as a Principal Analyst at Forrester for more than five years.

“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always considered the company a hidden gem,” said Shea in a statement. “Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey. With this push toward a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable revenue. I’m hitting the ground running — if you want to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”

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OK, I’m sorry for getting that song stuck in your head, but it’s true: Due to the market expansion powered by today’s interconnected, digital world, it’s easier than ever — in theory — for companies to expand their global reach and engage with prospects in different regions. However, there’s one major hurdle: Language barriers.

While the easy answer might seem to be tossing a white paper into Google Translate, Kathleen Pierce, Principal Analyst, Content Strategy and Operations at Forrester, explained that simply translating content into another language isn’t enough.

“Localization is the act of making something appropriate for a locale, which includes translation plus many other cultural and data elements,” Pierce explained. “You can do translation without localization, and while there’s a time and place for that, it’s riskier. Raw translation can be extremely off base or nonsensical. There are plenty of humorous screenshots of free translation engines botching some translation because it only translated the words, not the meaning. In regulated markets, if you just run your content through some tool that doesn’t know your information, it could lead to significant fines, failed audits, or inability to sell in a region.”

Additionally, localizing assets helps promote customer retention/growth and increase an organization’s competitive advantage as new vendors vie for their market share.

“Startups are extremely nimble these days, and they don’t have tech, design, or content debt,” said Pierce. “Many startups are global from the get-go; they’re going to market in 20 languages with their first launch. And companies who normally didn’t have vendor competition in certain countries are seeing the startups eat their lunch, so to speak. They’re realizing that if they don’t offer a better, more localized customer experience, they’re going to lose market share.”

To remain competitive, the three steps organizations need to take to localize content are:

1. Conducting Research To Understand Regional/Cultural Etiquette  

As for determining where to invest, it’s all about the research. Pierce advised marketers to conduct stakeholder surveys of their customer-facing employees and channel partners to find out how current localization policies affect customers, sales, and marketing.

“I often find that the customer-facing employees are a secret to success, because you can ask them anything and they’ll provide an unvarnished version of the truth,” said Pierce. “Customers can only tell you what’s important to them personally, whereas customer-facing employees have first-hand insights across a wide range of customer scenarios.”

Additionally, Pierce recommended that practitioners tap into their customer and competitive research to see what the “standard of care” is in their industry.

2. Proactively Accounting For Localization When Creating Content

With 42% of practitioners indicating they want content that’s personalized and tailored to their needs, it’s imperative that marketers uplevel localization processes. Pierce advised marketers to incorporate localization at the design stage and treat it as an enterprise function using a hub-and-spoke model with a skilled localization leader at the center.

“You want to put processes and tools in place that enable you to localize content without rewriting or redesigning,” said Pierce. “Skillful planning can eliminate half the time, half the cost, and half the people. There will always be many different groups involved in localization, and you need a skilled localization leader or team at the center to provide vision and management and get the right technologies in place.”

3. Implementing The Right Technologies

According to Pierce, many B2B marketers are using “horribly old-fashioned” manual processes for localization, which is a complex, high-volume, highly technical initiative. “It would be like having your sales reps track their opportunities using spreadsheets and email,” she explained. She continued that the root cause of this is decentralization and lack of leadership, as it’s common for organizations to have many people across multiple departments, such as legal, HR, product, regional marketing, and more, localizing only their content.

“If all these departments are partnering with different freelancers or agencies and treating localization as an afterthought, it’s tough to optimize at an enterprise level,” said Pierce. “Decentralized efforts lead to high costs, slow turnaround, and substandard quality that discourages proper investment by making it appear as a failed area.”

She recommended that organizations future-proof themselves by adopting translation management software, investigating speech-to-speech and speech-to-text localization technologies and training machine translation (MT) libraries for their organization.

To that end, several B2B companies — including Qualified and Contentstack — released GPT-powered AI solutions that assist with translation and localization. Qualified’s offering provides AI-powered recommended conversation responses and on-the-fly translation between languages, while Contentstack’s innovations seek to help content teams create, test and translate short- or long-form content in seconds.

The post How To Prevent B2B Content From Getting Lost In Translation appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

With such high representation, Amy Hayes, Forrester’s VP, Research Director, teamed up with other Forrester analysts to write a data overview report outlining the implications of the changing buyer demographics, titled “Younger Buyers Have Changed The Business Buying Landscape.”

“Generations tend to have an influence or an impact in business buying behavior,” said Hayes. “It’s important for businesses to understand where the tide is turning and where those shifts are heading so they can start thinking and contemplating that in their plans and compare that to what they already know about their buyers.”

The report, which defines anyone born in or after 1981 as “younger buyers” and anyone born between 1946 and 1980 as “older buyers,” found thatover the next two years, more than one third of younger buyers will purchase through self-guided digital channels. Specifically, the younger generation prefers transacting through internal app stores, external marketplaces or app stores and vendor websites.

“Younger buyers are digital natives, and as they rise through the ranks in their organizations, they’re exerting more influence over buying decisions,” said Hayes. “The preference for self-service with vendors reflects what they’re experiencing on the consumer side every day. We know that 90% of the time, business buying happens with a group of people. That’s an important factor to consider, especially because they’re bringing their personal experiences into the group with them.”

Simultaneously, younger generations are more likely to conduct independent, third-party verified research throughout their buying journeys, while older buyers relied more heavily on first-party insights. Specifically, younger buyers indicated that the most impactful sources for generating information are:

• Technology information websites (47%);
• Forums (42%);
• Industry websites (38%).

By contrast, older buyers pointed to:

• In-person vendor sales;
• Peers; and
• Vendor websites.

“Younger buyers tend to value information from third-party sources outside of the vendor’s control, such as a journalist, analyst or media outlet,” said Hayes. “There’s a significant need for providers to understand what those sources of influence are for their younger buyers to design a program that reaches those influencers.”

However, it appears younger buyers are likely to be more critical throughout their buying journeys, as 90% cited dissatisfaction with the vendor in at least one area compared to 71% of older buyers. According to Hayes, the two primary areas of sources for younger buyers’ dissatisfaction are around the relationship with the sales rep and their competence during the buying process. To combat that disconnect, Hayes stressed the importance of ensuring buyer-facing roles were well-versed in the buyer’s needs, pain points and how they’re buying.

“There’s nothing that compares to having direct conversations with buyer personas that you’re most interested in reaching,” said Hayes. “My No. 1 recommendation for any organization — even if they’re not dealing with younger buyers — is to also make sure they’re prioritizing conversations and interviews with both their perspective and current buyers on a regular basis.”

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But what will those strategies entail? And what can B2B marketing leaders do to increase their chances of success?

Facing tough times, we expect that B2B organizations will look to minimize risk by focusing their resources on the places that matter most. The B2B companies that will come out ahead are those that orient their strategies and operations around furthering the value created for their customer base. To make that happen, marketing leaders should consider pursuing these three approaches:

1. Make Customer Health A Top Priority

B2B organizations are shifting plans to emphasize growth in the places they know and understand — and that starts with their existing customer base. Strategies weighted toward retention, cross-sell and upsell revenues require not only great customer insights but also strong customer relationships. Yet, B2B marketing leaders have been notoriously poor at prioritizing customer health, and as recently as 2022, only 11% of B2B marketing decision-makers responded that their company’s CMO dashboard featured customer health scores.

Where customer health is not well measured, it can’t be well managed. Making a change by introducing customer health as a key indicator of marketing’s performance is a great way to refocus the organization on a vital driver of growth — that’s why Forrester is predicting that use of customer health scores on B2B CMO dashboards will triple in 2023. With health scores established, organizations can dig into their most meaningful levers and use them to expand efforts into driving ever-stronger customer relationships.

2. Forge The Next Incarnation Of Sales & Marketing Alignment

As B2B organizations increase their attention on existing customers, the need for sales and marketing to enhance alignment across all stages of the customer lifecycle must take center stage. While Forrester expects some companies to respond to this challenge by shuffling internal reporting lines, we see reorganization alone as an unrealistically optimistic remedy for more fundamental misalignment. We’d prefer to see companies address two pressing operational issues that sit at the heart of misalignment: Understanding buyers as individuals who work as part of a group and adapting to the different types of opportunities that are being pursued.

To confront the texture of complex buying groups, organizations must start grouping and progressing buyers working on the same teams into cohesive opportunities (instead of treating them as disconnected individuals). Proactively working to identify and balance opportunity types (acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell) will help marketing and sales better align around consistent approaches for helping each progress through a buying process.

3. Retool The Revenue Technology Stack Around The Customer

A flood of innovative marketing and sales technologies has created new opportunities for organizations to connect with buyers in more automated, personalized and timely ways. Yet, the rapid influx of new tools has outpaced evolving GTM processes, leaving organizations with overlapping, duplicative and poorly aligned technologies. While internal functions may wrestle with the inefficiencies of a rapidly grown revenue technology stack, it’s the customer who is subject to experiences that are inconsistent, illogical and/or supremely frustrating because a provider’s business systems are not aligned.

Forrester predicts that B2B organizations will shed one-third of the point solutions from their revenue tech stack in the coming year to regain control, smooth out the customer experience and free up some budget in the process. Marketing organizations can start by partnering with sales operations and revenue operations functions to audit the current inventory of solutions, looking for technologies with redundant capabilities and places where those overlaps negatively affect the experiences of customers. Those overlaps represent prime areas for simplification.

While 2023 is bound to present B2B marketers with a host of both predictable and unexpected challenges, forward-looking organizations will rethink their relationships with buyers and customers. Those that successfully refocus their efforts and operations to ensure that the creation of customer value remains the driving force in all that they do are those that will come out on top.

Ross Graber is a VP, Principal Analyst for Forrester.

The post 3 Things That 2023 Will Demand Of B2B Marketers appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The global economic outlook is bleak — in a survey conducted by the

But Forrester’s “Planning Guide 2023: B2B Marketing Executives” is taking a slightly different approach and encouraging businesses to “spend money to make money.” Specifically, Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Barbie Mattie explained in the report that marketers can prevent the disruption of long-term growth by:

• Defending customer experience investments and applying them toward employee experience; and
• Investing in corporate social responsibility initiatives to engage and energize employees. 

To dive deeper into the planning guide’s insights, the Demand Gen Report team sat down with Mattie in an exclusive interview to uncover strategic investment priorities for marketing organizations throughout 2023.

Demand Gen Report: Before we dive into the specifics of the report, can you elaborate on the “spend money to make money” paradox?

Barbie Mattie: The hypothesis is that prolonged unpredictability of the global economy will drive short-termism, exposing marketing executives to unprecedented budget scrutiny and justification. Forrester wants to help B2B CMOs get ahead of that by equipping them with the spend patterns from companies that have managed to grow annual revenue by 20% or more over the past two years. 

The “spend money to make money” paradox aims to help B2B CMOs protect (and confidently request more) budget related to long-term initiatives (i.e., brand activities, customer engagement, data strategies and more) because Forrester has the data-driven insights from high-growth companies on where to invest those dollars to maximize growth.

DGR: With that in mind, where are some of the key areas for marketers to invest their dollars to maximize their growth? 

Mattie: One of the top questions Forrester analysts tend to get asked is, “what budget should be allocated towards technology/tools?” There is no precise answer because tech does not drive growth; the technology you buy, implement and integrate should support how the company plans to grow. 

When you start with the tech and “back into” the business goals, it puts the tech in charge and perpetuates tech sprawl. Forrester has identified three steps to designing a revenue engine tech stack that supports growth. While still relevant questions, rather than starting with “how much budget for tech?” or “what tech should I buy?” the first questions to answer are:

1.     How does the company plan to grow?

2.     Do we have the six essential technologies (and integrations) as our foundation?

3.     Are we taking an outcome-focused approach to selecting the tech that starts with business goals?

DGR: Shifting back to a more general view of the report, what are some of the most pertinent takeaways that you hope resonate with marketing executives? 

Mattie: The three key takeaways we advise CMOs to focus on are:

• Addressing changing buyer behaviors;
• Implementing purpose-driven brand; and 
• Focusing on post-sale customer engagement. 

Marketing must be regarded as an integral part of the revenue engine and perpetuating a “lead-centric” approach sets up marketing and sales for misalignment. While certainly a heavy lift, shifting from a lead-based model (MQLs, MQAs, etc.) to opportunity management aligns all marketing, teleservices and sales functions to better identify, engage, qualify and win these opportunities. 

Facilitating this will adjust any misconceptions that marketing is just a siloed branch of the business that’s expected to drive pipeline. Clearing those misunderstandings will also be the undercurrent that supports the three key initiatives required of B2B CMOs to drive growth.

DGR: What’s your best piece of advice for CMOs as they plan out their 2023 budgets?

Mattie: B2B CMOs will not endure — let alone flourish — in 2023 if they are not in lockstep with their marketing operations leader. Marketing ops directly contributes to an organization’s ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences and attain revenue growth. Only when the CMO and marketing ops leaders work together as true allies can they improve perceptions of marketing’s role, the value it delivers to the business and the return on marketing investment.

The post How B2B Organizations Can Prevent The Disruption Of Long-Term Growth Amidst Economic Uncertainty appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

1. Don’t create your marketing plan alone

The key to a good marketing plan is alignment to business objectives and collaboration with your counterparts in product and sales. Getting the fingerprints of your functional counterparts on your marketing plan will inspire them to feel that they had a role in creating it. They will be more supportive of your marketing priorities than they would be if they weren’t involved. They might become marketing evangelists if they feel that it is their plan, too.

2. Don’t dust off last year’s plan

If your marketing plan has been sitting on a shelf gathering dust, then it was probably developed to justify last year’s budget and then forgotten. Take a new approach and identify the key business objectives that your company wants to achieve. List them and then develop a marketing response to each of them, identifying the approach that marketing will take to fulfill those objectives, then prioritize the mix and publish your marketing plan on a page.

3. Don’t make it a repeat of your event execution calendar

Unfortunately, it is true that much of marketing budgets are consumed by events and sponsorships, many of which are locked in well in advance of the marketing planning process. Consider breaking the cycle of event-driven marketing and map marketing resources to specific business objectives that are described in impact-oriented metrics. If achieving these objectives requires participation in an event, that’s fine, but your overall plan can become less dependent on these high-priced tactics if you justify them carefully.

4. Don’t make it a reflection of your organization structure

Often, marketing leaders will build their plans by looking at the disciplines of their marketing teams and allocating resources along these functional lines, then their marketing leaders will develop their own plans along their specialties. This will result in a stream of disconnected marketing tactics, and measuring their outcome and demonstrating their alignment to business objectives will be impossible.

5. Don’t be myopic

We often see marketing focused on growth and revenue, and that often translates into finding new opportunities. When measurement is focused on contribution to pipeline, bookings or revenue, it is easy to become myopic about demand creation. Marketing is more than demand; it cuts across reputation, demand, customer engagement, sales enablement and marketing operations. Don’t forsake the important areas of marketing value contribution for the easily measured.

6. Don’t give in to the richest business unit or product group

In most organizations, there are areas that generate most of the revenue. When planning season comes around, it can be expected that these areas will ask for big proportions of marketing resources and attention for the coming year. The challenge that a marketing leader faces is to make the decisions to invest in growth areas along with the sustaining efforts to support the big revenue generators. In some cases, marketing will have to invest ahead of revenue and profit and, in others, be careful to manage investment in mature areas. It’s a balancing act.

7. Don’t just develop a marketing plan

Often, marketing plans are developed to meet an internal objective, and then they are set aside and the “real work” of marketing begins. Instead of perverting the purpose of marketing planning, make sure that you can translate your marketing plan into action. One way to do this is to use your plan on a page as the basis for your business review reporting template — then, when the quarterly business review comes around, the marketing report reflects the progress made against the plan.

Let’s face it: Planning is hard, and it is not a lot of fun. Most marketers would rather be executing their marketing plans than building them. And in many companies, the planning process is disruptive — forcing a halt to activities while marketing leaders prepare for some internal milestone that leads to getting their budgets approved. But some companies have found a way to take the disruption out of both sales and marketing planning by building a cross-functional planning council that meets periodically. It’s a way to assess performance, extend the current sales and marketing plans in a collaborative way and apply course corrections.

Craig Moore is a VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Moore brings 30 years of experience to the marketing executive services team. His three decades of experience span such areas as marketing operations, partner marketing, strategic alliances, product marketing and management, software development and entrepreneurship.

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