At an event that features a high level of analysts and researchers, such as Forrester’s B2B Summit, these types of blog posts are difficult because almost every word spoken holds a profound takeaway from marketers. Though it wasn’t easy, the Demand Gen Report team combed through hours of sessions to pull the most hard-hitting quotes to share.
“If you can align sales, marketing and product, you can move faster than your competitors. In fact, the numbers show that companies that achieved alignment grew 17% faster and were 14% more profitable than unaligned companies.”
-George Colony, CEO, Forrester
“The final component of aligning internal departments is trust. And this is more in terms of building a relationship with sales, because the more actionable and qualified insights we can deliver to them is just going to increase that trust and level of partnership. Having everyone on the same page and striving toward the same goal is really important.”
-Heather Rath, VP of Marketing, ServiceNow
“It’s time for you to unlock your creativity. Think differently, take risks, try new things, break down those silos and connect disparate pieces of data. But most importantly, take action.”
-Cristina De Martini, VP Research Director, Forrester
“A change leader is less worried about the minutia of change initiatives and more focused on setting the tone and end state. They remove barriers that get in our way, and they release resources to help us accomplish our goals.”
-Peter Ostrow, VP, Research Director, Forrester
“A company like Netflix — or any of these channels that you might subscribe to now — they create content, everything goes into their content creation or the deals that they do with content creators. Every subscriber for them is their revenue, and they treat that subscriber like precious gold dust. They think about how this buyer is changing and how they are going to serve them up information. Because if I lose them, I lose a subscription dollar, and that’s hard because I can’t manage my business. Well, we should think like that about every single person that we get to our sites, any sites that you run: Websites, social media sites. When I started to think about every visitor to my website in this way, it really started making me think about the amount of money that I was losing, not just that I was investing in this content, but I was losing if I couldn’t convert them and keep them engaged.”
-Jennifer Smith, CMO, Brightcove
“Every time somebody makes a purchase decision or recommends one of your products and services to be purchased for their business, they are putting their professional reputation at risk. And that creates a very emotionally charged interaction before you even start communicating.” Michelle Yaiser, VP, CX Analytics, Forrester
“As an organization, if you can align on what you’re trying to achieve through customer obsession and focus on it, it puts you in a good situation. Start assessing how much you want to invest in customer obsession.”
-Nick Buck, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
“We learned that it really is possible to scale personalized, relevant email outreach when marketing and sales come together — when marketing is developing the needs-based templates and when sales has been doing the research when somebody comes through and personalizing those emails. We also learned not to cry over form fills because with person-based advertising, we can get actionable signals from prospects by knowing who’s clicking on what even if they’re not completing a form.”
-Martha France, VP of Marketing and Sales, Vya
“Stop thinking about individual roles and start thinking about personalized, modular content that’s usable across many different functions and then create a personalized journey based on the role and somebody’s self-assessment of their skills.”
-John Buten, Principal Analyst, Forrester
“Know your priorities — including what you want to accomplish this week, month or quarter. This is so critical because in our world, you have so many things coming at you and there’s just so much opportunity to get distracted.”
-Steven Leonard, Chief Sales & Customer Engagement Officer, ArcBest
“The content engine of the future will merge human and machine. They will work side by side, each making autonomous decisions that help manage and fuel a unified customer experience.”
-Christine Polewarczyk, VP, Research Director, Forrester
