According to Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guides, 91% of global tech decision makers and 87% of global marketing decision makers are planning for budget increases in the year ahead. Still, leaders are facing increased pressure to optimize spending and drive efficiencies, resulting in leaders investing in cross-functional efforts that have an outsized impact on growth.
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.”
