A customer obsessed organization

Turn B2B Marketing Into A Customer-Obsessed
Organization
Executive Overview: The B2B Marketing Playbook
by Peter O’Neill and Lori Wizdo
August 10, 2016
For B2B Marketing Professionals
forrester.com
Key Takeaways
B2B Marketing Will Become The Steward Of
The Customer Relationship
The customer needs a champion, and the
customer relationship needs a steward.
Responsible for content, communication, digital
engagement, and delivering on the brand promise,
marketing is best suited to serve in that role.
B2B Marketing Can Best Lead The Transition
To Customer Obsession
The transition to a customer-obsessed enterprise
will require a wrenching pivot for many B2B
companies. B2B marketing leaders are in the best
position to lead this transformation by introducing
changes that address the needs, desires, and
traits of their most valuable customers and most
promising target audiences.
B2B Marketers Need A Digital Wake-Up Call
B2B buyers thoroughly research their buying
decisions, both online and off, throughout
all stages of the buying process. As B2B
buyers demonstrate that they are willing to
buy increasingly complex and costly products
online, B2B marketers must step up to create
a digital experience that attracts, educates,
persuades, and, sometimes, closes these digitally
empowered customers.
Why Read This Playbook
The next wave of competitive advantage for
business-to-business companies will come from
deepening customer knowledge and taking action
based on an obsessive desire to deliver what
their customers want before their competitors
do. This fundamentally changes the role of
B2B marketers; they need to evolve from brand
stewards, lead generation machines, and sales
supporters to architects of customer engagement
across the customer life cycle. This playbook
provides practical guidance for B2B professionals
who are leading and living that transformation.

© 2016 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®
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Turn B2B Marketing Into A Customer-Obsessed Organization
by Peter O’Neill and Lori Wizdo
with Laura Ramos, Matthew Camuso, and Rachel Birrell
August 10, 2016
Customer Obsession Requires A Marketing Refresh
As an informed B2B marketer, you know that business buyers have increasing power over your go-to-
market strategy. Boundaries between physical and digital marketing and selling are now irrelevant to
them and so are the internal organizational lines and systems that you use to approach them. Firms
that thrive in the next decade will be those that build systems of insight and engagement to better
engage buyers, delight them with extraordinary user experiences, and win their business and loyalty. To
lead this transformation, B2B marketing execs must engineer a number of pivots:
›› From products to customer outcomes. B2B firms that continue to operate within their
product and organizational siloes will not connect with buyers, who now care less about product
differentiation and most about the ease of doing business. To thrive, customer outreach must
demonstrate empathy to their business challenges and responsiveness to their needs — whenever,
wherever, and however they reveal those desires.
›› From channel-centric to customer-centric operations. Buyers decide what channels to use
to research, interact with, and transact with businesses, and they are seldom consistent in their
choice. Through marketing, sales, and any customer-facing interactions, B2B marketers must
ensure an exceptional brand experience across mobile, digital, and traditional channels.
›› From a top-notch supplier of leads to an architect of customer engagement. In their rush to
standardize, automate, and scale marketing practices as well as show the impact of marketing
spend on revenue performance, marketers overlook the opportunity to continue customer
communication post-sale in order to build loyalty and generate enthusiastic advocates who extend
the reach of their company message. Marketing and transformed sales forces should address
customer engagement across the entire customer life cycle.

August 10, 2016
© 2016 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
2
This Playbook Helps You Drive A New Mindset For The Post-Digital Age
Becoming customer-obsessed requires more than solid strategy, process, and technology investments.
To ensure expenditures pay off and changes persist, marketers must adopt a new worldview founded
on the simple principle that customer obsession occurs when you walk the walk.1
This playbook shows
marketers how to reveal the impact of customer obsession on the things that matter most to their
executive peers and the board — growth in revenue, profit, and customers. This new B2B marketing
mindset focuses on measuring marketing’s contribution to creating exceptional customer experiences
as a function of account acquisition and installed base growth. To get there, B2B marketing
professionals must:
›› Measure business outcomes, not program outputs. B2B marketers often measure what is
convenient and easy; they track and favor quantity over quality. Marketers will only gain respect
and avoid being viewed as a cost center when they can quantify how they drive sustainable
business development. This playbook shows you how to align marketing activity with business
results so that marketing gains credibility and retains budgets.
›› Make marketing more helpful, handy, and human. Customer-obsessed marketers help by
designing experiences that let customers address their needs and explore possibilities easily. With
creativity and agility, they move from broadcast to personal communications to forge favorable
conditions for breeding lifelong customer relationships, while taking a lean approach to marketing.
They also put a premium on customer voices and storytelling to create a dialogue that is authentic
and empathetic — two values key to creating trust and loyalty.
›› Manage marketing performance across the customer life cycle. Rapid technology and
competitive changes, coupled with global service-oriented economies, now put marketing in
charge of the buying cycle from their company’s point of view. B2B marketers must calibrate
internally focused customer engagement processes to the buyer’s purchase journey, and not vice
versa, while extending performance measurement to post-acquisition activity.
Forrester Can Help You Become Customer-Obsessed
The concurrent assimilation of this new marketing mindset, new mobile, social, and digital marketing
techniques, and a staggering set of new marketing technologies will create significant stress for just
about every marketing organization. Forrester’s B2B marketing playbook is designed to help you
through this journey. Use this bundled body of research to apply our best-practice advice as you
progress through the transition (see Figure 1). To achieve a successful outcome, you should:
1. Discover: Map your current state, future vision, and the costs/benefits of getting there. Before
you begin to build, re-engineer, or retrofit your marketing processes and organization, this playbook
helps you identify your starting point in detail; communicate your vision; and determine the
implementation priorities, costs, and expected return on investment (ROI). You will need executive
back-up, employee buy-in, and support from all neighboring organizations to be successful.

August 10, 2016
3
2. Plan: Develop your road map to customer-obsessed marketing. Getting the plan right is
key to a smooth and successful implementation. Moreover, a proper, detailed plan is a critical
communications tool to inform and win buy-in from all stakeholders. To help you, the Plan section
provides a series of tools to assess your current state in each of the dimensions; the various
ingredients necessary to craft a strategic plan; and the ordered steps you need to follow to develop
the implementation road map to execute your vision.
3. Act: Operationalize the transformation with an eye to customer engagement. To help you
execute your vision, the Act reports give you a straightforward framework to create, validate,
or fine-tune customer-centered marketing programs and processes. It includes advice on how
to reorganize marketing and manage the important interfaces with other departments to ensure
exceptional customer experiences; a straightforward framework to define and refine your marketing
processes by identifying the actions and tasks that have the most impact; and a report that helps
you understand both the roots (current strength) and the vision (future strengths) of marketing
automation technologies.
4. Optimize: Identify and refine program elements. Once customer obsession becomes core to
marketing planning and execution, you can always adjust various dials and levers to get even
more mileage out of your strategy. To help you, the Optimize section includes reports that describe
techniques and tools you can use to jump-start and sustain the program; comparative metrics from
top performers to prove to senior management and executives the full impact of implementing
this transformation; and a framework to optimize performance by measuring the things that matter
most to your company’s unique goals and business objectives.
FIGURE 1 The B2B Marketing Playbook
DISCOVER PLAN ACT OPTIMIZE
Assessment
Strategic Plan
Road Map
Organization
Processes
Tools And
Technology
Performance
Management
Benchmarks
Continuous
Improvement
Vision
Landscape
Business Case

August 10, 2016
4
Recommendations
Use The B2B Marketing Playbook To Accelerate Your Transformation
It’s easy to underestimate the scope and range of work that B2B marketers must undertake to adapt
to the extraordinary change that the age of the customer demands of marketing strategy, execution,
technology, and management. As you embark on this journey, we advise you to:
›› Share this report with your team, sales colleagues, and boss. B2B marketing leaders should
use this executive overview as a guide to using the playbook reports that can help transform
marketing. However, as noted, there are many parties, with different roles and responsibilities,
involved in building, re-engineering, or retrofitting B2B marketing. Share this report with them so
that they too can tap the resources that this playbook offers.
›› Step up to leading the charge. In becoming customer-obsessed, the biggest organizational
adjustments will happen between sales and marketing, but don’t underestimate the impact on
other organizations. Customer obsession places different demands on product management, alters
your marketing service procurement model, and consumes capital. As well as articulating and
evangelizing the vision for marketing transformation, you also need to carefully manage the change
process by maintaining a constant program of communication and engagement with all parties.
›› Develop a marketing automation plan. The out-of-the-box functionality of a marketing
automation system provides a baseline customer engagement process. In many companies that
haven’t yet defined this process, deploying one almost immediately gives them all the benefits of
a managed process, which can evolve as marketers adopt and gain familiarity with the process.
But take a strategic perspective and create a marketing automation plan that can drive customer
engagement and integrate with all your critical business systems.
›› Find a trusted marketing tech advisor. Rethink your relationship with the CIO’s organization,
engage an external service provider, or create a shadow tech management competency in
marketing operations. Whatever the source, find your technology champion.
›› Set expectations carefully. Emphasize the value of continuous incremental improvement. The
reality is that you are starting on a long journey to transform your marketing organization. Change
takes time, investment, and commitment.

August 10, 2016
5
Endnotes
1
The post-digital future has arrived with different customer behaviors, attitudes, and business practices. However,
decades-old habits forged in the mass marketing era still lie beneath most marketing plans. To win in the age of the
customer, marketers need a new perspective, not more technology, guided by three principles: Be human, be helpful,
and be handy. See the “Thriving In A Post-Digital World” Forrester report.
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