We are all facing some stiff and common head winds to achieving our companies' revenue goals in 2013.  Not the least of which is that the economy has reset itself into a "do-more-with-less" state. At the Forrester Forum in March, our growing community of leaders and teams will tackle head on the core challenges to revenue acceleration including:

• How do we overcome repeated cross-selling disappointments?
• Our funnel fall out is out of control, how do we increase the odds of some new business actually closing?
• Channel disruption is on the rise, what is our path to greater loyalty? 

Hello Fellow B2B Marketers, Marketing Monday (or a bit later on a holiday week) is a regular blog post highlighting our ongoing research focused on B2B revenue acceleration, as well as an exclusive look into what outputs you can expect soon. Kick off your week here to get a burst of support for your professional success.

Tis’ the season to look back on where you excelled during 2012, and forward to some things in your business to improve upon in the New Year. Whether you want to place a renewed focus on yourcustomer experience, you want to draw inspiration from some of the leaders in social strategy, or you are a B2B marketing professional focused on driving revenue (that should apply to all of our readers), Forrester has you covered. And because your competitors and your customers are more informed than ever, we aim to give you the leg up you will need to make 2013 a banner year for your company.

Graphic of the Week: Customer Experience Management (CXM) Solutions Will Emerge From The Convergence Of Many Solution Categories

August 10, 2011 “The Emergence Of Customer Experience Management Solutions” Forrester report.

This month, we have been studying the returns from our Q4 2012 US And Europe B2B Marketing Tactics And Benchmarks Online Survey of more than 328 B2B demand management marketers in the US and Western Europe. We asked a total of 34 questions, covering the revenue acceleration tactics that marketers deploy and in which lead-to-revenue process phase; how effective these tactics were in terms of conversion rates across the L2R processing; and several other questions about resources. We also asked about their progress in adopting various systems of marketing automation software. Lori Wizdo presented some of this data in her Webinar on November 20which Forrester clients can replay. Data highlights and curiosities include:

·  US marketers prefer tradeshow and print. US-based companies have a 50% larger allocation on this spend item compared with European companies. They also  allocate 30% more for print advertising.

·  Top-performing marketers spend differently. Companies with better-than-planned revenue growth, or where marketing contributed more than 50% to the sales funnel, mixed the 16 possible tactics differently, with the biggest differences in their usage of trade shows, SEO, and social marketing for lead origination.

·  B2B marketers prefer to create their own content, mostly for lead nurturing. Even more, the data shows them stuck in the product marketing comfort zone, and their marketing content fails to deliver at all in the awareness phase.

·  Email campaigns can work, if done well.We asked if they “send out individualized mails based upon prospect-specific data and behavior.” While 30% said yes to this, among the top performers, it was 48%.

One of the most enjoyable tasks as a Forrester analyst is reviewing all of the Groundswell awards submissions. And we know many of you also look forward to seeing the innovative approaches that other B2B companies use to listen to and engage with customers. This year, we received 45 entries and we judged submissions across seven categories: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Spreading, Supporting, Embracing, and Mobile. 

Earlier in November, we announced the winners and then presented a Webinar to Forrester clients where we discussed the awards process, criteria, highlights, and named all the winners. And we described why they won their awards as well as featuring many other entries that we thought warranted an honorable mention.

Download this podcast to hear more from Kim Celestre, Zachary Reiss-Davis, and myself about the Groundswell B2B Awards (it runs for around 45 minutes):

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ForresterTechnoPolitics/webinar_110812_oneill_celestre_reiss.mp3