We’ve all seen the ubiquitous martech slides: Thousands of company logos crammed into a single graphic that is both useless and illuminating. Useless as any sort of planning or evaluation tool — but also illuminating because it shows what we all know to be true from first-hand experience: The B2B marketing tech landscape is confusing and getting worse every day.

To help B2B marketers make smart technology choices in the midst of such chaos, Forrester has just published the TechRadar™: B2B Marketing Technologies, Q3 2016. In this report, we evaluate the current state and future potential of the business value provided by 17 distinct technology categories, after surveying dozens of vendors and end users and consulting with the entire roster of analysts on the Forrester B2B marketing team.

In surveying the B2B marketing technology landscape, we uncovered a few noteworthy trends:

  • The technologies that drive customer acquisition and retention are thriving.
  • Social has become a tactic for all functions, but ROI is proving elusive.
  • Early adopters see long-term potential in sales optimization.

But the most important guidance in this report is that B2B marketers should use the Forrester Go-To-Customer (GTC) Strategy Matrix to simplify technology decision-making. By mapping the key characteristics of your company’s offerings to their corresponding buying and selling archetypes and then selecting those archetypes that are the most important to your business strategy, you can much more easily rationalize your organization’s existing martech stack and make truly informed, strategic decisions about how to prioritize future purchases.

On behalf of the entire B2B marketing team, we hope you enjoy the report and we look forward to working with you to more deeply explore its conclusions and implications.