Experience Rooms Are Back At Forrester’s B2B Summit

When I think of Austin, Texas, I think of one of the coolest cities in the United States. Images of tacos, breweries, and music festivals such as SXSW and Austin City Limits come to mind. Most of all, it’s a great big salad bowl of creatives who have come together to make Austin weird — and it works! Maybe that’s why Forrester keeps returning to this vibrant city to host its B2B Summit North America event (happening this year from May 2–4).

Just as multiple elements combine to make Austin a destination city, so should the elements of the revenue engine align to drive growth and enhance customer experiences. Companies should make sure that their marketing, sales, and product teams’ efforts are coordinated at each stage: strategizing, creating, activating, and measuring. The key is knowing the dependencies and how all these functions can and must play together to ensure cohesive customer journeys.

Picture this, for example: You have a shiny new campaign launched by marketing, complete with an amazing content and distribution strategy, rallying around a new product. The product and marketing teams are celebrating, but sales is scratching their heads wondering what to do with all this new “stuff.”

Was there a sales activation plan in place, and was this communicated to the team? Do they have the assets they need to support the campaign? Did marketing and product take sales’ priorities and main objectives into consideration when this campaign was planned?

Are you familiar with the Forrester Buyer-Aligned Sales Process framework and the seller’s role in the customer journey? This framework helps both sales and marketing understand who the buyer is and what they need at each step of the process, expediting the buyer’s journey. For example, it reveals dependencies such as types of assets that the sales team uses when engaging with buyers and surfaces how sales can have a huge impact on content performance.

If your revenue engine functions are not all focused on the same strategic goal, growth will be a big challenge. An aligned organization translates to higher profitability and faster growth.

We’re here to help you avoid reliving this or similar scenarios and answer questions you may have about these frameworks (and others!). Forrester Consulting Experience Rooms are back at B2B Summit. This year’s “experience” consists of four rooms: Strategize, Create, Activate and Measure. These interactive experiences will give you the opportunity to “try on” the research you’re hearing about in sessions, apply it directly to your situation, and have a bit of fun doing so!

In the Strategize room, we will help you translate business objectives to what you need to accomplish as a sales, product, or marketing leader. Take these objectives to the Create room, where we’ll build assets and processes that support in-market offerings and then round that up with the exercises found in the Activate room to reach and move buyers as well as empower sales. Finally, examine the metric types and evaluate if what you’re measuring is reflective of best practices in the Measure room. These four rooms were designed with hands-on exercises to help ensure that you walk away with a better understanding of where you can strengthen cross-functional alignment across the product, sales, and marketing functions.

As a bonus, pop into the Forrester Consulting Experience Rooms at B2B Summit North America, and maybe you’ll even get recommendations from our local consultants on where you can grab the best tacos, see the best art, and listen to live music!