Challenges Facing B2B Marketing Executives And Their Teams
B2B marketing leaders face rising expectations to drive measurable growth while navigating transformation, complexity, and internal misalignment.
- Demonstrating marketing’s impact on revenue and ROI
- Aligning marketing with sales, product, and finance stakeholders
- Building capabilities across fragmented teams and functions
- Adapting planning and budgeting to rapid market and technology changes
- Identifying and closing skills and competency gaps
To succeed, leaders must modernize marketing operations while clearly proving value to the business.
The Data Behind Today’s B2B Marketing Challenges
of marketing effort is lost due to misaligned planning.
of B2B marketers have operationalized AI across key use cases.
stakeholders are typically involved in complex B2B buying decisions.
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Turn Strategy Into Measurable Impact
Modern B2B marketing must balance transformation with accountability. Executives need frameworks that define capabilities, guide investments, and align teams to business outcomes. Forrester equips marketing leaders with proven models to clarify priorities, connect activities to revenue, and build resilient organizations. These frameworks help leaders move beyond fragmented execution to integrated, outcome-driven marketing that supports growth, improves customer experience, and strengthens stakeholder confidence.
Design High-Performance Marketing Capabilities
The Forrester B2B Marketing Capabilities Framework defines the full set of capabilities required to execute marketing effectively across the end-to-end value chain. It helps leaders identify gaps, assess effectiveness, and prioritize investments based on business outcomes. By mapping interconnected capabilities, marketing executives can align workflows, structure teams, and build an ecosystem that supports high-performance execution and customer-obsessed growth.
Build Skills That Drive Performance
The Forrester B2B Marketing Competency Framework enables leaders to assess and develop the skills required for modern marketing success. It provides a structured approach to evaluating foundational, shared, and specialized competencies across teams. By identifying skill gaps and prioritizing development, marketing executives can strengthen execution, enable collaboration across functions, and ensure that their organizations are equipped to succeed in an increasingly complex B2B environment.
Questions We Answer
Common B2B Marketing Questions That Forrester Helps Answer
Forrester helps marketing executives connect marketing efforts to measurable business outcomes using structured approaches to link activities to pipeline, revenue, and customer value. By translating performance into the metrics that matter most to executive stakeholders, leaders can clearly demonstrate impact, strengthen credibility, secure investment, and position marketing as a core driver of enterprise growth.
Forrester’s B2B Marketing Capabilities Framework helps leaders systematically identify the strengths and gaps across their organization. It defines the full range of capabilities required to support high-performance marketing and links them directly to business outcomes. By assessing current capabilities and understanding their interdependencies, marketing executives can prioritize investments, design more effective workflows, and ensure that their teams are aligned to deliver against strategic goals, rather than operating in isolated functional silos.
Forrester provides structured frameworks and guided approaches to help marketing leaders align teams around shared goals, roles, and metrics. These models focus on clarifying responsibilities, establishing consistent processes, and improving collaboration across functions such as demand, brand, and operations. By creating alignment and accountability, marketing executives can reduce friction, accelerate decision-making, and ensure that transformation initiatives translate into measurable improvements in performance and business outcomes, even in complex and rapidly changing environments.
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Forrester Decisions for B2B Marketing Executives
Forrester Decisions empowers B2B marketing executives to make confident, informed choices that drive business outcomes. Combining research, tools, and expert guidance, the service helps align marketing strategy to corporate priorities, optimize planning and investment decisions, and build high-performing teams.
What’s Included In This Service
Forrester Decisions services are uniquely built to give you strategic insights for your role as a business leader in your organization and help you deliver on your functional role as a division or department leader. Here’s what’s inside:
Insights
Shape strategy, guide transformational change, and stay ahead of the curve with leading research and insights.
- Customer obsession research
- Customer insights
- Trends and predictions
- Market forecasts
- Industry highlights
- Planning guides
- Technology and service provider landscapes
- Forrester Wave™ evaluations
Tools
Empower your team to conquer your priorities with proven strategic models and plug-and-play templates.
- KPIs and peer benchmarks
- Assessments
- Strategic models and frameworks
- Execution tools and templates
- Forrester Wave™ evaluations for your function
- Certification courses
Guidance
Accelerate progress and de-risk decisions with expert advice and hands-on support tailored to you and your team.
- Guidance sessions
- Peer discussions
- Event attendance
- Client webinars
- Dedicated relationship management
Forrester AI Where You Work
Powered by generative AI, Forrester AI helps clients make progress on their top initiatives faster, with trusted answers from Forrester research. Get AI-powered insights and advice from Forrester directly in the tools you use every day.
Support For B2B Marketing Executives And Their Teams
Forrester supports marketing leaders and their teams with research, consulting, and events that build capabilities and drive performance.
Executive Leader
Leverage support from a trusted partner and former executive who understands your challenges and supports your strategic agenda every step of the way. Availability may vary by geographic region.
Leader
Procure deep expertise across your functional discipline through expert-led guidance sessions that help you apply unique research, tools, and data to your specific needs.
Team
Develop a common language and toolset to strengthen your team’s expertise and skills with access to relevant certification courses and insights.
AI Access
Equip everyone in your organization to get trusted advice fast through AI in a flexible self-service model.
Key Benefits For B2B Marketing Executives
Drive measurable impact while building a modern, high-performing marketing organization. Our tailored research services provide leading insights, proven tools, and continuous guidance to de-risk decisions and accelerate growth.
- Demonstrate marketing’s contribution to revenue and business outcomes
- Align marketing strategy with corporate priorities and stakeholder expectations
- Identify and close critical capability and competency gaps
- Improve planning, budgeting, and resource allocation decisions
- Strengthen cross-functional alignment with sales, product, and finance
- Build resilient teams that adapt and perform through change
What Our Clients Are Saying
Palo Alto Networks Boosts Win Rates 17% By Ditching MQLs For Buying Groups
Tired of low-converting MQLs, Palo Alto Networks revamped its lead strategy with buying groups — and saw deals grow bigger and close faster. With Forrester’s guidance, the shift delivered an impressive 17% boost in win rates.
How Palo Alto Networks Drives Revenue With Buying Groups
By aligning sales and marketing around buying groups and partnering with Forrester, Palo Alto Networks saw a 17x increase in pipeline progression, doubled deal sizes, and a 17% lift in win rates — proving that smarter collaboration drives stronger revenue outcomes.
How Panasonic Connect Fuels A Data-Driven Marketing Culture
Discover how Panasonic Connect leverages Forrester’s insights to validate strategies and boost confidence in data-driven decisions.
How Wolters Kluwer Health Revamped Its Marketing For A Changing Landscape
Discover how Wolters Kluwer Health leveraged Forrester’s insights to overcome change management challenges and align on a future-ready marketing strategy.
Upcoming Events For B2B Marketing Executives
Complimentary Webinars
Beyond The Click: Winning B2B Buyers In The Age Of AI Search And AEO
Retool Your B2B Marketing Budgeting For 2026 Success
Predictions 2026 Webinar: B2B Marketing, Sales, & Product
Explore Related Marketing Roles
B2B marketing executives collaborate with leaders across product management, revenue operations and enablement, and B2C marketing. Forrester supports alignment across these roles to drive growth.
Product Management
For leaders responsible for defining and delivering offerings that win in the market, our research and guidance supports portfolio strategy, product innovation, and stronger alignment with customer needs and business goals.
Revenue Operations & Enablement
For leaders responsible for connecting marketing, sales, and customer teams, explore research and guidance supporting revenue alignment, process optimization, and improved execution across the customer lifecycle.
B2C Marketing
For leaders responsible for engaging customers and driving demand, our research and guidance supports customer insight, brand-strengthening, campaign effectiveness, and delivering consistent, value-driven experiences across channels.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I make the case for increased marketing investment?
By linking marketing activities to measurable business benefits and aligning them to executive priorities, you can clearly demonstrate value and strengthen credibility with the C-suite. Forrester helps marketing leaders build outcome-driven business cases that connect initiatives directly to revenue, growth, and customer experience. This improves your ability to secure funding for critical transformation initiatives.
How should marketing planning and budgeting evolve?
Marketing planning and budgeting must shift from static, annual exercises to continuous, adaptive processes. Forrester helps leaders align planning with business objectives while adjusting to changing market conditions. By integrating planning, campaign execution, and budget allocation, organizations can improve agility, optimize investments, and ensure that resources are consistently focused on initiatives that drive the greatest impact.
What’s the best way to align marketing metrics with business goals?
Forrester helps marketing leaders move beyond activity-based metrics by aligning measurement with stakeholder priorities and business outcomes. This means translating marketing performance into indicators such as revenue growth, customer experience, and lifecycle impact. By focusing on the metrics that matter most to executives, marketing can better demonstrate its contribution and influence strategic decision-making.
How can I build a more resilient marketing organization?
Building resilience requires aligning teams, clarifying roles, and establishing consistent processes across the marketing function. Forrester provides frameworks that help leaders reduce fragmentation, strengthen collaboration, and improve accountability. By equipping teams with clear structures and shared goals, organizations can adapt more effectively to change while maintaining performance and delivering consistent business outcomes.
How do I prioritize marketing initiatives effectively?
Forrester helps leaders prioritize initiatives by linking them directly to business objectives and measurable outcomes. Using structured approaches to evaluate impact, dependencies, and strategic alignment, marketing organizations can distinguish critical priorities from lower-value activities. This ensures that limited resources are focused on the initiatives that will deliver the greatest contribution to growth and long-term success.
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