There has been quite a response to my comment in the last blog on planning a technology-focused track at our October B2B Marketing Forum. Thanks for your inputs. I am glad you are looking forward to it. I have the luxury of being able to invite many different experts to the Forum, not just the B2B Marketing analysts; so that track in Miami will focus on how to deal with the current marketing-technology offerings as an enterprise: how to architect, compare and procure, and manage the business case – through the full life cycle.

I’ve recently enjoyed Ajay Agarwal’s article in TechCrunch “Marketing Tech’s Bumpy Road”. Ajay talks about the trends from the investor point of view of course; but his comparison of B2C being weighted 10:1 in marketing and sales resources compared to B2B being the other way around is succinct — that is why sales enablement is so important in our B2B Marketing research portfolio. But that ratio of 1:10 will swing more and more across to marketing each year of the Age of the Customer, as empowered buyers engage with suppliers digitally and redefine their expectations of face to face meetings.  Andy Hoar is just starting his new survey of business buyers, a project he does with eRetailer each year, so expect to see us updating our sales archetypes forecast, as reported here by Mary Shea, later this year.

Clearly, both marketing and sales are now realizing a sense of urgency – both organizations need to consider their “Digital Reboot”.  I will be talking about this in more detail at an upcoming Forrester webinar on March 17th. This is an open webinar; you do not have to be a Forrester client to register. So join me if you have time.

By the way, Kate Legget, our CRM expert, and John Bruno are also planning a stream of research on this topic for their audience of application development staff in the technology management organization. And Rusty Warner’s latest report on the increasing need for a Marketing Technology Officer is quite relevant to B2B as well in this respect.

Always keeping you informed! Peter