Forrester just published The Forrester Wave™: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q4 2016.  Our research uncovered a robust market in which Act-On, Adobe, IBM, Marketo, and Oracle lead the pack; bpm'online, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Salesfusion offer competitive options; and CallidusCloud and Right On Interactive are Contenders.  Forrester’s Wave ™ process is comprehensive (we evaluated the products across 36 different criteria); rigorous (the process comprises executive briefings, detailed product review and demo, all validated with customer references); and completely transparent (each criteria is graded on a 0-5 scale with the scale explanation openly published).  There’s no hiding in the Forrester Wave ™ process – for the vendor, or for the analyst.  As the lead analyst on this research I want to thank the marketing and product marketing teams of the vendors who participated in the Wave research process.  

Our last Forrester Wave ™ analysis on L2RM platforms was published in 2014 and we found significant differences in:

  • Practitioner motivation: 
    B2B marketers are moving beyond revenue performance to life-cycle customer engagement
  • Platform maturity:
    Support for advanced B2B marketing practice is the differentiator with marketing practitioners looking for their marketing operating system.
  • Marketplace adoption: 
    There’s a lot of runway in the L2RM Platform Market.

 

L2RM Practitioner Motivation:
B2B marketers are moving beyond revenue performance to life-cycle customer engagement

When Forrester introduced the concept of L2RM in 2010, we defined a business system for marketers whose offerings mandate a long, complex, or highly considered buying process. L2RM mostly applies to B2B marketers, but not exclusively. Consumer marketers who are taking highly considered products and services to market also benefit from the managed process of L2RM and the changing marketing remit that the practice enables. The L2RM business system comprises integrated goals, processes, and metrics that reshape marketing practices to drive effective customer engagement across the entire customer life cycle — from awareness to advocacy.  For Forrester, L2RM has always been about engagement.  But early practitioners were more focused on accounting for the revenue impact of marketing programs.  But, that’s changing.  While revenue is still important, slightly more of the leading practitioners we interviewed for this research cited ‘enhancing customer engagement’ more important than ‘increasing marketing’s contribution to revenue’.

L2RM Platform Maturity:
Support for advanced B2B marketing practice is the differentiator with marketing practitioners looking for their marketing operating system.

The L2RM platform market is growing because more B2B professionals see L2RM as a way to implement standardized, scalable processes for marketing planning, execution, and reporting. Vendors that offer support for managing the process of marketing — planning, budgeting, and performance management — are more likely to become a strategic solution provider.  All vendors in this evaluation help marketers operationalize a controlled L2RM process. But succeeding with today's empowered digital business buyers takes more. Strong support for cross-channel execution, inbound marketing, personalization, as well as predictive and account-based marketing (ABM) dictate which providers will lead the pack.

L2RM Platform Adoption:
There’s a lot of runway in the L2RM Platform Market.

In a recent survey of 279 B2B marketing decision-makers, we found that L2RM automation is still an emerging market: only 28% of respondents said that their firms have implemented a system to manage the lead-to-revenue process.  Our research also shows L2RM automation drives B2B marketing maturity and results. Successful L2RM practitioners are driving more revenue, contributing 52% of the sales pipeline, compared with the 35% contribution from firms that are just planning to implement L2RM automation for the first time.   And L2RM practitioners run marketing by the numbers. More than three-quarters (78%) of marketing decision-makers who have implemented L2RM in their B2B firms told us that they use measurement and analytics to understand their marketing success, compared with just 52% of those who have not automated their lead-to-revenue process.

For the complete details, download the Forrester Wave™: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q4 2016.  As always, feel free to send me an email or set up an inquiry to discuss L2RM and/or the B2B marketing technology landscape. If you are considering enterprise marketing software investments and want to discuss priorities, challenges or vendor capabilities, we’re here to help.