Customer-Obsessed B2B firms are 2X more likely to report revenue growth of 10% or more in the last fiscal year.

Now there’s a headline!

These firms are also more likely to have loyal customers (who spend money with them) and happier employees (who are more productive).

If you’ve listened to Forrester anytime during the past six years, you’ve probably heard our rallying cry: Become customer-obsessed! By now, you may also have figured out that this likely means a significant reinvention of your structure, culture, talent, metrics, processes, and technology as you work to understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.

What many B2B marketers don’t know is how much reinvention you need because you don’t know how customer-obsessed you already are.  Well now you can find out!

In my latest research report, The B2B Marketer’s Guide To Benchmarking Customer Obsession Maturity I take a closer look at the degree of customer-obsession we found among 468 B2B marketers — from a study where we asked them to complete Forrester’s Customer Obsession Assessment (COA).  You can also use this 21-statement self-evaluation tool to place your organization in one of four segments and identify the habits that hold you back.

In this B2B deep-dive, we found:

  • Many organizations are just beginning their customer obsession journey: 64% of all respondents rank in the bottom-two segments of maturity. B2B firms follow a similar distribution, with a slightly higher percentage (65%) comprising the Customer-Naïve and Customer-Aware categories.
  • B2B firms that score at the high end of our maturity scale surpass typical revenue growth expectations: 42% in the Obsessed category reported that their organization grew revenue by 10% or more in the past fiscal year, compared with only 18% of Naïve respondents.
  • Obsessed companies also feel very confident about the future: 91% of the most mature respondents said that they fully expect their products and/or services to be best-in-class five years from now if current management approaches, corporate philosophy, and innovation strategies continue.

The report goes on to identify key practices that B2B marketers can employ to advance their customer-obsession and help their firms thrive in this digital age.

During Forrester’s B2B Marketing Forum in Austin, Texas this year (October 5 – 6), I plan to dig into this topic a bit deeper during my keynote and showcase some best practices of highly customer-obsessed B2B marketers.  Spoiler Alert!  One of those practices is being very diligent about protecting your customers’ privacy and obeying related local regulations.  Why?  Because keeping your customers secure builds their trust in you as a marketer and business partner.  And trust is one of the three principle characteristics of great B2B customer experience!

Hope to see you in Texas — bring your boots and “yee-haw” y’all!  If you’d like to know more, visit our events site.  And if you’ve read this post this far, congratulations — you can also receive a discount of $200 by entering this code:  B2BBLOG17.   (And you thought all you were going to get from this blog was smarter!)