The increasing pace of change with markets, buyers and technology puts pressure on B2B organisations to become more agile and dynamic in the way they plan and execute their go-to-market efforts. In addition, macro-economic events such as the current pandemic and associated economic uncertainty mean the plans of many organisations can quickly become obsolete. However, the functions that comprise the Revenue Engine (Sales, Product and Marketing) often treat annual planning as a once-a-year exercise that results in a static plan. Only 14% of organisations report they have an aligned planning process that includes sales, product and marketing, and according to SiriusDecisions annual CMO study, APAC CMOs indicate that the annual planning process is their number one priority for improvement. Revenue leaders must develop annual plans that are resilient, drive focus, and enable agility within their organisations to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions. This presentation will provide the following benefits:
• Gain a clear understanding of the characteristics of resilient revenue plans
• Learn how building resilient plans can drive alignment and interlock across the revenue engine
• Understand how to maintain interlock and alignment across sales, product and marketing as you move from planning to execution

Speakers:
Meta Karagianni, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Steve Silver, VP, Research Director, Forrester

The convergence between brand and customer experience is about ensuring harmony between promises made and experiences delivered: A poor promise will starve a great experience, a poor experience will break a great promise. This session will lay the groundwork for why ensuring tight alignment between brand and CX is crucial for creating brand value.

Speakers:
Dipanjan Chatterjee, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Changes in buyer behaviour and expectations, along with new technologies and touchpoints, are forcing B2B marketers to continuously rethink their approaches to programmes, tactics, design, and delivery as additional buyer insights are revealed with each interaction. The modern demand tactic mix should be designed and adapted to attract, engage, and qualify target buyers; optimise for conversion; and provide a unified experience across devices and channels for any path the buyer might take on their journey. This presentation will provide the following benefits:

Speakers:
Jessie Johnson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The transition from an on-premise to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model has broad implications across B2B organisations. While much attention is given to product management and engineering, many businesses underestimate the impact that a pivot to SaaS offerings will have on the marketing function. Successful companies that add SaaS offerings to their portfolio understand the shift in mindset, skills, and budgets required for the marketing organisation. This presentation will provide the following benefits:

Speakers:
Mavis Liew, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Amy Hayes, VP, Research Director, Forrester

Defining a formal sales methodology helps the sales organization realize repeatable and scalable results by replicating the behaviors and activities of high performers. However, companies often adopt a new sales methodology with little understanding of what they are getting and what it will take to ensure a successful implementation and ongoing engagement. This session will explore the various types of sales methodologies, the business needs that a methodology addresses, and a process for internal discovery, methodology definition and alignment to sales outcomes.

Speakers:
Heather Cole, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Eric Zines, Principal Analyst, Forrester

It used to be that you could deploy your most empathetic staff on the frontline, and rest assured they would treat your customers right. A polite smile, a pleasing personality, a humble disposition – and lo and behold – you could win the toughest customers over, and have them coming back for more. Fast-forward to 2020, thanks to the pandemic we’re suddenly staring at the prospect of reduced face-to-face interactions. Good-bye human touch. Hello screens. Not an exciting prospect for brands, right? After all, you can’t really be polite through an app. And you can’t really build trust through a webpage. Or can you? Welcome to this session on emotions in a digital world. Learn how the best brands are re-creating the human touch, online (while literally avoiding it altogether).

Speakers:
Amit Bhatia, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Strained relationships between leaders in Marketing, Customer Experience and Technology isn’t just bad for moral – it has a material impact on CX. Indeed, CMOs, CCOs and CIOs in top CX firms across APAC don’t succeed by accident, they score well because they embrace a common set of characteristics. Join Sam Higgins as he explores how these leaders must get together to create great CX and the implications for the customer obsessed professionals across the region regardless of who they report to.

Speakers:
Sam Higgins, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The technologies and approaches used in account-based marketing (ABM) and broad-based marketing are beginning to converge and become the foundation for all demand activities. This doesn’t mean that all accounts should be treated the same way. Rather than reducing the number of segments, practitioners are using a more granular approach to segmentation. The question is, how can sales and marketing work together to identify the type and level of buyer engagement needed to support each segment? We will share an updated view of the Demand Spectrum and demonstrate how it can be used to align sales and marketing on choosing the right type of engagement, as well as people, process, and system requirements. This presentation will provide the following benefits: • Understand how different marketing approaches align to known sales needs • Discover how insight availability, sales and marketing collaboration, and the ability to customize deliverables inform the selection of marketing approaches • Get insights on the state of ABM adoption in APAC

Speakers:
Nicky Briggs, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

In many B2B marketing organisations, content planning, translation, and localisation are run from a centralised corporate function. This centralisation has created pervasive challenges in regional and local content relevance, resulting in content waste and diluted global and regional campaign performance. During this session, we will share industry best practices for integrating regional and local input into centralised content planning processes, improving global content quality and relevance for regional and local use, and optimising the value and impact of campaign content investments.

This session will cover the following topics for marketing audiences:

• An introduction to the SiriusDecisions Campaign Content Strategy Process model
• Best practices for global and regional teams to operationalise the campaign content strategy process
• Tips for driving better campaign alignment between global and local teams

Speakers:
Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Would you like to enable your sales reps to devote more time to live sales pursuits? What if you could recoup selling hours by delivering a consistent flow of opportunities to sellers? You can. Stand up a business development team. This low-cost, non-quota-carrying resource filters lead sources, engages prospects and nurtures qualified accounts. Business development hands off the opportunity to sales reps when customer behavior indicates a readiness to buy.

This session will provide the following benefits:

• Understand the components of a best-in-class business development function
• Learn how to structure a business development function
• Learn how to run a best-in-class business development function — including outbound prospecting tactics, inbound lead follow-up, coaching and mentoring

Speakers:
Kevin Avery, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Driven by their short-term KPIs, marketers are over-obsessed with performance-based marketing and sometimes adopt tactics like dark patterns. But consumers today will demand much more than efficient and reliable products, and will increasingly care more about values like respecting consumer data privacy and environmental protections. Before and amid COVID-19, we see consumers in APAC initiated backlash on cultural insensitive ads and supported cause marketing. This session will share best practices that leading brands differentiate with ethical marketing to build long-term value, and pitfalls to avoid.

Speakers:
Xiaofeng Wang, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Customer expectations have changed in this new normal. How brands respond right now will strongly influence customer loyalty in the future. Brands that ignore the customer experience in these uncertain times will struggle to re-establish trust. Learn what Forrester’s Customer Experience Index tells us about interactions with the right emotions and its impact on reducing customer churn and increasing share of wallet.

Speakers:
Vikram Sehgal, VP, Research Director, Forrester

FWD is on a mission to change the way people feel about Insurance by putting customers first.  Join this session to understand how FWD partnered with Forrester to understand and track how the needle of CX performance has moved in each country, and to derive relevant and practical insights to build on improvement initiatives. As a customer-led company, they rolled out a CX company-wide training program that not only provides professional development opportunities, but also offers a way for employees to contribute to the development of a Group-wide Customer-Experience Culture.

The adoption of artificial intelligence represents a significant business opportunity, but it is also fraught with certain risks. Unlike other technologies, AI has the ability to learn biases inherent in data and perpetuate those biases at scale with a veneer of objectivity. Now more than ever, companies need clearly articulated corporate values and a means of enforcing them. Those that aren’t careful risk running afoul of regulations, making poor business decisions, and alienating values-driven consumers. This session will focus on how to ensure the AI systems you’re deploying align with your corporate values and best practices for ethical AI adoption.

Speakers:
Achim Granzen, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The pandemic has put into stark focus the importance of business and process automation, as a means to reduce costs, or to manage business risk. But how can a modern business effectively automate the critical customer-facing processes that affect each stage of the customer life cycle? Join Principal Analyst Leslie Joseph as he describes how you could automate pragmatically while preserving customer experience and extending your digital transformation investments.

Speakers:
Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The history of business is littered with successful organisations that ultimately failed because they could not or would not adapt to meet the changing needs of their buyers. Organisations that will navigate today’s changing B2B buying behaviours successfully will adapt on the basis of a strategic understanding of the evolving relationship between their specific offerings and buyer motions. This presentation will provide the following benefits:

Speakers:
Amy Hayes, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Steve Casey, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Speakers:
Anjali Lai, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Despite ever-increasing customer expectations and evolving approaches to delivering growth, B2B organisations continue to rely on well-worn performance goals and corresponding metrics. However, measurement centred around customer acquisition and internal operations fails to live up to the task and stands in the way of customer-centricity. In this session, we will highlight a balanced approach to managing B2B metrics and performance through the adoption of a revenue operations mindset. This presentation will provide the following benefits:

Speakers:
Ross Graber, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

It is increasingly becoming clear that cybersecurity decisions have broader societal implications than ever before.  In 2020 and beyond, technology promises to change our own experience and enhance our way of life, and those of our customers, significantly.  Society and humanity increasingly depend on tech to work, learn, vote, transact and socialise.  But that dependence is also making our technology, organizations, customers and us, targets. This session will explore how these technologies are going to change the experiences of our lives for the better and for the worse.  And what you, as CX professionals, need to know about in this landscape to enable your organizations, customers and yourselves.

Speakers:
Jinan Budge, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Customer Support continues to be the key influencer in a brand’s overall CX performance. Its only logical then that it also becomes a marketing strategy, specially since customer experience is now also a CMO agenda. Brands focused on CX cannot operate siloed marketing and customer service operations. Join us on a discussion to see how to leverage customer service to fast-track your CX efforts.

Speakers:
Vasupradha Srinivasan, Senior Analyst, Forrester

B2B organisations often struggle to establish lead management best practices with their partners, as many have an incomplete view of the channel demand universe and the types of leads that exist within the channel environment. The result is that channel leaders have only partial insight into partner demand efforts, lead progression, and performance. In this session, we will reveal how channel marketing leaders can strengthen their focus beyond the Demand Waterfall and apply best practices to improve channel lead visibility, partner lead performance, and ROI. This presentation will provide the following benefits: Learn a taxonomy to define the universe of channel lead types and Understand how to operationalise the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall

Speakers:
Dara Schulenberg, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Kathy Freeman Contreras, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The eternal question for account-based marketers is: How do I allocate my limited resources to achieve my objectives? Properly answering this question requires account-based marketers to calibrate the work that needs to get done with the skills and capacity their team possesses and the available budget, then decide if they should manage all the work internally, outsource to a service provider, or use corporate agencies to manage activities. In this session, we will introduce a decision support framework that organisations can use to evaluate the suitability of some of the most common account-based marketing (ABM) activities for outsourcing, and any associated trade-offs. This presentation will provide the following benefits: Understand critical attributes when deciding whether — and what — to outsource;  evaluate the outsourcing suitability of some of the most common ABM processes and activities, and understand some of the trade-offs and risks involved with outsourcing and how to mitigate them

Speakers:
Nicky Briggs, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

As the amount of time that sales reps spend directly interacting with buyers decreases, reps struggle to deliver more value in less time, making the interactions that do occur more important than ever. Leveraging technology is critical to sales productivity and providing value to the buyer. In this session, we will delineate seven areas where dynamic guided selling provides insight and guidance. This presentation will provide the following benefits: Understand the buyer’s journey and the seven critical interaction points where dynamic guided selling can have the most impact; gain insight into sales operations’ role in supporting dynamic guided selling and sales success, and learn about technologies with the potential to change how sales teams will sell in the future

Speakers:
Steve Silver, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst, Forrester

For years, the foundation of most CX strategies has been the power of personalization – tailoring products and experiences to the needs of your customers. But two global trends now threaten to derail the data needed to do personalization well: 1) Increasing privacy regulations 2) rising consumer privacy concerns. In this session, you’ll learn how new strategies like zero-party data, transparency, and privacy persona analysis can help balance this paradox and deliver value to both sides of the equation.

Speakers:
Zhi Ying Barry, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Whilst our research shows us that government agencies globally struggle to keep up with their private sector counterparts when it comes to customer experience (CX), we find that many APAC government departments have had blooming CX transformations. Join this session to learn best practices, challenges, and successes in government CX.

Speakers:
Riccardo Pasto, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Seles Sebastin, Senior Research Associate, Forrester

COVID19 is causing companies to scramble and create entirely new customer experiences.  Before, CX was about perfectly laid out experiences.  But now, customers need comfort, assurance, and control.   Join Forrester’s Chief Business Technology Officer and Head of FeedbackNow as he discusses what he’s hearing from clients and how you’re going to have to take on new operations, methodologies, and technologies in order to survive in this new world.

Speakers:
Steven Peltzman, Chief Business Technology Officer, Forrester

Speakers:
Mavis Liew, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Paul Dolan, Principal Analyst, Forrester

As the pandemic peaks and wanes, businesses will rethink their customer experience strategies and engagement models throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from how customers discover and buy products, to how they use services, to how they ask questions. The immediate drive for safety means that customers may temporarily sacrifice their personal comfort but demand more trust and reliability from companies they choose to do business with.

Speakers:
Tom Mouhsian, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Riccardo Pasto, Senior Analyst, Forrester