Forrester To Recognize Return On Integration Honorees And Program Of The Year Award Winners At Its B2B Summit North America 2023

At B2B Summit, attendees will hear from award winners about how they tackled their most pressing challenges to drive growth

Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) will recognize Cart.com, Cisco, and IBM as this year’s B2B Return On Integration (ROI) Honors winners at its B2B Summit North America, held June 5–7, 2023, in Austin, Texas, and digitally. These organizations are being showcased for aligning marketing, sales, and product functions to fast-track growth by maximizing customer value. Additionally, Forrester will celebrate B2B Program Of The Year (POY) Award winners for outstanding achievements within specific functions of marketing, sales, and product.

B2B Summit North America is the premier event for B2B marketing, sales, and product leaders to explore new ideas, pragmatic frameworks, and compelling data to fuel their customer-obsessed growth engines. At the event, honorees will present how they have grown revenue, accelerated time to market, and launched better-integrated global campaigns — all through deliberate cross-functional alignment.

ROI Honors winners include:

• Cart.com, the leading provider of comprehensive e-commerce solutions for retailers, gained alignment across the organization to define its go-to-market strategy. Using Forrester’s audience and campaign frameworks, the firm identified the overlap between ideal customer profiles, coordinated campaign messaging, and channel planning. As a result, the firm exceeded its revenue, gross margin, cash flow, and EBITDA goals. Join this keynote session to learn how Cart.com leveraged strategic go-to-market methodologies to focus its acquisition efforts and dramatically improve pipeline attainment.

“Our teams were trying to solve individual customer acquisition goals through disparate targeting, messaging, and technology solutions,” said Katherine Chambers, VP of revenue marketing at Cart.com. “Aside from the challenges and confusion that these efforts created in the market, we were unable to effectively measure the impact of our efforts or understand where to further invest resources. To address these challenges, we worked with Forrester to create a companywide marketing framework focused on targeting and acquiring customers and redefined how we go to market as a company.”

• Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT, and as it transforms its business for the digital era, its growing partner ecosystem accounts for more than 90% of Cisco’s annual revenue. With partners being so critical to Cisco’s success, it recognized the importance of enabling partner sellers as one of the fastest ways to drive revenue and bookings growth. To make this a reality, the company brought together its partner marketing, product, sales training, and sales enablement teams to develop and implement nurture journeys to help partners sell more effectively in focused product areas. In this keynote session, learn how Cisco enabled its partner ecosystem to achieve these goals, thereby expanding partner profitability and loyalty.

“We used Forrester’s frameworks to design hyper-personalized journeys to accelerate partner seller enablement in close collaboration with our sales and product teams,” said JoAnn Tillman, leader of partner engagement strategy at Cisco. “The integrations and cross-functional alignment that these programs established, in combination with measurable impact to bookings, set the stage for a transformational shift to a holistic persona-based enablement strategy that will drive revenue growth — both for our partners and for Cisco.”

• IBM, a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI and consulting expertise, simplified and redesigned its go-to-market strategy to better meet client needs and execute on its growth agenda. The marketing operations team focused on three key initiatives to measure and prioritize marketing contributions: relaunching campaigns to focus on products that matter most to clients, revising the management system to measure what matters most for growth, and refining the campaign operating model to prioritize efforts that deliver results. During its keynote session, IBM will share how the team contributed to growth by shifting toward client centricity and accelerating value to clients.

“Our growth strategy is part of a cultural shift toward total client centricity to accelerate value to our clients,” said Cindy Matos, VP of transformation and governance for IBM. “A campaign planning workshop with Forrester set the foundation for audience segmentation, buying group needs identification, and building plans-on-a-page. We also operationalized the Forrester Campaign Framework and relevant cascading models to support shared and interlocked processes. As a result, we are committed to executing with speed, focus, and consistency, and our growth is accelerating.”

These POY winners will also share their success stories on stage at B2B Summit:

• LinkedIn — B2B Marketing Executives Award Winner. LinkedIn will share how it aligned internal marketing, sales, product, engineering, and senior leadership to fuel a customer-obsessed growth engine.
• Unum — Marketing Operations Award Winner. Unum will outline an investigation of buying groups and multiple touches to measure marketing contribution based on improved close ratio and deal size results.
• Reltio — Demand & Account-Based Marketing Award Winner. Reltio will describe how it transitioned its go-to-market teams from lead-centric to opportunity-based processes, leading to improved pipeline quality and velocity.
• Keysight — Portfolio Marketing Award Winner. Keysight will discuss how it transformed its go-to-market approach from product-focused to a digitally-savvy, buyer-centric approach.
• VMware — Partner Ecosystem Marketing Award Winner. VMware will share the steps it took to revolutionize its partner program.
• Sprout Social — Sales Award Winner. Sprout will discuss the organization’s innovative approach to driving scalable growth and improvements in sales talent.
• Bayer — Product Management Award Winner. Bayer will outline how it implemented a rigorous upskilling program to improve product management competencies, leading to improvements in its targeted objectives and key results.

“Our Return On Integration Honors winners and Program Of The Year Award winners are proof points that companies can overcome their toughest challenges through cross-functional integration and alignment,” said Cristina De Martini, VP and research director at Forrester. “These organizations are investing in revenue-building efforts by focusing on providing value to their buyers and customers. We look forward to having them share their success stories at this year’s B2B Summit.”

Resources:

• Follow @Forrester and #ForrB2BSummit for updates.
• Learn how Forrester Decisions for B2B Marketing Executives, Forrester Decisions for B2B Sales Executives, and Forrester Decisions for Product Management can help drive functional alignment.
• Download The B2B Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine report to drive profitable, predictable, and sustainable growth.

About Forrester

Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We help leaders across technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions use customer obsession to accelerate growth. Through Forrester’s proprietary research, consulting, and events, leaders from around the globe are empowered to be bold at work — to navigate change and put their customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations. Our unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; 100 million real-time feedback votes; and the shared wisdom of our clients. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.

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