New Terminology Alert: B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms

[Bob_Conklin]

Adobe was just named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms, Q3 2024. What is a B2B Revenue Marketing Platform? Why does it matter?

These two quotes from the Forrester report provide the first clues as to what Adobe’s B2B Revenue Marketing Platform includes:

“Adobe’s vision is compelling: it aims to converge ABM and marketing automation capabilities, inbound and outbound channel orchestration, and CDP capabilities in a next-generation revenue marketing platform.”

“Adobe offers a tightly integrated solution with a bold vision for buying groups.”

So, in our view, key ingredients here are customer data, person and account prioritization, journey orchestration, personalized cross-channel engagement, performance measurement, and buying groups. These all represent investments Adobe has been making (and continues to make) to provide our customers with a powerful, integrated, best-in-class solution for B2B marketing and go-to-market; ultimately, a solution to help organizations drive growth and do so more efficiently while delivering the personalized experiences demanded by today’s customers and prospects.

Forrester defines B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms as, “A comprehensive solution that enables marketing teams to execute their lifecycle revenue marketing efforts by providing a holistic view of prospects, buying groups, and customers, as well as their interactions and impact on the business.”¹

Let’s unpack all this.

Last millennium, CRMs were supposed to be the all-in-one solution for managing customer interactions. They fell far short for marketers. Marketing Automation Platforms including Adobe Marketo Engage were born. By now, customer engagement was shifting to digital channels and personalization was already a must. B2B teams needed automation to scale their marketing and deliver the right content, through the right channel, to the right person, at the right time. Enterprise companies needed automation with the flexibility to do all of this for a broad range of products, markets, and buyers.

First priority: engagement (you know, the actual marketing)

Today, automated engagement remains at the core of B2B marketing. It’s where the rubber meets the road and where the marketing actually happens. Minds are won or lost. Your organization helps educate prospects and progress their decision-making…or not. Customers have a great experience and grow their investment with you…or not. Whether your demand process is lead-based, account-based, or a mix, it’s always about how well you can connect with and engage with people. It’s why we continue to invest heavily in new native Marketo Engage channels such as chat and webinars, in addition to AI-driven marketing attribution and an AI-fueled content supply chain. Forrester had the following to say about Marketo Engage:

“Adobe Marketo Engage stands out for its sophisticated e-mail marketing, web experiences, and multichannel and full customer lifecycle support.”

So, what is a B2B Revenue Marketing Platform? Forrester has referred to it as “the core B2B engagement platform”. So, if you remember nothing else, remember this – a B2B Revenue Marketing Platform needs to, above all else, be great at automating and orchestrating personalized, cross-channel engagement across GTM motions and demand funnel stages. Without that, you can improve things like audience targeting all you like, but the actual marketing will fall flat.

For this reason, a good number of the capabilities said to be within a B2B Revenue Marketing Platform (and some of the most important ones, in our view) are core features of Marketing Automation Platforms. Forrester is now viewing their capabilities as ingredients in a larger recipe. What else is in the recipe?

Deeper data: Unlocking next-level prioritization, segmentation and personalization

A little over 20 years ago, the IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) invented the term Account-based Marketing (ABM). The idea was simple: by better prioritizing accounts, Marketing could focus their efforts where they mattered most and team more closely with Sales on a narrower set of opportunities. Makes sense. Over time, data providers emerged offering 3^rd party account intent data. Others provided account-based advertising, often guided by that intent data. Together, these capabilities have helped B2B teams at the top of the funnel with new customer acquisition.

Now, capabilities including Adobe’s AI-powered predictive lead and account scoring extend prioritization to the rest of the funnel and a broad range of GTM motions including upsell and cross-sell. It’s just one example of how the deeper B2B customer profiles of products like Adobe Real-Time CDP can fuel not just better personalization, but also better segmentation, targeting, and prioritization across the customer lifecycle. So, if engagement is the first ingredient of a B2B Revenue Marketing Platform, data / data management is likely the second. Doing it right takes a flexible and powerful CDP.  Many Marketo Engage customers have made this move with several, including Vanguard, Qualcomm, Nasdaq, and Avantor, sharing their success stories at Adobe Summit earlier this year.  Here’s what Forrester said about Adobe Real-Time CDP as a component of Adobe’s B2B Revenue Marketing Platform:

“It (Adobe Marketo Engage) is tightly integrated with Adobe Real-Time CDP, which excels in consolidating customer data from numerous sources into unified profiles, enabling real-time personalization and segmentation across channels.”

Buying groups: the go-to-market orchestration B2B Marketing and Sales have always needed

The final ingredient in B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms represents one of the most important evolutions in B2B marketing to take place this century – buying group assembly and engagement orchestration. Why? Buying decisions in B2B are most often made by a group of people, not an individual lead and certainly not every single person working for an account. As such, the core cross-channel engagement capabilities of Marketing Automation Platforms have given us the marketing foundation we need. Deeper data and more unified data management has helped us better prioritize and deliver personalized engagement.

But something important has been missing – the ability to understand, target and automate cross-channel engagement with buying groups. In other words, the ability to align our marketing and sales to the buying opportunities within an account, whether one or many.

Targeting the key personas in a buying group got us part way there as we inched closer to true 1:1 engagement, but still what’s been missing is the ability to use signals from an individual as context for engaging the entire buying group and continue to message at the buying group and individual level, throughout the journey, to help buying group members reach consensus faster, which is especially important when buying groups are large and distributed as is frequently the case today. This also opens the door to scoring and qualifying buying groups, in addition to individual leads and contacts, to give Sales a more complete picture of demand for specific offerings.

As such, within B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms, you will see an expectation that software vendors offer this capability. We believe Adobe addresses this need most completely with Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. It did not count toward our “current offering score” in this first-edition Forrester Wave because it was still in beta at the time, but, with its general availability, this application is a true game-changer for enterprise B2B marketing teams. What Forrester said about Adobe and Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition:

“The company’s product strategy is differentiated by its strong commitment to buying groups, with the release of Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition on the near-term roadmap. Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition will seamlessly integrate with Adobe Marketo Engage and match individual addressable audiences to buying groups in target accounts.”

Final thoughts

We find Forrester’s market view aligns very closely with our own vision, innovation, and roadmap. We’re proud of our performance and of being named a Leader and we look forward to continuing to work with our customers to advance their marketing and marketing careers.

We believe, as time passes and future editions are published, the component capabilities and weightings will shift to even better reflect what we see as the most important aspects of a “core B2B engagement platform”. We also believe that, as more teams invest in buying group orchestration (since the tech is now here to do it), that will become a more significant factor within this and other analyst reports.  On that note, we always encourage our customers to use these evaluations as just a starting point. What capabilities are most important to you? Which vendors have the breadth and depth to deliver against all your use cases?  That’s what really matters. Our approach at Adobe is to provide a tightly integrated B2B Revenue Marketing Platform with everything enterprises need to achieve their pipeline, revenue, efficiency, and customer experience goals – now and down the road.

I hope this helped. It can be a terminology soup out there. That said, this is one worth paying attention to. B2B marketing is evolving and there has never been a more exciting time to be a part of it!

Check out the full Forrester report here.

¹”The B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023”, Forrester