I know this will date me, but I remember when email was just about the only technology that marketers were working with on a day-to-day basis. Then came contact databases, customer relationship management, and sales force automation systems — and the list goes on and on. Today, just attempting to get a basic idea of all the technology that exists within your organization today can be overwhelming. To succeed in the modern B2B landscape, marketers must have a solid understanding of their organization’s technology stack.

B2B marketers should partner with colleagues in marketing operations to identify the right technology to uncover meaningful insights. At this year’s Forrester B2B Summit North America, Barbara Winters and I are presenting “Lighting Up Your Tech Stack to Drive Market, Buyer and Customer Insights” and sharing the following highlights.

Identify The Most Important Insights

For the purpose of our session, we are focused on insights that will help marketers develop a better go-to-market approach and increase buyer and customer engagement through better messaging, content, and program design. We will specifically examine the following three categories of insights:

  • Buyer. There is no shortage of buyer information available in most organizations. Marketers must isolate which technologies are best suited to support the gathering of insights such as buyer needs and buyer behavior.
  • Customer. There are many customer systems available today — from customer success to customer advocacy to customer intelligence platforms. What systems can we “light up” to glean the best insights to support our audience-centric go-to-market efforts?
  • Market. Typically, market insights are derived from external sources. However, we must consider how our internal systems can be mined for additional insights to consider.

Understand The Available Technology

Within the massive set of technologies that exist in B2B organizations, where do we begin? Marketers must rely on our friends and colleagues in marketing operations, as they are technology experts and can help sort and understand the myriad systems that support our business needs. With an organized view of technology, marketers can better understand the sources of information that exist and identify which systems are best suited to support buyer, customer, and market insights.

When B2B marketers “light up” the right technology, we have confidence in the data we are gathering to support our efforts. We can find the answers to our critical business questions and ensure that we are applying the insights needed to make better business decisions.

We hope you’ll join us for our upcoming B2B Summit North America session — click here to register and also review the  B2B Summit agenda.