2023 Marketing Predictions | CMOs will incorporate customer relationship health into new metrics

An industry basically relies on acquiring new customers to drive growth, and acquiring new customers can not only win new projects, but also help companies to capture more revenue and profits faster and better. The author of this article analyzes the marketing forecast for 2023. Students who are interested can take a look.

Due to the severe economic downturn in 2022, most B2B companies began to shift their growth focus to existing customers.

Driving the needs of existing customers has become the cornerstone of growth. But if everyone does this, then the core problem is that if an industry has been mainly driven by acquiring new customers for a long time, it is not that they did not realize the importance of maintaining existing customers before, but acquiring new customers and winning new projects help companies to capture more revenue and profits faster and better.

Now these companies have to reconsider the issue of growth and how to create value for customers by improving internal efficiency. This efficiency improvement will run through the entire stage of the customer's life cycle value, with the goal of maximizing customer lifetime value.

Today we will predict what opportunities and challenges the marketing and sales functional departments of B2B companies will face as we enter 2023.

01 CMOs incorporate customer relationship health into new metrics

To increase customer loyalty and protect sales revenue as much as possible, more and more CMOs will focus on the health of customer relationships. These initiatives include jointly implementing planning processes and adopting new common goals for post-sales customer success departments.

According to survey statistics, 33% of CMO data dashboards include customer relationship health as an evaluation dimension, and this will become a future trend.

Including customer relationship health in growth indicators is a reflection of the implementation of the "customer-centric" marketing philosophy. The marketing department not only needs to be good at digging out core customer insights from marketing activities, understanding customers, and knowing customers, but they also need to collaborate with the internal sales department to obtain customer feedback in order to reach customers more accurately.

In addition, many B2B companies have a customer success department. The staff of this team needs to effectively scale customer interaction projects for a certain type of customer and expand them to more customers. These interaction projects include content marketing and communication projects specifically for the purpose of retaining old customers, cross-selling, and upselling.

02 Enterprises will reduce investment in single-point marketing technology tools by 1/3

In many enterprises, it is not uncommon to see systems being fragmented and data being isolated.

Marketing and sales technology tools that are at the forefront of innovation have indeed created new opportunities for companies to establish comprehensive, automated, personalized, and real-time connections with customers. However, the emergence of a large number of new tools has also exceeded the relatively slow pace of product development to market, which has also brought considerable confusion to companies.

There are serious risks in the deployment of new tools, technology collaboration, and data connectivity within corporate organizations. This phenomenon has also exacerbated the gap in customer experience between what companies can provide and what customers expect from companies, resulting in a large gap in customer experience.

In fact, many companies have made improving customer experience part of their core growth strategy, and 20% of B2B marketing decision makers from these companies have expressed the need to optimize marketing technology, including technology integration and rationalization of technology introduction to support growth priorities.

In 2023, B2B companies will reduce single-point solutions, fully integrate tool systems for different functions and businesses, and focus on delivering the best customer experience.

As for how to choose the tools that need to be integrated, companies need to conduct a comprehensive technical review to identify which ones do not meet customer or business needs and focus on reducing investment and use of these tools.

03 40% of B2B organizations will close their channel marketing departments

This number sounds shocking. Let me tell you about my own experience. About 90% of the business income of my previous company came from channels, that is, major distributors, wholesalers, and agents at all levels. This shows the importance of channels and the importance of building good relationships and fully interacting with channels.

B2B enterprises will reshape their partnership with channels and extend the management of traditional relationships to a value system that spans the entire customer life cycle. The all-round ecological business model will include - building, influencing, selling, serving and managing - a complete set of strategic cooperation systems will accelerate the transformation and upgrading of the existing traditional channel marketing model to the partner ecological marketing model.

In 2023, partner ecosystem marketing leaders will need to focus on full collaboration and ecosystem collaboration with a wide range of partners so that they can keep pace with their customers and fully realize their influence in transactional and non-transactional partnerships.

05 20% of the customer demand mining department will report to the sales department

For the marketing department, a very obvious trend in 2022 is the decline in customer demand and the reduction in sales contribution brought by collecting and converting marketing leads. In 2023, 20% of the customer demand mining department will report to the sales department.

Too many companies present this initiative as an attempt to improve departmental collaboration and improve the performance of inefficient departments, although this can be misleading .

Because changing reporting lines doesn’t really solve organizational alignment problems —nor does it correct the fact that demand generation departments often take short-sighted marketing actions before creating meaningful value for prospects and customers.

No matter who the demand generation marketing department reports to

Success depends on whether marketing leaders truly embrace the idea of ​​delivering a satisfying customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle and take action to do so.

Taking action means that marketing and sales departments must work together, communicate and collaborate fully, and integrate their respective strengths to support and meet the needs of consumers and customers - a goal that is simply impossible to achieve before both marketing and sales can truly solve customer group problems at the operational level and seize various market opportunities.

06 In the post-epidemic era, the expectation of a rebound in activity budgets has never been realized, and activity budget reduction has become the new normal

The epidemic has accelerated the digital transformation and upgrading of marketing models. B2B companies have spent a lot of budget on the preparation and hosting of offline activities for a long time.

Before the epidemic, data showed that offline event budgets accounted for 27% of the entire marketing budget. Due to the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic, which has continued from 2020 to 2021 and 2022, and has lasted for three years so far, market budget investment has become polarized. Some companies have further reduced their event budgets by 17%, while others, such as digital marketing, plan to increase them by 48%.

B2B companies have developed new marketing methods and fully utilized digital methods to connect with customers. This behavioral shift is not only meaningful but also irreversible. Digital marketing has assumed an increasing responsibility for sales growth. The budgets previously used for annual activities will no longer exist and will become history forever.

To better establish strong connections with channels and customers, CMOs must reshape their campaign strategies to include clear campaign goals, scientifically measurable selection criteria, and their revenue impact.

To summarize, looking ahead to 2023, improving the health of customer relationships, digital marketing transformation, market and sales integration and collaboration, and establishing a new partner ecosystem strategy will be the common strategic focus of the marketing and sales departments.

Data source: Forrester Research

Author: Zhu Jingyu, WeChat public account: Jade Digital Marketing