"Even in the best of times, planning for a new fiscal year can be daunting," says Monica Behncke, VP, SiriusDecisions Research at Forrester. "The goal of Planning Assumptions is to help B2B leaders be nimbler and adapt to the rapidly changing market forces for long-term success."

"Looking ahead to 2021, proactive planning, embracing change and transforming familiar models and approaches will be critical to B2B firms' success. Leaders across the revenue engine will need to accelerate the shift toward digitisation, buyer centricity and customer obsession," concludes Behncke. 

Each brief features actionable insights to help B2B leaders capitalise on opportunities in the next fiscal year.

It serves 13 roles including:
  1. B2B chief marketing officers
  2. chief sales officers
  3. demand and account-based marketing leaders
  4. marketing operations leaders
  5. as well as heads of sales operations
  6. emerging growth marketing
  7. customer engagement
  8. content strategy and operations
  9. portfolio marketing
  10. sales enablement
  11. product management
  12. emerging growth sales, and
  13. channel marketing.
The key insights from the release include:

B2B CMOs must be agents of change, not advocates for a comfortable status quo. Thriving in an unpredictable and continuously shifting B2B climate requires agility and resilience.

Proactively challenging assumptions and reviewing risks will help strengthen organisational resilience in the year ahead. B2B CMOs will need to adapt marketing campaigns to endure market volatility and shrinking budgets.

Chief sales officers must get adept at virtual selling for their sales organisations to address buyer needs. 2020 has forced profound changes in how sales organisations work, plan, and prioritise.

Buyers expect, and even demand, that sellers deliver an intuitive and immediate buying experience. Sales organisations should harness technology and data to deliver on buyers' expectations and deliver personalised experiences for each buyer.

Demand and account-based marketing leaders must find compelling ways to drive engagement across buying groups. The recent disruptions to the B2B buying process have heightened the focus on how demand marketing and account-based marketing programmes can drive growth.

The future success of demand and account-based marketing teams will rest heavily on their ability to invest in technology, programmes and content that help to spot, measure and enable buying groups.

Marketing operations leaders must enable hyper-agility. marketing operations' role has evolved to include unfamiliar responsibilities that are and will continue to be required to advance the organisation mid- and post-pandemic.

CMOs will lean on marketing operations to provide guidance on the best use cases for adaptability and improve processes for a nimbler marketing function.

Sales operations must improve capabilities to collect and analyse data. Guiding buyers through the purchase decision-making process requires a deep understanding of buyers and customers.

The job of the B2B sales representative is no longer to convince customers to buy but rather to help them buy. Sales operations must improve their capabilities to collect and analyze data to provide on-demand insights to reps and sales leaders.

For more information, visit www.forrester.com.