The reports show that dramatic changes in buyers' behaviour, evolving business models and technological advances mandate a shift in how companies design their strategies and operate their organisations.

To drive profitable and sustainable business growth in this environment, alignment across sales, marketing and product in B2B firms and across marketing, customer experience (CX) and digital in B2C firms are critical to powering a customer-obsessed growth engine.

Additionally, the research indicates that technology teams must be in lockstep to quickly address changing customer needs and market realities.

When internal stakeholders and functions fly in formation, everything moves faster — including a company's growth curve, according to the study. Not all forms of alignment result in competitive growth, however. 

Aligning teams around internally focused constructs can result in inefficient processes, excessive collaboration meetings and irrelevant goals and metrics.

To grow revenue, profit and customer retention efficiently and consistently, the report recommends using a journey-centric approach to drive alignment and establish aligned metrics that measure both customer and business value.

Key insights from the research include the following areas:

The B2B marketing, product and sales power trio must blend competencies to orient their growth engine to buyer value

Marketing leaders tend to have the most experience applying customer insights. Sales leaders tend to have the most practice driving revenue growth. Product and technology leaders tend to be the most well-versed in leveraging technology.

B2B leaders across these functions should encourage and incentivise cross-functional learning to extend customer competency to all relevant functions.

Alignment across B2C marketing, CX and digital functions is necessary to operate at the speed of digital consumers

Today's customers expect novelty and speed when interacting with brands. As a result, organisations cannot slow down the pace of digital innovation. Digital leaders must work closely with their marketing counterparts to drive a digital culture across the entire organisation.

Marketing executives represent the voice of the customer — and embody customer attitudes, behaviours and trends to ground all products, messages and experiences in customer obsession.

By raising digital competencies across key functions, digital teams can propel a behavioural shift toward a customer-led, insights-driven business focused on improving existing and future customer experiences.

Customer-obsessed companies leverage technology to amp up their growth engine

Firms that have reset their tech strategy to be customer-obsessed see 2.5 times more revenue growth than those that don't. Customer-obsessed companies make customer value the North Star of technology planning to deliver change at the pace of the business and the buyer.

This requires business and functional leaders to work together with their technology counterparts to align on the priorities of customer-facing teams.

"Achieving internal alignment is much easier when organisations have a common goal," says Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester.

Leaver adds, "A customer-obsessed growth engine aligns functions that have an outsized impact on customers and growth to set the course and pace."

"This research has been designed to help companies attain alignment across core customer-facing functions and reset their tech strategy to support this customer focus. When customer-facing and technology functions are in lockstep with each other, organisations can establish a collective understanding of customers, create new ways to deliver value, and lean on each other’s strengths to move faster and more efficiently," concludes Leaver.

Individuals can download Forrester's customer-obsessed growth engine report here (client access required). Alternatively, individuals are encouraged to read more about how to align internal operations around customer value to fuel customer-obsessed growth here. 

For more information, visit www.forrester.com. You can also follow Forrester on Twitter or on Instagram.