Forrester Recognizes Five B2B Organizations For Achieving Strong Sales, Marketing, And Product Alignment

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Forrester today recognized five B2B organizations that transformed their marketing positioning, strategy, and processes to drive business growth using SiriusDecisions frameworks. Executives from Cisco, CME Group, Gigamon, SAP + Qualtrics, and VMware Carbon Black were honored as Return on Integration (ROI) Honors winners at the recently concluded Summit 2020, where they shared inspiring stories of their marketing transformation journeys. These organizations navigated and succeeded through change to accomplish ambitious goals and were bold in tackling new challenges.

Forrester recognized these companies for their ability to move fast, adapt, and innovate. The ROI Honors winners took risks without the fear of failing, charted new paths with confidence, and acted decisively to drive demand and improve company performance as a result.

Brief description of ROI honorees' success stories:

• Cisco created an end-to-end solution integrating all partner marketing resources to help them attract new customers, utilize marketing funds, deliver more sales and drive profits.
  
  
• CME Group brought new Micro E-mini futures to market by aligning its sales, marketing, and product functions with a combined effort encompassing product design, customer development, education, digital, branding, and media management that culminated in the most successful product launch in company history.
  
  
• Gigamon achieved ambitious goals by assessing and transforming its marketing positioning, strategy, and processes, and evolving into a data-driven, agile demand organization.
  
  "To support our corporate goal of significantly accelerating growth, the Marketing team took on the audacious task of increasing contribution to pipeline six-fold within 12 months," said Karl Van den Bergh, CMO, Gigamon.  "Starting with an in-depth customer journey analysis and working closely with Forrester SiriusDecisions to calibrate on metrics and go-to-market approach, we built an agile, data-driven demand engine. Thanks to a focused strategy, rigorous execution and, perhaps most importantly, the growth mindset of an exceptional team, we not only met but exceeded our targets for the year."
  
  
• SAP + Qualtrics integrated the go-to-market strategies of SAP and Qualtrics to align sales, product, and marketing functions to ensure scalable execution in a high-growth market.
  
  
• VMware Carbon Black drove, enabled and supported the transformation of the organization's revenue operations function over the past two years to accelerate revenue growth, enable the transformation to SaaS and scale the revenue engine.
  
  "Revenue operations requires combining all the go-to-market operations functions including strategy, planning, analytics, operations, enablement, process, systems and data as a central powerhouse," said Dan Carpenter, VP of GTM Operations, VMware Carbon Black. "Revenue operations can help align and optimize the goals, resources and revenue engine, from top of the funnel through to renewals, to efficiently maximize growth, enable scale and provide a great customer experience in a hybrid SaaS environment."

"The winners personify behaviors that we like to call being bold at work," Forrester VP of Product Management John Donlon said. "At Forrester, being bold at work doesn't just mean coming up with new, creative ideas — it's about putting bold ideas into action. These companies relied on research-based approaches to problem-solving and serve as a true inspiration to other organizations that are experiencing unprecedented challenges given the current business climate."

To lead by example, Forrester quickly transformed its flagship Summit 2020 into a fully paid, four-day virtual event at a time when many organizations either canceled or offered free virtual events due to COVID-19. Attendance for the virtual event matched the number of attendees at last year's physical event, demonstrating Forrester's confidence and ability to move fast, adapt, and innovate.

Resources:

• Learn how to align sales, product, and marketing to improve business results.

About Forrester

Forrester is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We work with business and technology leaders to drive customer-obsessed vision, strategy, and execution that accelerate growth. Forrester's unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 690,000 consumers and business leaders worldwide, rigorous and objective methodologies, and the shared wisdom of our most innovative clients. Through proprietary research, data and analytics, custom consulting, exclusive peer groups, certifications, and events, we are revolutionizing how businesses grow in the age of the customer; learn more at forrester.com.

Shweta Agarwal, (617) 613-6805, [email protected]

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