Forrester B2B Summit Recap: What RevOps Leaders Need to Know

The Hyperscayle team recently attended the annual Forrester B2B Summit in Austin, TX. As a team that loves the work we do optimizing and aligning marketing and sales operations teams, a lot of the themes and content seemed pretty fundamental.

But in a “down” atmosphere, when many organizations are pulling back on investments, cutting budgets and going through layoffs, a return to focusing on core capabilities is a great idea. When it comes to RevOps specifically, now is the time to take the steps to build the foundational infrastructure of people, processes and technology that revenue operations teams need to grow, with speed and resilience.

In this article, we’ll lay out some of the key themes we heard at the conference, and offer practical advice on how marketing and sales teams can take advantage of this unique time to get back to RevOps basics.

Marketing and Sales Alignment: Why is This So Hard, Anyway?

Marketing and sales alignment is hard for a couple of reasons, but it’s not like these teams don’t want to be aligned. Sales and marketing leaders don’t wake up and say, “Today I am going to work hard not to align with my counterparts in sales and/or marketing.” Most of the time they are trying really hard to align, but either their communications or actions create friction within the organization. This friction can be solved by having a business plan that aligns marketing and sales.

In most cases, this business plan hasn’t gone down all the way to the revenue or a production plan level in a way that brings alignment to marketing and sales. This is important because it aligns with what marketing and sales teams should be doing and helps leaders understand where the problems manifest in the business. It’s important when getting to this level that teams don’t see it as a way to point fingers, but as a way to increase understanding of where there are gaps and where slack must be picked up.

In other cases, firms may have these plans, but the planning cycle only happens once a year, with no one owning responsibility for reinforcing the plan or keeping both sides honest.

This is where RevOps comes in as an overarching strategy to help coordinate and reinforce the people, processes, and technologies around a revenue production plan. Organizations should create a plan designed to align sales and marketing and make sure to use it as an anchor point that drives everyone together.

In addition, marketing and sales alignment requires bi-weekly meetings to review performance against metrics. This clarity and transparency reinforce alignment and helps teams identify and solve little problems before they become big problems.

Are MQLs Really Dead?

One of the themes we heard multiple times at the Forrester B2B Summit was that Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are dead. While we certainly understand the reason people are making these bold statements, in reality, MQLs are far from dead.

The key takeaway here is that marketing and sales teams should be pivoting to an approach that considers buying groups and account-based marketing (ABM) motions, rather than just passing leads over the fence. And while this makes a lot of sense, most organizations are pretty far away from operationalizing ABM in a way that will allow them to do this. Investing in the RevOps function is the only way to usher in this kind of change.

MQLs also don’t really go away just because we’re focused more on buying groups. Instead, they become signals that indicate early interest in the prospecting stage, so some handoff or identifier that allows marketing and sales to talk and align is still needed.

For most organizations, it’s time to evolve the MQL into a buying group approach that leverages the foundational alignment work. That said, RevOps teams still have to rebuild their whole backbone or infrastructure to allow this evolution to happen and that takes time, development and a really good understanding of the transformation that has to happen all the way into the SDR or business development function.

Until there’s a template for this that can be dropped into these organizations, we won’t see this evolution take hold, especially in enterprise companies where the cost and effort might not be worth it.

How Can We Truly Right-Size Marketing and Sales Tech Stacks?

Scott Brinker is well known for capturing the scope of the martech and salestech landscapes. The 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic shows over 11,000 solutions on the MartechMap alone.

During strong economic times, it’s easy for companies to spend money on new tools if they think it will help solve a specific problem. But fast forward to today, the market has changed, and it’s a good time to look at all those solutions to understand how much it’s actually used and how much real value it drives. Right-sizing tech stacks can be a logical way to cut back.

And there are more costs to consider when maintaining a tech stack with multiple solutions. Beyond the cost of seats and implementation, someone still needs to own the updates and manage the alignment and impact of each tool on the business process. Without this ownership and oversight, over the past few years marketing and sales teams have bought tools, dropped them in, then received very little clear value.

Even tools that are easy to implement have additional costs associated with them. Someone still needs to adapt the tools to adjustments to the business process, as well as understand how these tools impact downstream data. If you have tools without enablement plans that teach people how to use them, this indicates a low level of investment and probably adoption. These are the low-hanging opportunities to eliminate these tools from the tech stack.

Organizations that want to drive more efficiency and/or reduce costs should work to eliminate the tools that provide the least value and eventually reinvest in the foundational RevOps processes and alignment that will drive the most value out of these tools.

How Can We Operationalize Intent Data?

Intent data can be extremely valuable if used correctly and it has a lot of potential. At the Forrester B2B Summit, we heard several stories of people who have used intent data to increase pipeline and revenue. And we certainly had a lot of conversations with others who haven’t cracked the code yet on how to drive value from intent data.

Overall, there are still a lot of common mistakes people and teams and organizations make with intent data, and there are still some big gaps in the data itself. The biggest mistake teams currently make is buying intent data and dropping the intent data into sales processes, thinking that the sales team will know what to do with it. This almost never works. Another common mistake is that people don’t understand how intent data works, so they try to map high levels of intent to either the topics that people are searching for or tangential topics that are associated with their product.

When organizations buy intent data, they need to think about how to operationalize it, which boils down to meaning that people who come from intent data are NOT leads. Marketing teams must strategically think this through and realize that intent is an early indicator of interest, so instead of treating intent signals as leads, we must think about how to get them warm and moving through our buyer journeys. An intent signal is like a small flame that requires care and feeding to grow into a fire around your product.

With the way buying decisions are changing, there is a lot of potentials to structure intent data to help identify signals from buying groups instead of individuals. The key here is to identify interest and teach sales and marketing teams to find those signals to create those buying groups. This works well in ABM motions and is key in moving in that direction, but there is a lot of coordination that must happen with sales and marketing teams to make that work.

It goes back a little bit to sales and marketing alignment, but if this coordination doesn’t happen, then no one is taking action on intent data since your business process makes it too complicated for sales and marketing to leverage it.

Generative AI in RevOps – Is it Here? Is it Here Now?

Generative AI was a big announcement at the Forrester B2B Summit. Usually, Forrester advises a “wait and see” approach, but with generative AI, they encouraged the Summit attendees to actively explore and find ways to make it work.

We agree with this perspective in general - generative AI is here and there are some great use cases everyone should experiment with, such as enhancing content processes and allowing teams to go faster. But with that said, we are probably still a couple of years away from generative AI being useful in mainstream business processes.

Another thing organizations can do now is prepare for what you need to do to take advantage of generative AI as business value and adoption grow. If your sales and marketing data and infrastructure aren’t figured out, or you feel like you have “dirty data,” you’re not going to be in a position to take advantage of the full potential of generative AI, and your competitive edge will drop.

Now is the time to invest in your RevOps function and get your data figured out, so that you are prepared to align business processes to data at scale. Start to also create time and space for the RevOps team to start looking at or practicing ways to use AI. According to Forrester, the CMO should own generative AI. We think the CTO should be the one creating or crafting the strategy around generative AI, and the CMO (and/or CX leaders) might be the best to think about how customers interact with generative AI and how to leverage existing content in the best way.

It’s also important to remember that generative AI is always going to be historical or looking back, don’t expect it to be able to find, identify or come up with something new and groundbreaking. Instead, find the repetitive processes and help them move forward.

The Bottom Line – Get Back to RevOps Basics

As always, the Forrester B2B Summit was a great chance to get together with like-minded marketing and sales leaders, discuss common challenges and solutions, and hear about some of the new ideas and trends that we all need to pay attention to.

As you think about taking what you learned there and putting it to practice in your organization in the near term, remember that the real opportunity here is to take advantage of a “down” market to improve the foundational processes, teams, technology and data we all use to do our jobs.

This way, when we inevitably flip back to the ability to invest in growing our teams, the foundations we need to scale and try new things are firmly in place.