So, you didn’t get to go to Forrester B2B in Austin? Here’s our take on it.

Forrester’s B2B event is one of the premiere B2B conferences of the year, combining key tech players, key thought leaders and a wide swath of brand marketers looking to improve their understanding of the current- and future-states of B2B marketing. Moreover, it’s one of the few conferences where most everyone wants to be there and interact with each other. 

From arrival on Sunday through the last session on Wednesday, there were great presentations and discussions, with the following areas bubbling up as themes:

Theme 1: Alignment is still an Issue

Brands and thought leaders continuously cited sales and marketing alignment as a key hurdle in achieving results. But it’s not just alignment with sales, as alignment with leadership, IT, data teams and even internal marketing teams was brought up as a core challenge.

Theme 2: AI is finding its way into marketing operations

Long a hot topic in the marketing world, AI is now finding its way into the operational landscape of ABX and DemandGen. From content generation to creating reports to operationalizing manual processes and audience design, brands who have invested the time are starting to reap the benefits. 

Theme 3: Over 50% of marketers aren’t fully utilizing their tech stacks

While ad spends have been cut during the economic downturn, many brands are upping their investments in their tech stacks. Not necessarily for new tools, but to optimize the tools and tech stacks they already have. Key to this space is finding partners that can help optimize and integrate tools to fit their desired process and customer experience. 

Theme 4: Demand Gen is ripe for a change

Whether it’s AI, new tools, better processes, or a combination of all three, many marketers see the next 3 years as a potential reckoning for how they GTM. Marketers with a willingness to break out of existing processes (even those that are working) have an opportunity to leap past the competition. 

Theme 5: The definition of ABX is becoming more consistent

ABM and ABX aren’t new terms, but the consistency of how people are defining them is gaining steam. With this consistency, the industry can start to work towards a better understanding and application of what works, what doesn’t, and what kind of expertise is required in hiring people, partners, and technologies to get ABX done right. 

Final Thoughts 

A great event, in a great town, Forrester was a great example of an event where you can get out of it as much as you put in. As we look towards the rest of the year, we think Salesforce’s Connections (Chicago in May), Gartner’s Marketing Xpo (Denver in June), 6sense’s Breakthrough (Vegas in Oct) are all similarly charged events with great content and collaboration opportunities.

ROI·DNA’s TLDR Takeaway

A great conference for marketers looking to see what their peers are doing and a great opportunity to see who is “winning” in the Marketing Technology space. It’s worth the ticket/travel for marketers with established tech stacks looking to mature the people, process, and tech within their marketing functions/teams.

Check out our video recap of the event!