As 2027 approaches, it's time to think about where to focus your resources and investments for maximum impact. Join Forrester's Revenue Operations analysts as they discuss what the coming year will hold for B2B businesses. They highlight specific challenges operations leaders should anticipate and offer recommendations to help you shape your investment decisions. Get answers to your questions about how these changes will affect your organization.Key takeaways: Learn how marketing and sales are allocating their budgets today — and how they expect that to change.Hear Forrester's recommendation for specific areas where go-to-market operations teams should increase and adjust investment levels.Target audience level: all levels

The Forrester B2B Marketing And Sales Data Strategy Model provides the foundational elements for organizations to build a comprehensive marketing and sales data management strategy, including governance, compliance, and technology. It also helps data teams execute the strategy by identifying primary data requirements, effectively managing data assets, and empowering end users to put that data to use. In this report, we describe the key components of data strategy planning and execution a data management team needs to create and nurture an insights-driven culture.

You can use B2B intent data providers to focus resources on your highest-potential business opportunities; better align and personalize outreach and messaging across marketing and sales; and predict, identify, and engage buying group members. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation. Marketing, sales, and operations professionals should use this report to understand the value they can expect from a B2B intent data provider, learn how vendors differ, and investigate options based on size and market focus.

Designing and delivering successful conversational interactions in business requires a strategy for conversational data that is connected, scalable, accurate, and compliant. Too often, data strategy teams and marketers underestimate both the potential and the risk of conversational data. In this report, we explain the need for a conversational data strategy for B2B marketing and sales, discuss how that strategy should connect conversational data to business requirements, and highlight key considerations for conversational data at each stage of the data lifecycle.

This checklist gives B2C marketers a template for collaborating with their security and legal counterparts to gather the consent and documentation requirements of the preference center. It alerts marketers to the types of consent the preference center must capture by data point and channel as well as what other parameters the preference center must capture to comply with regulations and internal policies.

Preference centers satisfy consumer privacy concerns while providing marketers with data that can deliver relevant, personalized experiences. But constructing a robust, privacy-compliant preference center is no easy feat. Forrester’s Preference Center Creation Checklist details the requirements, considerations, and best practices for building and optimizing a preference center. B2C marketers can use this checklist and accompanying templates to guide them through the steps, document their responses, and track their progress.

As marketers design their preference centers, they must consider the types of communications they deliver today and by what channel. From there, they can identify where they would like to give customers opportunities to adjust their communication preferences. The Preference Center Communications Matrix prompts B2C marketers to identify the different content types delivered through each channel supported by the preference center. The matrix then shapes decisions about granular content and channel controls the marketer can surface in the preference center. It may also highlight areas in which the organization is overcommunicating on certain topics or in certain channels.

This checklist enables B2C marketers to document the types of preferences they want to surface in their preference center: zero-party data about the customer’s purchase intent or persona, customer data points (required and optional), delivery channel preferences, and content type preferences. Once they’ve completed this checklist, marketers can incorporate their inputs into other preference center templates.

AI has upended the fragile norms of B2B go-to-market (GTM) strategy and ushered in a new period of singularity in which the old rules no longer apply. Progressive GTM leaders recognize that they can’t proceed cautiously, continue to cut costs, and wish for a return to normalcy. Instead, these leaders anticipate that increased budget availability will help them adapt to this new reality. Revenue operations teams must aggressively sharpen their focus and assert a customer-obsessed and growth-oriented mission in an AI-centric world. This report provides revenue operations leaders with data-driven guidance on key investments, divestments, areas to avoid, and places to experiment for 2027 budgets.

Sage, a global provider of cloud business management solutions, initiated an innovative AI development program within its performance marketing team, empowering marketers to lead AI adoption rather than rely on technical teams. Early hack-a-thons and pilot squads helped marketers experiment with AI tools, develop skills, and produce tangible results — including faster automation, enhanced dashboards, and real-time agents. In this report, we explore how Sage’s human-centered AI strategy enabled rapid innovation for its performance marketing group.