2025 presents a swath of challenges and opportunities for B2B marketers because buying behavior is shifting significantly. B2B marketing executives want to adapt to changing buyers, but limited resources risk taking too much focus from near-term sourced and influenced pipeline and revenue goals. An aligned strategy and process improvements will be required to succeed in this environment. This data overview presents our findings on challenges and priorities from Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2025 (B2B), to aid B2B marketing executives in forging the best path to growth in 2025 and planning for 2026.

B2B marketing decision-makers are showing surprising optimism about their budgets looking ahead to 2026, even though the first half of 2025 has proven economic and geopolitical change can come quickly. Forrester recommends that marketing executives focus their investments on segments that can withstand change with careful extraction from riskier, less stable segments. Expect stressful times with pressure for hard results and a redirection of resources into demand generation activities in safer markets. In this year’s budget planning guide, we share our advice on where to invest, divest, and experiment as B2B marketing executives navigate their path to growth.

Sixty-six percent of marketing professionals and 63% of sales professionals say there is a lack of alignment between marketing and sales in their organizations. How can marketing and sales leaders close this gap? Join principal analyst John Arnold and a group of your peers to discuss the ways leaders can drive more alignment by co-creating their growth strategies and building better partnerships between marketing and sales (and product and CS too). Peer discussions are available exclusively to Forrester Decisions VIP Leaders and Leader license holders for their own participation.

Can you trust the so-called 95:5 rule when you target B2B buyers with your brand and demand marketing mix? Here's what we found.

B2B marketing leaders should use the Forrester Initiative Ranking Matrix (FIRM) to prioritize marketing initiatives based on customer value and revenue impact. The tool also invites users to evaluate the relative level of effort as a secondary consideration, which avoids the tendency for teams to deprioritize higher-effort initiatives despite their higher potential value.

B2B marketing leaders should use the Forrester Initiative Ranking Matrix (FIRM) during a group working session to prioritize potential marketing efforts for a major initiative based on customer value and revenue impact.

As revenue increases, B2B organizations realize efficiencies that allow marketing investment to remain proportionally the same, but this is not the case for sales expenses. Forrester’s B2B Sales Survey, 2024 and Forrester’s Marketing Budgets Survey, 2024, reveal that marketing investment as a percentage of revenue is stable at 7% to 8% regardless of annual revenue, but sales expense as a percentage of revenue grows. Many marketing costs decline with volume, but sales activities involve human effort and are harder to scale, especially in larger firms. Marketing and sales leaders must partner to ensure budgets work together and are large enough to meet growth and sufficiency targets.

Nearly two-thirds of sales and marketing professionals say there is a lack of alignment between marketing and sales in their organizations. Yet 82% of company leaders believe that their sales and marketing functions are aligned. That's a big disconnect, and Forrester predicts it's about to get worse.Join a group of your peers and principal analysts John Arnold and Rick Bradberry to explore why the perception gap is so large and how leaders can build a better partnership between marketing and sales.Peer discussions are available exclusively to Forrester Decisions VIP Leaders and Leader license holders for their own participation.

Spending on connected television (CTV) advertising is forecast to increase 13.8% in 2025. But is CTV a good fit for B2B advertising? Learn the advantages and disadvantages to CTV advertising in this post.