According to Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2025, only 21% of marketing leaders report that a “transition from lead-focused efforts to buying groups and opportunity management” is among the most important priorities for their marketing strategy in the next 12 months. But with buyers becoming more autonomous, buying groups increasingly more complex, and customer expectations higher than ever, B2B CMOs need to step out of their comfort zone, step up as strategic leaders, and work with their peers to transform their revenue processes.

From Leads To Lifecycles: A New Mandate For CMOs

Gone are the days of linear buyer journeys and single lead conversion models. Modern B2B marketing demands a shift to dynamic, customer-centric engagement across the entire opportunity lifecycle — from presales to pipeline to postsale — and across the entire buying group. This transformation requires a strategic overhaul of revenue processes.

  • Lead change by championing transformation within the marketing, sales, and product growth engine.
  • Engineer alignment by unifying marketing efforts with sales and customer success teams.
  • Harness capabilities by leveraging data, technology, and cross-functional expertise.

Presales: From Awareness To Opportunity Activation

The presales stage is no longer about generating leads (and if you’re still reporting on leads to your board, you’re putting yourself at risk). It’s about understanding and engaging buying groups early and meaningfully to activate opportunities.

  • Lead change in marketing by refocusing on engaging buying groups that include all relevant personas for an opportunity by account. Today’s B2B purchases involve an average of 22 stakeholders, 13 internal buying group members, and nine external buying network members. CMOs must orchestrate marketing strategies and partner closely with sales based on this growing complexity.
  • Engineer alignment across demand/frontline marketing, product marketing, campaign teams, and marketing operations to ensure a shared understanding of target personas and their preferences. Drive strategies that seek to engage buyers based on their preferences, and then act on buying signals and intent data to create timely and relevant campaigns.
  • Harness capabilities by leveraging cross-functional expertise to develop programs that nurture both new and existing opportunities to get them to “sales readiness.”

Pipeline: From Handoffs To Hand In Hand

In the pipeline stage, marketing must work hand in hand with sales to accelerate deals and optimize engagement. Marketing has access to buying signals and intent data that can better empower sales teams to engage more relevantly and appropriately with buyers, accelerating conversions.

  • Lead change by proactively enabling customer-facing roles with buying signals and intent data to drive opportunity progression. Gone are the days of sending leads to sales and wishing them the best. Now, a hand-in-hand approach — utilizing insights to craft the next best interaction experience with the buyer — should take center stage.
  • Engineer alignment between sales and marketing to identify buying group members and deliver targeted, persona-based engagement across pipeline stages.
  • Harness capabilities by using intent data and internal expertise to build high-impact programs and campaigns that drive conversion.

Postsale: From Avoidance To Engagement

Despite 73% of B2B revenue coming from existing customers, on average, most marketing teams still focus primarily on acquisition with a limited focus on expansion. Avoiding postsale engagement by assuming that it’s sales’s and customer success’s job alone is a fallacy. Marketing should engage postsale to facilitate customer engagement and support retention (the foundation for existing customer growth).

  • Lead change by expanding marketing’s postsale role beyond developing customer references to build and execute programs that drive retention, upsell and cross-sell, loyalty, and customer lifetime value. This requires recalibrating KPIs to reflect customer-centric metrics, as well.
  • Engineer alignment with customer success and account management teams to share goals such as customer delight and engagement as well as to coordinate on customer communications.
  • Harness capabilities by integrating data across systems to build more complete customer profiles and deliver personalized, high-value experiences.

The Payoff: Increased Value At All Stages

By expanding marketing’s role across all stages of the opportunity lifecycle, CMOs will maximize value for the buyer and the customer through personalized, data-driven engagement. They’ll improve collaboration with sales and account teams through alignment across the customer lifecycle. They’ll focus functional teams on shared goals and customer-centric strategies that drive growth and greater efficiency for their organizations.

Forrester clients can read more in my latest research report and schedule a guidance session to discuss how to champion and drive change in your organization.