With 2025 budget cycles well underway, B2B sales and marketing leaders are braced for another rough go at it. Forrester’s Budget Planning Survey, 2024, found that only 35% of B2B marketing leaders and 33% of B2B sales leaders expect budgetary increases of 5% or higher. This means that, after factoring for inflation, the overwhelming majority of organizations will only be able to support new go-to-market investments by scaling back current areas of investment.

For leaders of marketing and sales operations, doggedly tight budgets will require ruthless introspection as you identify areas for savings and pointedly work through how to best redeploy that investment. To make smart choices, we must acknowledge key business challenges likely to weigh on marketing and sales teams in 2025:

  1. Processes designed around company needs, not customer value, are taking a toll. Whether it’s systems of measurement that don’t account for customer value or processes that fail to help customers attain it, the ways that B2B organizations allocate their resources often have a negative impact on the customer.
  2. An AI explosion is stretching legacy technology and data to a breaking point. A large majority of B2B decision-makers are at minimum exploring the use of AI in go-to-market processes. But applying AI as an accelerator to customer needs that aren’t understood and turbocharging outreach to buyers on the basis of subpar data are recipes for buyer dissatisfaction — signs are that most organizations are not ready.
  3. A perpetual break/fix mode is inhibiting meaningful change. Go-to-market operations teams continue to devote more time to duct-taping fatally flawed approaches than designing better ways to work. As long as this goes on, organizational challenges revolving around the application of insights and optimization of revenue-related processes will never be addressed, while operational resources getting overwhelmed by the crisis of the day will continue to be the norm.

Given these realities, here are just a few of the investment choices that we believe go-to-market operations teams should start with in 2025:

  1. Double down on customer data unification and hygiene. A deeper, more connected understanding of your buyers and customers is crucial. Organizations need to invest in solutions that unify data, support hygiene and enrichment, and perform ID resolution if they’re to gain a fuller view of the customer and optimize value-producing engagement.
  2. Squeeze out duplicative capabilities in best-of-breed solutions. B2B revenue tech stacks have grown unwieldy. Sprawling collections of point solutions are absorbing financial resources and adding complexity to customer-facing processes. It’s time for B2B organizations to pare some of those best-in-breed solutions holding great, but underutilized, promises — especially where broad platform providers that are already deployed are presenting “good enough” solutions.
  3. Expand deployment of conversation intelligence technologies. According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2023, nearly half the purchasing interactions that buyers value are personal, and personal interactions most frequently take the form of conversations between humans. These interactions are rich sources of insights into the needs of buyers and customers. With AI-driven advances promising to unlock meaning from these interactions, investments in conversational intelligence are poised to drive better outcomes for buyers and sellers alike.
  4. Quit trying to scale chaos. Go-to-market operations teams frequently fall into the trap of focusing on low-priority operational tasks, random tactical requests, and continuous firefighting. At the heart of this activity lies a series of outdated processes never designed around customer need. Revenue operations leaders must stop investing their time in attempting to mitigate chaos and prioritize one or two high-priority processes for mapping and improvement.

Navigating tight budgets shouldn’t mean sacrificing go-to-market excellence. Operations teams can use a series of smart investments, well-placed experiments, and targeted cuts to power your organization’s growth and create lasting customer value. Forrester clients can read more of our recommendations in our Budget Planning Guide 2025: Revenue Operations.

Forrester clients who’d like to hear more about these recommendations and what else sales, marketing, and revenue operations teams can do to ensure that their 2025 plans are successful, please join us on November 18 for a client webinar.