In today’s fast-paced business environment, operational excellence is crucial for organizational success. The key to achieving this lies in understanding all processes. Successful organizations excel by having their operations teams categorize and sequence every B2B process, identifying where breakdowns occur and addressing them effectively.

But often, go-to-market teams seem to drown in processes and operations teams struggle to understand how these processes connect. Each B2B process is like a link in a chain, interconnected and dependent on the others. Operations teams need a way to visualize and synchronize these connected B2B processes to ensure that everything flows smoothly.

The Forrester B2B Process Chain Framework acts like a life preserver, providing essential support for go-to-market teams, with seven categories relating the sequence of B2B processes. Each category represents a crucial link in the chain of key processes for sales, marketing, and product. Here are the seven interconnected categories within the Forrester B2B Process Chain Framework:

  • Strategize: establishes direction and alignment within the organization.
  • Plan: sets clear goals and priorities to guide strategy execution.
  • Design: creates effective and balanced processes for internal and external audiences.
  • Build: develops scalable efficiency and effectiveness for the go-to-market strategy.
  • Deploy: executes to achieve desired outcomes by implementing the plan.
  • Measure: gains insight into performance to drive continuous improvement.
  • Optimize: improves progress toward goals and ensures execution excellence.

By using the Forrester B2B Process Chain Framework, organizations can align all processes with a focus on excellence and adaptability. Sales and marketing teams rely on strong processes managed by revenue operations. Sometimes, marketing and sales need to focus on their own tasks — different strokes for different folks. Forrester provides separate process-chain reports for both marketing and sales operations to accommodate this.

Explore how these process chains can transform your business and unlock operational excellence in our related reports covering the Forrester B2B Process Chain Framework. And to learn even more, join us at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America from March 31 to April 3, 2025, in Phoenix. We have keynote, breakout, workshop, and roundtable sessions focused on process optimization as the key to operational excellence.