B2B marketers overwhelmingly agree that their buyers and customers expect experiences relevant to their needs and preferences. Yet they struggle to define and deploy an audience-centric approach to B2B personalization that extends throughout the customer lifecycle.
Compounding this challenge is that the “right” content — what is most relevant or meaningful to the buyer — is not absolute but changes with each interaction based on new information obtained and new experiences with the provider and within their buying network.
B2B organizations overall have much work to do to catch up to audience expectations and evolving buying behaviors. Even with the proliferation of AI-powered personalization capabilities, no single technology has emerged as a personalization panacea: most B2B organizations use between four and 10 discrete technologies to execute personalization (Forrester’s State of Digital in B2B Marketing Survey, 2023).
Across tech categories, specialized AI agents are now poised to disrupt and democratize the design, deployment, measurement, and optimization of B2B personalization. They’ll soon be able to autonomously execute against your program and performance goals fueled by infinite content variations, a rich signal universe fed by unstructured data, and individualized experiences that enable each unique customer journey.
The aspiration for precision and scale, however, will fall flat if B2B organizations fail to first address gaps in strategy and alignment—and documentation. Doing so will help ensure new AI models and agents enabling personalization orchestration are learning the ideal state, not “the way we’ve always done things.”
Focus on Five Elements to Elevate B2B Personalization A clear and actionable strategy for B2B personalization, driven by a shared vision of its role in delivering valuable interactions, helps organizations achieve goals for real-time buyer and customer enablement, revenue process transformation, increased sales efficiency, and improved customer satisfaction. To get there, B2B organizations should assess their personalization maturity across five core competencies:
Strategy. B2B personalization requires a well-defined approach to deliver relevance throughout the purchasing journey and postsale experience using customer history, preferences, context, and intent.
Data. B2B personalization requires a comprehensive marketing, sales, and product data strategy and the ability to collect and unify various sources of prospect and customer data into a single, holistic dataset.
Design. Organizations must understand their target audiences’ information needs, desired outcomes, and interaction preferences throughout the customer lifecycle and use those insights to inform content requirements and signal-driven adaptation.
Delivery. No one wants three “Dear [First name]” emails in a day. B2B personalization must be omnichannel, signal-driven, group aware, and connected across interaction types and information sources to effectively coordinate personalization across inbound and outbound delivery mechanisms.
Measurement. Click-based activity metrics are not enough. A comprehensive view of B2B personalization requires additional mid- and long-term metrics aligned to established SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals and a culture of experimentation to discover new ways to reach, engage, and enable audiences.
Evaluate Your Approach to B2B Personalization—Then Re-evaluateHow does your organization’s approach to B2B personalization stack up? Join us in Phoenix at Forrester’s B2B Summit for the interactive workshop “Dear [AttendeeName]: Could Your Personalization Strategy Be Better?” You’ll leave with a completed B2B Personalization Maturity Assessment and practical next steps for increasing personalization capabilities and impact.
