Can customer-centric marketing shift from rhetoric to reality?

80% of survey respondents said customer centricity has become ‘much more’ or ‘more important’ to their organisation over the past 2-3 years. To be customer-centric, marketers must possess a complete understanding of the customer, but as the buying journey has become more complex and anonymous, achieving a single, integrated view of the customer has become increasingly challenging.

"B2B buyers are evolving. Armed with more online resources than ever before, they favour self-directed research over traditional sales engagements, particularly in the earlier stages of the customer journey. The B2B customer in China knows more than we expected. They know both competitor and our products really well. The customer is already knowledgeable when they go to us.”
VP Commercial Marketing, Technology, China

This new buyer persona and their larger digital footprint expand the data landscape for B2B
marketers, shaping the fast-changing B2B landscape.

What are the macro shifts driving B2B Marketing today vs. in the past?

Rank 1 - Customer Centricity

Rank 2 - Changing Buyer Profile

Rank 3 - Increase in Tools and Technology

Rank 4 - Digital-led business and sales models, eCommerce and XaaS

Contrary to some strains of thought, respondents rated Creativity and Purpose-driven as being the least influential.

Changing B2B buying behaviour and stricter privacy regulations worldwide are pushing CMOs to tools that supply and leverage intent data and produce more sophisticated audience segmentation. With expanded ownership over the customer journey, B2B Marketing departments are also seeing bigger budgets—70% of survey respondents saw their Marketing budget increase over the past three years, with 75% reporting the incremental dollars are channelled into data and technology.

Budget changes over 3 years

Adding more data and technology into Marketing has created more opportunities for CMOs, but has also added complexity to their roles.

You indicated that your role has become more complex. What is driving that increase in complexity?

Survey respondents ranked understanding the B2B buyers’ needs across the journey as a major challenge, particularly pronounced in Southeast Asia. Addressing that challenge is driving significant investment in data and tech, yet these tools remain disconnected across departments due to conflicting priorities and objectives.

With limited direct control over tech infrastructure, few respondents (10%) described their B2B Marketing tech stack and performance to be mature.

"You have to understand and know your client so well that you don’t need to ask them anymore what they want.” - CMO, Financial Services

A global online retailer provided a roadmap for achieving customer-centric marketing by leveraging in-house machine learning models to speed up content creation tasks. These machine learning models and A/B testing technology solutions enable the team to iterate and improve content over time. With sophisticated email and data segmentation tools, they tailor content to individual customer segments, making the buyer the center of their marketing strategy.

"Buyers don’t want a generic value proposition. When we build content, it’s personalisation, dynamic fields...” – Head of Europe & Asia Marketing, Online Retailer

Customer expectations for a personalised experience have increased. At the same time the personal Sales relationship has declined in importance, and the barriers to switching vendors have come down.

A risk for many, but an opportunity for marketers who can leverage new technology like Gen-AI to help consolidate and interrogate large, disparate customer interactions across the organisation, from Marketing to Customer Success, Sales and Partners, unlocking the voice of the customer at scale.

By forging strategic partnerships with functional leaders, particularly the CTO, marketers can help ensure the data/tech strategy and stack are in service of full-funnel customer experience; identifying gaps, increasing data accessibility, and translating insights into impact.

The 2023 Global B2B CMO Survey was conducted by EssenceMediacom and NewtonX, and is based on a study of 188 senior business-to-business (B2B) marketing leaders across North America, EMEA, China and Southeast Asia.