Martech trends do not appear and disappear overnight but emerge and fade from the limelight. As we slowly head toward the new year 2023, some trends will continue to influence marketing in the coming year, while some will gain more prominence. Here are a few martech trends from this year that will continue to impact and a few new ones that will gain importance.
Trends do not appear overnight with the element of surprise, like a startling dream. Rather as they mature, they become more apparent. The forces that shaped last year will continue to influence next year. They will not disappear; some may no longer dominate media headlines, while others will.Â
The trick — or, better said, the skill — is to spot emerging trends that will significantly impact markets, companies, and customers. The key is to track them and know how and when to act. Leaders that understand how to spot and capitalize on emerging trends have a distinct advantage.
2022 Spill-over
2022 was a heady year for martech, RevOps, and sales technology. Companies had money to spend and a thirst for growth at all costs. By the middle of the year, the money pot had emptied, and belt-tightening began to preserve headcount. With shelfware, unused seats, and low-usage applications being canceled, software spending was scrutinized through the lens of measurable ROI.
Meanwhile, customer journeys continued to change. B2B buying teams are larger, more bureaucratic, and self-reliant. Marketers, in turn, increased go-to-market automation to reach top-of-funnel buyers, shifting from traditional demand generation to intent signaling.
See More: How Customer Journey Mapping Provides Value to Business
While organizations are planning for a year of economic and geopolitical disruption, three B2B buyer behavior trends have emerged which will impact those plans:
- Automation backlash — B2B buyers are wise to marketing automation and actively avoid vendor engagement. Several factors contribute to this, including contextually irrelevant personalization, low-value content, over-touching, annoyingly irreverent copy, and feature-hyping.
Influencer power — Peers, colleagu
es, and online and offline communities are the trusted ‘go-to’ sources. Influencers have more credibility when providing recommendations, feedback, vendors to consider, product fit, ‘real’ ROI, pricing and contract terms.
Post-purchase reputation — How vendors onboard users, depth of product knowledge, and ongoing customer service reputation is becoming THE final decision criteria, often overruling price.Â
What’s in Store for 2023?
Everything is fundamentally changing. The growth at any-cost mindset has put technology companies at a distinct disadvantage in their ability to respond to economic uncertainty.Â
Doug Bell, Host of the Revenue Generator Podcast, advises against kneecapping marketing and sales for the sake of the short term. “CEOs should take a hard look at their business, focus on long-term growth with a sustained product, and go to market investments.â€
Three emerging trends every C-Suite should focus on and quickly define how they will capitalize on or, at a minimum, reduce associated risks are:
Customer-Facing Technology Rethink
Organizations are frustrated with sales, marketing, and customer service applications as they do not support the velocity of today’s business cycles. In addition, applications play poorly together, are based on outdated assumptions, are rife with data quality issues, and cannot provide real-time feedback loops for leaders.
Mark Stouse, CEO of Proof Data Corporation, believes, “today’s clock speed of businesses is speeding up. And the past is not even remotely prologue. Governance and decision-making hinge on the ability to quickly model the question, forecast a future path forward, and then compare actuals to the forecast, all at the clock speed of the business.â€
The entire go-to-market enabling technology stack is on the cusp of a complete rethink. Today’s formulaic approach does not align with buyer behaviors and expectations.
Increasingly being discussed is a new paradigm that captures and responds to, in real-time, customer behavior complexity. By enabling companies to contextually understand market changes and customer expectations at macro and micro levels, they can meaningfully meet buyers where they are and deliver desired outcomes.Â
This trend signals the rise of a holistic and comprehensive customer lifecycle platform that is truly 360-degree, wrapped around and tuned to the buyer/customer. When vendors begin announcing their new platforms, it will massively disrupt the entire category.
Digital Twinning
One capability of this future platform already offered is digital twins to simulate customer engagement. As applications become more capable of capturing, analyzing, and responding to persona lifecycle, behavior simulations or twining will become standard best practices to assess the alignment and effectiveness of planned engagement strategies with target buyers.
Today, the approach to twinning is ‘inside-out.’ As more companies become truly customer-led — culturally, cross-functional processes, data strategy, and technologically, twinning will become ‘outside-in’ based on qualitative customer journeys, VOC, and buyer behavior-generated data streams.Â
Artificial intelligence (AI) will prove the benefits of twinning use cases and how it can lead to happier customers and revenue growth. Yet, as with all things customer-related, it comes down to data quality, the depth and breadth of current customer insights, and a symbiotic customer mindset.Â
The latter most companies have not yet achieved, and it is showing up in a disturbing new trend.
See More: 4 Strategies To Boost Customer Loyalty Within the Visual Economy
Death of SaaS Contracts
Increasingly enterprise and SMB customers are balking at traditional SaaS and Cloud contracts. They see costs rise with cloud-based solutions, not decrease as promised. Equally, the promise of hyper-flexibility and continuous innovation has yet to meet their expectations.Â
Customers want monthly or quarterly contracts and more control over the value they realize. And this will bite hard on the unit of economics model vendors use to manage their business.
Unit of economic calculation is how organizations, especially SaaS and cloud vendors, measure and forecast revenue and profitability. It is the cost-to-revenue ratio at its most basic level, a unit — the customer. How much does it cost to acquire a customer (CAC) compared to how much revenue a customer yields as measured by customer lifetime value (CLTV)? The rule of thumb is that customer acquisition costs should be recouped within a year, and the CAC to LTV ratio should be 3:1.
The notion of a customer as the economic unit does not lend itself to forecasting profitability. In other words, CLTV is a guess, which makes forecasting profitability and contribution margin tricky.Â
A shift to short-term revenue commitments and new usage pricing models will trigger a significant true-up for vendors. This will be catastrophic for many sectors dependent on high retention and renewal rates. More nimble vendors and startups can leverage this emerging trend by eliminating contract lock-in and offering more flexible, customer-led pricing and contract terms.
The world has changed tremendously with new definitions of commerce, cultures, and industries. As we look at past transformations, it is helpful to remember that each trend is a puzzle piece of a larger canvas.Â
Change will keep coming faster. Understanding the macro direction of trends and how the broader canvas is evolving helps us to make sense of all this at an organizational and personal level. Therein are new opportunities to disrupt, innovate, and drive growth.
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