Evolution And Value Expansion Redefine Partner Marketing Automation
The complexity of the ecosystem of partners that B2B organizations engage with has redefined partner demand strategies and expanded the requirements for partner marketing automation. For B2B organizations, PMAPs now replace the legacy throughchannel marketing automation (TCMA) technology category, essentially segmenting the market between B2B PMAP vendors and B2C TCMA vendors. This shift reflects evolving market requirements and acknowledges value expansion beyond exclusive through-channel strategies to include the automation requirements of marketing to, with, and for partners. This evolution has surpassed the tipping point, with many viable, competitive offerings currently available for B2B partner marketing automation. Different vendors address these evolving market requirements and challenges uniquely, providing a variety of technological capabilities and innovations from which to choose and enabling B2B partner ecosystem marketing leaders to find solutions purpose-built for their specific partner ecosystem marketing goals and requirements.
PMAP buyers and customers using this evaluation to inform a purchase decision should consider:
- Partner ecosystem-specific capabilities. Prioritize vendors with capabilities that match your unique partner ecosystem. Focus on those that accommodate your distinct composition of marketing to, through, with, and for partners based on specific partner types, business models, routes to market, and go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Some organizations may require support for marketing to and through partners. Others may need to select a vendor that also provides marketing management with partners to support collaborative GTM approaches, such as comarketing to facilitate co-selling initiatives and multiparty solution opportunities.
- AI evolution and innovation in partner marketing automation. All the vendors featured in this report have integrated AI into their platforms to varying degrees. Prioritize vendors based on their current capabilities at the time of evaluation, as well as those with a clear vision and roadmap for future AI innovations that align with your specific PMAP requirements. These innovations should aim to significantly increase PMAP value for both your organization and your partners by rapidly boosting platform engagement, ease of use, marketing and demand success, and ROI and unlocking yet-to-be-realized AI innovation potential.
- Demonstrable business value. PMAPs are crucial not only for automating marketing across a wide universe of partners at scale but also for proving the value of partner marketing investment, not just the PMAP technology, through comprehensive and quantifiable reporting and analytics. Prioritize vendors that provide capabilities to determine the ROI of partner marketing investments, facilitate assessing partner attribution and/or contribution to B2B revenue and growth, and analyze investments and performance as a guide for future partner marketing strategies and improvements.
Evaluation Summary The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders (see Figures 1 and 2). We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations and adapt the findings based on their priorities using Forrester’s interactive provider comparison experience.