May 2021

B2B Marketers’ Checklist For A Successful Vendor Marketplace Strategy

Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Checklist

Executive Summary

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Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Checklist Commissioned By CloudBlue

Table Of Contents

Organizations’ success hinges largely on how well they can provide customers with relevant information to inform their purchase decisions in the locations consumers prefer to purchase. The increasingly large number of channels at consumers’ disposal makes this strategy even trickier: How can organizations make sure they’re meeting customers where they are and providing the best possible purchase journey?

Enter the marketplace strategy. As a key component for B2B sales, marketplaces have long been sought to increase revenue, reach, and customer satisfaction. Depending on organizations’ intended focus, marketplaces can be broad and far-reaching or niche and specialized. Marketplace owners can bring together a variety of sellers or vendors to sell their products in one distinct space.

Integrating into hypermarketplaces or industry marketplaces is a necessary piece of digital strategy to meet today’s consumers’ needs. However, this process is rife with challenges that marketers must address to create the most impactful, relevant strategy for their customers. This checklist helps decision-makers build solid marketplace strategies through 9 simple steps that address assessment and setting a realistic baseline, understanding how to address common marketplace challenges, and setting an appropriate plan of action.

Project Director: Megan Doerr, Market Impact Consultant
Contributing Research: Forrester’s B2B Marketing research group
NEXT SECTION: Realistically Assess Your Current Positioning, Customer Base, And Priorities

You can’t move toward success without an accurate vision of your starting point.
  • 1. Evaluate your current performance.

    Look at dashboards, metrics, and annual process plans to understand how you’re doing across sales/channel performance/marketing performance as a whole. What next steps make logical business sense? Are you underperforming in any key areas that prevent achievement of priorities? Are these easily addressable, or will they take time to change? Take this one step further and identify a handful of KPIs you want to focus on (like number of purchases per customer, average order value, or basket size) to benchmark against yourself in the future.

  • 2. Reach out to key buyers to understand how and where your target personas prefer to shop.

    Survey data shows that buyer behavior has changed to match an increasingly digital world. Evaluate how this has affected your buyers and where these buyers prefer to make purchases. If your personas are better suited for industry marketplaces but you’re solely evaluating hypermarketplaces, you’re doing your buyers a disservice. Ensure you have accurate and adequate representation in any and all locations your buyers want to purchase. If there are any gaps, determine how you can enter into these markets effectively.

  • 3. Revisit your goals and priorities for the year.

    Evaluate if your current goals from Step 1 are setting you up to be marketplace-ready. If they’re not, how can you restrategize? Are your goals well supported by your current processes, tools, technologies, and skill sets — and vice versa? If not, where are there gaps that need to be addressed? Do you need to collaborate with other teams to create more streamlined processes? Are your initiatives for the year positioning your marketplace strategy for success, or is it being treated like an afterthought? Treat your annual initiatives as stepping stones to reach your marketplace goals.

POLL

See How Your Company Compares By Taking Our Poll

What are your organization's main marketing priorities over the next 12 months? (Select all that apply.)

POLL

See How Your Company Compares By Taking Our Poll

How other organizations answered:

NEXT SECTION: Understand How To Overcome Common Marketplace Struggles

Once you understand where you are and where you want to go, be on the lookout for challenges standing in your way of marketplace success.
  • 4. Determine how your offerings appear on a variety of different marketplaces.

    One marketplace presence is not enough — but don’t use the same templated offerings on every marketplace. In the same way you would personalize social media content across channels, so should you for each type of marketplace. Evaluate where you want to sell and what products will be sold in each marketplace. Ensure that each location has full visibility of all offerings and solutions, is consistent across all marketplace locations, and is tweaked appropriately to fit the individual needs of each location. Remember: Your message should be consistent, but the delivery should be unique.

  • 5. Evaluate your technology’s ability to support marketplace integration.

    Integrating across multiple marketplaces is no easy feat; before you start, make sure your tools and supporting technology enable you not only to integrate across numerous marketplaces, but also to automate the integrations. This helps avoid a slow time-to-market and frees up more time to focus on what innovations come next. If you’re operating with legacy tools/systems that don’t allow for the integrations you’d prefer, determine if there are any features that would allow you to duplicate content easily instead.

  • 6. Support sales enablement content with your marketplace strategy, and vice versa.

    Don’t let your sales teams fend for themselves. You can support sales teams with your marketplace strategy and have their support for marketplaces. Unifying sales teams by making sure sales enablement content is streamlined across different channels will help bolster your marketplace strategy in the long run. Consistency is key!

NEXT SECTION: Put Insight Into Action And Start Moving Toward Your Marketplace Future

You’re ready to roll. Take what you’ve learned and apply it to setting the best marketplace strategy.
  • 7. Automate where you can, innovate where you need to, and iterate again and again.

    The ideal approach is one that is technology-driven, diversified, and repeatable. Given your assessment in the previous steps, determine what you have that meets these criteria or if there are gaps that need filling. Does your process include early customer influence, frictionless vendor selection and commerce, long-term adoption, stickiness, or cross-sell/upsell? If not, can it feasibly support these initiatives? Determine where and how each of these pieces can best fit into your strategy. A focus on optimization, automation, and self-service can create a better customer and partner experience that is infinitely scalable.

  • 8. Embed your marketplace strategy across your organization.

    Embed your marketplace strategy into your product, marketing, sales, channel, and customer success strategy. Break down internal silos and build a consolidated marketplace team under one leader to better collaborate and align with other customer-facing departments. This group will share the same goals and objectives while leveraging best practices across the entire sales, marketing, and channel functions. Put special focus on the product management group, as they should be building routes to market and marketplace strategy early into all product development.

  • 9. Seek assistance from experienced, trusted vendors.

    Don’t go it alone — let a partner take the reins on supporting foundational aspects so you can spend more time focusing on refining your marketplace strategy and innovating within it. In our survey, the most sought-after capabilities from a partner include automated solution onboarding (56%), partner and channel management (56%), product information management (52%), multiorder channel management (48%), and vendor/catalog management (47%). Delegating one — or all — of these capabilities to a suitable partner will allow you more time to innovate and ensure effective handling of foundational processes.

POLL

See How Your Company Compares By Taking Our Poll

What capabilities would make you better able to deliver on your marketplace strategy? (Select all that apply.)

POLL

See How Your Company Compares By Taking Our Poll

How other organizations answered:

DID YOU KNOW?

The ideal approach is one that is technology-driven, diversified, and repeatable.

NEXT SECTION: Methodology

CloudBlue commissioned this study to understand marketplace channel strategy best practices and organizations' readiness to embrace industry marketplaces.

To achieve these objectives, Forrester conducted an online survey with 313 B2B marketing leaders at global SMBs/enterprises.

This study was conducted by Forrester’s Custom Content Consulting Practice. Get in touch to discuss your custom content needs and goals. Learn more about all of Forrester's consulting capabilities.

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Learn more about CloudBlue solutions at www.cloudblue.com.

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