Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guides: Leaders Across Functions, Industries, And Geographies Intend To Spend More In 2025
August 01 2024 - 9:00AM
Business Wire
Tech leaders are the most bullish when it comes
to increased budget expectations in the coming year
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2025 Budget Planning
Guides, leaders intend to spend more in 2025 after a year of
restrained budget expectations. Despite high interest rates, tight
labor markets, and the uncertainty of US elections, 91% of global
tech decision-makers and 87% of global marketing decision-makers
are planning for budget increases in the year ahead. Pressure to
optimize spending and drive efficiencies remains a focus for
organizations, however. As a result, to derive the most value from
increased budgets, leaders must invest in cross-functional efforts
that have an outsized impact on their firm’s growth.
Forrester’s Budget Planning Guides provide data-backed
recommendations for technology and security, B2B and B2C marketing,
customer experience (CX), digital strategy, and sales and revenue
operations leaders to make sound planning and budgeting decisions
for the coming year. The guides also include spending intention
benchmarks and recommendations for areas to experiment, deepen
investments, and divest budget allocations. Read on for key
insights from Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guides.
Areas to increase investment in 2025:
- Cross-functional efforts to deliver connected
experiences. Organizations with strong alignment among their
marketing, digital, and CX teams report 1.6 times faster revenue
growth than their peers and 1.4 times better customer retention. To
ensure alignment, leaders should invest in customer journeys where
functional teams and business units have a strong interlock.
- Capabilities and frameworks for AI governance and trust.
As AI deployments become ubiquitous, firms should invest in
building policies and frameworks around data access, usage,
sharing, storage, and retention to retain customer and employee
trust. This also requires security and privacy investments in
approaches like advanced encryption, data masking, differential
privacy, and data clean rooms.
Areas to decrease investment in 2025:
- Journey-mapping without a purpose. CX leaders often
struggle to build momentum and drive action from their mapping
efforts. As a result, they should scale back journey-mapping
initiatives that lack a clear objective, an executive champion, or
customer insights.
- Bespoke tech stacks. Leaders should inventory and
replace their bespoke applications and isolated infrastructure that
only serves one or a few applications. Addressing this sprawl
requires up-front investment to reduce technical debt and deliver
high-performance IT.
Areas for experimentation in 2025:
- Platform teams that break down silos and innovate.
Platform teams are cross-functional product-centric teams that
build and maintain tooling, infrastructure, and services, enabling
other IT and business teams to build, deploy, and manage their
applications. Platform teams deliver value to stakeholders by
improving alignment and eliminating bottlenecks.
- Quantum security. As cybercriminals amass sensitive data
vulnerable to quantum attacks, leaders should follow post-quantum
(PQ) cryptographic developments and experiment with PQ security
solutions to insulate critical assets and future-proof their
organization against data breaches.
“Optimistic budget expectations will serve leaders well as they
enter 2025, but they need to be super thoughtful about investing in
areas that support their firms’ overall growth,” said Sharyn
Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester. “While leaders should
continue to experiment with more advanced AI capabilities in 2025,
those shouldn’t be the only experiments they pursue. They should
prioritize investments that benefit their entire firm and help
establish long-term trust with customers and partners. Forrester’s
Budget Planning Guides provide detailed guidance on where leaders
should invest, pull back, and strategically experiment to succeed
amid continual, rapid change.”
Resources:
- Explore the Budget Planning Guides hub.
- Read more about the key areas that technology, marketing,
customer experience, and other leaders should prioritize in 2025 to
deliver customer value and business results.
- Register to attend Forrester’s upcoming Budget Planning Guides
2025 webinars for B2B marketing leaders, CX leaders, and technology
and security leaders.
About Forrester
Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research
and advisory firms in the world. We help leaders across technology,
customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product
functions use customer obsession to accelerate growth. Through
Forrester’s proprietary research, consulting, and events, leaders
from around the globe are empowered to be bold at work — to
navigate change and put their customers at the center of their
leadership, strategy, and operations. Our unique insights are
grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business
leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective
research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; more
than 100 million real-time feedback votes; and the shared wisdom of
our clients. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.
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Ira Kantor ikantor@forrester.com
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