Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021

Top Priorities for

Tech & Service
Providers: Leadership
Vision for 2021
Product Marketer

© 2021 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. CM_GTS_1114728 1
 Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021

Introduction
As every organization becomes more dependent on technology in all facets
of business, the market for technology products and services will expand
to cover more aspects of business and open new markets.
Advances in digital technologies continue while the digitalization of the
world’s economy is still a work in progress. The path toward a digital future
is accelerating, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The combination
of these factors strengthens demand for technology products and services.
Despite challenges, high buyer optimism in the near term will drive increased
buying effort, which signals increased opportunity for providers.
Enterprises that successfully leverage technology prowess, including
robust diagnostics and benchmarking, will be able to strategically transform
into competitive threats to existing technology products and services.
These companies will drive growth through innovation by creating both
competitive and substitute products.
Rishi Sood
Group Vice President, Tech & Service Provider, Gartner

Several forces are playing a larger role in the way enterprises differentiate

their business models. Further, these forces also serve as a basis for startups
to disrupt existing markets. They will continue to drive large changes in the
technology and services markets.

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 Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021

Introduction
Today’s product marketers play a critical role in the overall marketing Top 5 priorities for product marketers
organization. They face a highly competitive and continuous buying
environment in which digitally savvy customers are always on the lookout
for alternative options and technologies. This makes getting and keeping 1 Product differentiation and messaging
attention a challenge and a top priority. Agility, particularly in terms
of adapting to disruption and improving performance, will also be key.
Marketers who support demand, sales effectiveness and renewals in this
2 Driving brand awareness
evolving world will be well-positioned to help their companies drive
differentiation and consistent growth. 3 Creating compelling content

4 Improving performance with key performance

indicators (KPIs)

5 Generating and nurturing leads

3

3 trends that will impact product
marketers in 2021
Marketers are adjusting to a virtual
event world
The pandemic has forced technology
providers to move to virtual events. This
shift requires thinking differently about
format, sponsors and promotion. Can
content be reused to reach audiences
after the event? And most importantly,
how will success be measured?
Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021
Increasing use of agile marketing to
respond to changing market dynamics
Agile adoption will continue even in
a virtual, non-office environment. Benefits
will include increases in speed to market,
quality of deliverables, visibility of
marketing efforts, morale and productivity.
Marketers are helping sales make
buying easier and faster for customers
Marketing is able to create content that
can help enable sales to make buying
easier and faster. This trend of buyer
enablement, where marketing shares
responsibility with sales to help simplify
and enable purchase decisions for buyers,
is likely to continue for some time.
4

2 challenges facing product marketers
in 2021
Although product marketers will face many challenges in 2021, here are two
to begin strategizing for:
Messaging is neither differentiated nor compelling
across products and portfolios
Targeting may be overly broad, with messaging designed to appeal to
everyone. Or differentiation may occur at the product or feature level,
rather than being seen in terms of business outcomes. The reality is that
for many companies, differentiation is a complex set of challenges,
rather than one straightforward problem.
Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021
Marketing is expected to use a wide variety of
KPIs to show value
Beyond measurement of market-qualified leads, other relevant
KPIs exist. Many are hard to measure, however, or cannot easily
demonstrate a marketing impact. So, this is a journey that is only
partially complete.
5

2 actions for product marketers to take
in 2021
Given the challenges product marketers will encounter, consider these two
actions to help move the organization in the right direction:
Create a differentiated messaging foundation
The differentiation and messaging process needs to start with positioning.
Questions answered by different audiences will help develop outcome-
driven stories. These stories can then flow into both customer-facing
content and sales-facing training.
Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021
Track marketing’s impact on customer acquisition,
retention and growth
Metrics that account for all of these can help inform better decisions.
Some will come from marketing automation and sales force automation
systems that highlight contributions from the marketing funnel and
the sales funnel. It’s also important to track metrics that are tied to
the owning cycle.
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 Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021

Most critical priorities for tech marketers

More 150

Product differentiation and messaging

Driving brand awareness Creating compelling content
Marketing agility: Improving performance based on KPIs

Generating or nurturing leads Positioning the portfolio to align with brand stories
Better understanding of market dynamics and individual product positioning
Critical to solve

Better segmentation and understanding of

buyer profiles and processes Defining or establishing KPIs aligned to corporate goals
100 Improving sales enablement practices
Managing new product launch/release communications
Selecting and implementing Introducing or optimizing account-based marketing
Obtaining and allocating budget marketing technology (ABM) programs
Innovating Introducing or optimizing
customer marketing
Collaborating with Introducing or optimizing
internal stakeholders industry marketing
Introducing
Resourcing or optimizing partner Introducing or optimizing field programs
programs

Less 50
85 100 115

More Confidence Less

n = 190, all respondents

Q: Of this list, which would you say is the most critical and which is the least critical challenge to solve for the overall performance of your department?
Q: Please indicate how confident you are in your ability to solve these problems.
Q: When must you solve for the problems to ensure the success of your department’s commitments?
Source: 2020 Gartner Annual Product Marketing Study
KPI = key performance indicator 7
 Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021

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© 2021 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. CM_GTS_1114728
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