New B2B marketing data; lead quality trumps lead quantity...again!

The results are in from Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 Benchmark Survey. Here is a summary chart of how B2B marketers rate their challenges.

The first point of note is the B2B marketers are feeling more challenged in general across the board; not surprising given the trying economic conditions and shrinking budgets, but it’s more than that. The marketing function is experiencing a revolution, a real shift towards the demand from management to generate demonstrable results; real ROI. At the same time new outbound and inbound marketing automation technology provides powerful new capabilities. B2B Marketers are increasingly analysts not artists.

With this background its even less surprising that the key challenges marketers say they are facing is generating higher quality and quantity of leads. Within this trend there is a clear emphasis on generating higher quality of leads. This is a  challenge  because many organisation struggle to align their sales and marketing functions, so that there is a smooth unified process; from  finding the right type of lead, nurturing that lead until they are ready to be handed over to marketing and then cleanly providing sales with a complete record of that lead for them to follow up. 

Sales routinely blame marketing for providing them with unqualified tyre kickers...and marketing regularly accuse sales of failing to follow up on hard won leads. Such is the world we live in. Yet organisations that are aligned have been proven to be significantly more effective, they grow 5.4% faster, close 38% more leads and turn over 36% fewer clients, a staggering set of numbers!

B2B marketers...how does this generic data compare to your own experience? What is you major challenge? Do you feel your profession is undergoing a period of intense change?