30-Mar-2010, Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing, Bulldog Solutions published ‘Even High-Performing Marketers Struggle with Content, Alignment’:
“Continued struggles in sales and marketing alignment […]
These are the key findings from the Executive Benchmark Assessment (EBA), a survey created by Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, and demand generation agency Bulldog Solutions to measure the efficacy of BtoB marketers and provide benchmark data.
The EBA surveyed 250 BtoB marketers between June 2009 and January 2010 […]
Many organizations have heard the call and attempted to move toward better communication, including and SLAs between sales and marketing that spell out key agreements such as how a high-quality lead is defined. Nonetheless:
- Less than one-quarter of BtoB marketers say they’re generating enough demand to satisfy their sales teams.
- Less than half (46%) have developed buyer personas to guide communications and sales readiness for their prospects.
- Slightly below two-thirds, 64%, have defined the stages of the pipeline in order to ensure marketing and sales agree on common definitions.
[…]
- Only 36% leverage marketing automation or manual processes for message testing.
The custom communications enabled by marketing automation have put significant requirements on organizations to create compelling content. If technology is the engine, content is the fuel. Indeed, the pressing need for content across a range of buying stages and personas was the third greatest challenge identified by the survey group to leveraging marketing automation, behind only people/skillsets and appropriate process. Other findings:
- Slightly more than half, 53%, of marketers said they have sufficient content to support multiple messages.
- Only 23% store public-facing content in a publically available library or content center. For the rest, content is in multiple locations or an internal set of folders.
[…]”
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 