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No less than 50% of B2B marketers won’t reach their goals this year. When sales and marketing teams are firmly aligned, the outlook is much better, with 80% saying they will reach their goals.
The insights come from a new Pipeline360 report, “The H2 2024 state of B2B pipeline growth” based on a survey of 500 B2B marketers in the U.S. and U.K.
Top B2B challenges. The chief barriers to achieving desired outcomes cited by the marketers are:
- Budget and resource limitations (48%).
- Economic conditions (46%).
- Problems with marketing/sales alignment (44%).
Why we care. Year in, year out, we hear the same thing. Marketing and sales aren’t aligned. Sales teams are unimpressed by marketing leads; marketing has little insight into what sales is doing; sales is more interested in getting a signature on the dotted line than polishing brand reputation. And so on.
One enduring guarantor of non-alignment, of course, is the dramatically different ways sales reps and marketers are incentivized. Another is the standard structure of most organizations, where marketers report to the CMO and sales reps don’t. Pipeline360 argues for a “branded demand” approach in which content syndication is a key part of marketing’s strategy, aimed at delivering quality leads that are engaged with the brand.
More data. There was some conflict in the survey results about the value of content syndication. While 78% were very satisfied with the quality of leads when content syndication was combined with display advertising, 35% thought content syndication would provide poor leads; that’s a minority but a substantial one.
The channels most used for lead gen were email marketing and social media, followed by influencer marketing and display marketing, with content syndication coming in eighth place.
It’s also worth noting that 85% said they were using generative AI, with 76% being satisfied or very satisfied with the results.
The full report is here (registration required).
Dig deeper: Pipeline360 on “branded demand”
