Want to know some of the other common concerns and opinions that these respondents had regarding the current state of Sales & Marketing? Check out some of the top eye-opening stats from this year’s State of Inbound.
“The majority of marketers today focus on converting leads into customers and growing traffic to their website. There’s also strong focus on upselling existing customers. Historically considered a cost center for businesses, Marketing is now measured against its ability to contribute to the business’s bottom line.”
1. Only 61% of marketers believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective, in comparison to 69% of C-level executives and 55% of individual contributors. It’s not a huge variance between all three, but there are definitely some inconsistencies across all three levels of the team who believe in the effectiveness of their organization’s overall marketing strategy.
2. So, how can they work towards making their strategy more effective? Well, 61% of marketers say their top inbound marketing priority is growing their SEO/organic presence.
3. In second place, 53% of marketers say their top inbound marketing priority is blog content creation.
4. And in third place, 47% of marketers say their top inbound marketing priority is improving their content distribution.
5. Still, only 12% of marketers say outbound marketing has a better ROI than inbound marketing.
But…the State of Inbound is not just all about marketing. So where does sales fit in?
On the sales side, respondents tell us it’s getting harder to elicit a response from a prospect, close deals, and prospect for leads.
Most agree that prospecting is currently the toughest part of the sales process. Sales teams need help qualifying leads, whether it’s with more robust lead scoring or for Marketing to use better lead-qualifying actions to ensure salespeople are given accounts that are most likely to convert into customers.
6. 38% of salespeople say they struggle most with prospecting, detailed as follows:
7. 19% say they’re struggling to incorporate social media in their sales process, with only 12% of salespeople agreeing that Facebook is the most successful channel for connecting with prospects.
8. 40% of individual contributor sales reps say telephone is the best way to contact a prospect, but only 26% of C-level executives agree with this statement.
9. 38% of salespeople say getting a response from prospects is more difficult than two to three years ago, while 35% of salespeople agree, saying closing deals in general is more difficult than two to three years ago.
10. In addition, 13% of sales professionals think using sales technologies is now harder than it used to be.
11. To further argue that point, 23% of salespeople agree that their biggest challenge using their CRM is manual data entry, with 45% of salespeople saying they spend over an hour performing manual data entry.
And what about the alignment between Sales and Marketing? Are these teams working better together to achieve their common goals?
12. Unforunately, not really. Only 22% of all respondents say their organization’s sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned, vs. 31% of C-level executives and 17% of managers and individual contributors agreeing.
13. On that same note, 59% of marketers say that the highest quality leads are marketing-sourced, but only 25% of salespeople agree.
14. Over the years, HubSpot’s State of Inbound has “consistently found that marketing and sales organizations with tight alignment perform better”. In fact, respondents with sales and marketing SLAs in their organization are 3x more likely to say their marketing strategy is effective compared to those in misaligned organizations.
What do all of these stats mean for the future of your sales and marketing teams, and your sales and marketing strategies in general? Click the image below to download this year’s State of Inbound report to dig deeper into the responses behind these statistics, while also learning about 2017 trends for content distribution and buyer communications, and marketing priorities across the globe.
