Demand Gen Report

When sales and marketing fail to collaborate, it has a big impact on the bottom line. That was one of the key messages from the Sales Enablement Strategies panel at the B2B Content2Conversion event.

Moderator Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, told the audience that poor sales-marketing alignment costs $14 million a year at a $1 billion firm. “For every 650 leads, one deal is closed in 19 months and sales cycle times have increased by 10% over the past three years, from five months in 2010 to 5.4 months in 2012,” he said, citing figures from Gartner, IDC, Alinean and DiscoverOrg.

Only 3% of companies can track social media to sales, according to the Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey, highlighted in this infographic developed by Go-Gulf. Most (82%) of companies have fewer than three people on their social media team.

According to a report from Accenture, 40% of top marketing executives don’t feel prepared to meet their objectives, citing inefficient business practices among the top impediments to performance.

In response to these concerns, executives reported that they are shifting their investments to analytics to measure the changes in demand for multichannel marketing. Almost half (48%) of executives will be dedicating more funding to managing customer data, 40% will focus on web analytics, and 39% will invest in market analytics.

Are marketing-generated leads really full of dreck, or is sales just unable to close deals? It is an age-old battle of wills that is getting more heated as the pressure is on both sales and marketing to meet ever-rising revenue targets. Many organizations are looking to Big Data and predictive analytics to help identify hot sales prospects, but weaknesses in their databases are hampering sales productivity.

More than two thirds (68%) of companies report struggling with lead generation, blaming marketing for not providing enough quality leads, according to recent research sponsored by Lattice Engines, a data analytics platform provider, and conducted by CSO Insights, a sales and marketing effectiveness research firm,