Marketers Given Marginal Grades for ABM-Driven Revenue Growth

CMO Council Releases Year-End Scorecard of B2B Marketing Effectiveness In Finding, Winning and Growing Key Customer Accounts

Seeding and harvesting the sales pipeline — the process of acquiring, capturing, qualifying and converting business opportunities — are essential to the growth and profitability of B2B marketers across every industry and geographic sector. Marketing is largely responsible for driving this business process, yet nearly two-thirds of lead gen and engagement strategies are underperforming.

A new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, produced in collaboration with WM America, entitled “Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine,” covers critical aspects of lead generation and engagement. This includes models and metrics for tracking and measuring performance, best practice demand-gen execution, ways to score effectiveness, and more.

The latest CMO Council research finds scores of marketers falling behind in lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing. Key findings from a Q4 survey of over 170 B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution leaders include:

• 63% say marketing must own and optimize a company’s revenue-generation engine
• 64% say their lead gen and engagement strategy underperforms
• 78% of highly evolved marketers are satisfied with their accelerated pipeline, compared to only 15% of lesser evolved marketers

“In today’s competitive data-driven environment, marketers should no longer be satisfied with paltry returns on their sizable lead-gen and ABM investments,” the report notes. “It’s time to turn the tables on inefficient, ineffective, and outdated practices for anticipating, adapting, and responding to customer needs and opportunities.”

Based on the research findings, the CMO Council provide a year-end scorecard that ranks proficiencies in critical areas of B2B marketing execution and demand gen operations:

1. Better segmentation and precision targeting of buyers and influencers
2. On-demand customer business intelligence and personal buyer insights
3. Tighter integration of demand gen, channel, direct sales, and support teams
4. Greater utilization of tools and data sources for richer prospect profiling
5. Proactive and timely pre-sales follow up and cultivation strategies

The CMO Council’s research revealed the top five skill sets contributing to improved ABM-driven business outcomes:

1. Better segmentation and precision targeting of buyers and influencers
2. On-demand customer business intelligence and personal buyer insights
3. Tighter integration of demand gen, channel, direct sales, and support teams
4. Greater utilization of tools and data sources for richer prospect profiling
5. Proactive and timely pre-sales follow up and cultivation strategies

The CMO Council has uncovered widening gaps in performance between highly evolved marketers and lesser evolved marketers. Gaps are occurring in four core capabilities: lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing.

This report tiers factors that make up a model for better identification, engagement and conversion. The model coincides with the CMO Council and WM America’s thought leadership initiative to advance lead revenue science practices through a certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process, or LEAP model. “Marketers will need to take a few LEAPs of faith in the coming months, because sticking to the status quo is just not practical or possible anymore. As data becomes more critical than ever before, CMOs need to extend their visions for innovation and forward-thinking strategies,” according to Lee Salem, WM America’s Vice President of Sales.

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