This 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.
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.
Key findings from a Q4 survey of 150 B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution leaders include:
“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“It’s time to turn the tables on inefficient, ineffective, and outdated practices for anticipating, adapting, and responding to customer needs and opportunities.”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:
“Marketers must climb the evolutionary ladder and leave behind outmoded and dated practices,” notes CMO Council executive director, Donovan Neale-May.
“Using AI-derived, intention-based buyer data and advanced sales intelligence are among the ways growth marketers bring more precision, predictability, and performance to B2B account marketing investments.”
The CMO Council’s research revealed the top five skill sets contributing to improved ABM-driven business outcomes:
The CMO Council has uncovered widening gaps in performance between highly evolved marketers and lesser-evolved marketers.
Gaps are occurring in four core capabilities:
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.
The report is based on a survey of 150 heads of B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution in Q4 2023. It also included content from in-depth interviews with executives from Netline, Autodesk, T-Mobile, NTT, ABM Consortium, TechTarget, IBM, B2B Marketing, Reachdesk, Momentum ITSMA, and Xometry.
