Marketing has begun to make a major impact on sales B2B. There is no denying it…that huge gap between marketing and sales (worthy of video humor) is starting to narrow. The question is, by how much? And over what period of time?
This is important because executives are looking to allocate resources toward marketing & sales B2B based on this trend.
Let’s explore further…
A few weeks ago, we attended the Pardot Elevate user conference (which was awesome by the way). Here is what we learned from their VP of Sales:
- The Pardot sales team sourced 60% of their leads. This surprised us…a marketing automation and inbound marketing company sourced more leads through sales than they did through marketing?
- An even larger percentage of their closed deals came from sales (let’s assume 65/70%). Now that part itself is no surprise as sales reps want to close their own leads more than somebody elses (marketing).
Surprising data. But not an isolated case.
When you walk into Dreamforce, the largest software event in the world, you are immediately thrust into a world of marketing automation. The platinum sponsors (which spend over $500k) are almost all inbound/marketing automation companies, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop…and there are a ton more lighter weight sponsors out there (Hubspot, Genius, Leadformix, Loopfuse, etc).
The funny thing is these companies, who are preaching the world of inbound & marketing automation software all have some of the strongest and most invested sales teams in the world. They are particularly strong at cold calling, referral generation, and sales blocking & tackling.
The marketing guys have doubled down on sales.
This week, the awesome team at the Bridge Group released a very informative and easy to read study that looks at these type of metrics. If you are a B2B sales or marketing executive, it’s worth the quick read.
One of the charts shows the percentage of pipeline sourced by marketing. See below.
38% of leads generated by marketing…not necessarily what you would expect given all the “inbound hype”.
But they also published the report for SaaS companies here. And the results for lead sourcing on SaaS support inbound more:
These are trending where one would expect, but not in line with Pardot’s sales/marketing breakup.
After making a comment on the Bridge Group blog, I received a prompt response from Matt Bertuzzi which made significant contributions to the discussion. His condensed response:
- The bigger the company in revenue, the more likely it is that their leads are sourced from sales (*makes sense).
- It’s not settled on whether cold calls (if they roll up to marketing) are or should be attributed to marketing.
Hence my colleague @jonnybird’s tweet from the corporate account:
Sales is still heavily reliant on sales.
— SalesLoft (@SalesLoft) November 14, 2012
And that’s why we’re here to help.
Great point on how marketing companies still rely heavily on selling. Even the most well known self-service companies (Google Ad-Words, Amazon, Hubspot) are heavily invested in large and agressive sales forces. While marketing tools absolutely help the sales process, there’s a low percentage of successful businesses that exist without a great sales department. There’s still no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and selling.