Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

Watch the Webinar Recording

According to the marketers surveyed by Forrester, few of their C-suite colleagues refer to marketing data when making strategic calls.

That’s a worrying reality for anyone with the word marketing in their title.

Marketers are failing to inspire executive leadership, according to Forrester.

Only 8% of the surveyed marketers in the report claimed that their CEOs used any marketing numbers when making decisions.

CFOs are taking even less notice, with just 4% using marketing numbers.

Marketers’ peers aren’t much better. Forrester found that only 10% of business unit and divisional leaders rated marketing data as worthy of consideration.

Even Sales isn’t engaged, with only 15% taking note of Marketing’s numbers.

No wonder B2B marketing budgets are typically stuck at around 2% of revenue.

And when you think about it, why should CEOs, CFOs and general managers be interested in disconnected operational data points such as email response rates, brand awareness stats, website traffic and trade show scans?

Unfortunately not enough marketers are both genuinely moving the revenue needle and demonstrating that they are.

Marketing needs to move from vague goals to specific targets driven by hard data:

Source: June 2013 “Measuring and Communicating Marketing Performance” Forrester ITSMA/VEM webinar.