B2B Lead Generation & Marketing Automation – The key figures for 2019

For the third consecutive year, Companeo has published The 2019 B2B Lead Barometer. A complete and detailed study, carried out among marketing and sales directors. Once again this year, this barometer highlights market trends and developments in B2B lead generation.

What should we remember?

Alignment between marketing and sales remains a real issue for companies – 

Only 27% of respondents believe that their company’s marketing and sales departments have aligned on the lead generation strategy, which is even less than in 2018!  In detail, and compared with the 2018 results, the perception of this poor alignment has increased among marketing directors, sales directors and executive management. These results reveal both a growing awareness among management teams and the difficulty companies face in bringing their teams together and getting them to work around common objectives.

Marketing and sales alignment is therefore the number 1 priority in 2019 –

Aware of the issue related to marketing / sales alignment within their company, executives are making it their top action lever when it comes to lead generation (see chart below).

Increasing the volume of leads generated remains the second priority in B2B; this view is reinforced by the third priority mentioned, investing more, which amounts to increasing the volume of leads generated. Note that the need to measure results and ROI is gaining momentum, unlike cost per lead. Executives are prepared to pay a high price for a good lead.

Companies lack the skills needed to successfully carry out lead generation campaigns –

Cohesion between marketing and sales is logically the main obstacle to campaign success (72%). However, the important information seems to be quite different. 54% of the executives surveyed believe there is a lack of staff and skills to manage content, and 42% believe that what their company directly lacks is expertise in lead generation. These telling figures on the shortage of human resources and skills confirm the latest findings of the Syntec Numérique report on the chronic hiring difficulties that are slowing the growth of software publishers.

Marketing automation confirms its breakthrough among B2B marketing departments –

And to implement their lead generation (and processing) strategy, nearly half (43%) of companies have equipped themselves with marketing automation software, compared with only 13% in 2017! This can be explained in particular by the multitude of players on the market, as well as by the very strong communication in the French market from the company behind inbound marketing theories, HubSpot. It is also worth noting that users of marketing automation software are twice as satisfied with the results as they were two years ago.

On the other hand, if we look at companies that do not have a marketing automation tool, we once again find that the main issue for 46% of them is a lack of human resources and/or skills to manage the tool.

Marketing automation therefore has a bright future ahead of it. However, as with lead generation (the activities being closely linked), one of the issues remains the human factor. There is a lack of skills and people to tackle this part of the marketing and digital strategy.

Leads do not come only from marketing

Contrary to popular belief, leads are not generated solely by marketing. On the contrary, as you can see from the results below, 39% are generated by the sales department, 34% are generated through external service providers and only 27% are generated by marketing. As you can see, the distribution of generated leads is fairly balanced, confirming how important it is for these teams to work together in order to be more effective.

The use of social media is not reserved for the marketing department either. In fact, among the executives surveyed, 55% of them use social media to generate leads. It should also be noted that compared with last year, this figure has increased by 10 points.

The most widely used channels for lead generation. –

Contrary to what one might think, email marketing is no longer the preferred channel for acquiring new leads. As you can see in the chart below, it has declined by 17 points compared with last year. This can be explained by the impact of the GDPR, given that 26% of respondents consider the GDPR to be a constraint. By far the most used channels in 2019 are B2B marketplaces, with an increase of 21 points compared with 2018, followed by online advertising, up 17 points compared with last year, and finally webinars, the channel that saw the strongest increase, 31% compared with 2018.

In conclusion, to ensure growth (particularly in lead generation), aligning marketing and sales teams around common objectives and processes has become essential for companies. It has also become a major issue for the B2B sector. B2B marketing departments are also increasingly relying on marketing automation to improve their lead generation, not forgetting that marketing automation promotes sales / marketing alignment. Indeed, implementing a marketing automation tool is an opportunity to bring these two departments together and align them on the definitions of a lead at the various qualification stages, that is, to define what an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is and what an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is. This ensures a marketing automation strategy that generates quality leads.