B2B Lead Generation & Marketing Automation – Key figures for 2019

For the third year in a row, Companeo shared The B2B Lead Barometer 2019. A complete and detailed study, conducted with marketing and sales directors. This year again, the barometer highlights trends and market developments in prospect generation (Lead Generation) in B2B.

What should we take away?

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

Only 27% of respondents say that their company’s marketing and sales teams have aligned with the lead generation policy—this is even lower than in 2018!  In detail, compared to the 2018 results, the perception of this poor alignment increased among marketing directors, sales directors, and executive leadership. These results show both that leadership has become more aware of the issue, but also the difficulty for companies in bringing their teams together and getting them to work alongside one another toward a shared goal.

As a result, marketing and sales alignment is the #1 priority in 2019 –

Aware of the alignment issue between marketing and sales within their company, executives make 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 sentiment is reinforced by the third priority mentioned—investing more—which essentially means increasing the volume of leads generated. It’s also worth noting that the need to measure results and ROI is gaining momentum, unlike the cost per lead. Executives are willing to pay a premium for a good lead.

Companies lack the skills to successfully run lead generation campaigns –

Cohesion between marketing and sales is logically the main obstacle to campaign success (72%). However, the important information seems to be something else. 54% of the executives surveyed believe they lack headcount and skills to manage the content, and 42% believe it is directly lead generation expertise that is missing from their company. These telling figures about the lack of human resources and skills confirm the latest figures from the Syntec Numérique report on the chronic difficulty of hiring that is holding back the growth of software publishers.

Marketing automation confirms its breakthrough with B2B marketing leadership –

And to implement their lead generation (and lead processing) policy, soon half (43%) of companies have equipped themselves with a marketing automation software, compared to only 13% in 2017! This can be explained in particular by the large number of players on the market, as well as the very strong communication in the French market around the company behind inbound marketing theory, Hubspot. It’s also worth noting that users of marketing automation software are 2 times more satisfied with the results than they were two years ago.

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

So marketing automation has many good years ahead. However, as with lead generation (since the activities are closely linked), one of the challenges remains people. There is a lack of skills and people to tackle this part of the marketing and digital strategy.

Leads come not only from marketing

Contrary to popular belief, leads are not generated only 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 providers, and only 27% are generated by marketing. As you can see, the distribution of generated leads is fairly balanced, confirming the importance for these teams to work together in order to be more effective.

The use of social networks is not reserved for the marketing department either. Indeed, among the executives surveyed, 55% of them use social media to generate leads. It’s also worth noting that compared to last year, this figure has increased by 10 points.

The most used levers for lead generation. –

Contrary to what you might think, email is no longer the preferred lever for acquiring new leads. As you can see on the chart below, it is losing 17 points compared to last year. This can be explained by the impact of GDPR, considering that 26% of respondents view GDPR as a constraint. By far, the most used levers for 2019 are B2B marketplaces, with an increase of 21 points compared to 2018, followed by online advertising, up 17 points compared to last year, and finally the webinar, which is the lever that saw the largest increase, up 31% compared to 2018.

In conclusion, to ensure its growth (in particular in lead generation), aligning marketing and sales teams around shared objectives and processes has become essential for a company. This has also become a major issue for the B2B sector. B2B marketing leaders are increasingly turning to marketing automation to improve their lead generation, without forgetting that marketing automation promotes sales/marketing alignment. Indeed, implementing a marketing automation tool is an opportunity to bring these two teams together to align on the definitions of a lead at the different stages of qualification—that is, defining what a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and what a SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) are. This ensures a marketing automation strategy that generates high-quality leads.