Marketing Ops Execs Confident in ABM Efforts, More Skeptical About GDPR Compliance

May 1, 2018

This article is included in these additional categories:

Brand-Related | Customer-Centric | Data-driven | Lead Generation & Management | Privacy & Security | Regulatory

How do marketing operations professionals rate their smarts when it comes to various data management capabilities? Openprise surveyed more than 200 of them to find out, resulting in its Marketing Operations Benchmarking Report [download page], which reveals that respondents are most pessimistic about their GDPR compliance.

The 201 US-based marketing operations professionals surveyed were asked to rate their companies on a 5-point scale, where 5 is “best in class.”

Among the 10 data management capabilities identified, respondents gave their organizations the lowest average rating for GDPR compliance. With a score of just 3.1, marketing operations professionals give themselves a largely neutral rating on reaching compliance.

This may not be too much of a surprise: as the GDPR date looms, various pieces of research are coming out indicating that few companies are ready. For example, a recent study from Forrester Research indicated that just 15% of B2B organizations were fully compliant with the GDPR as of March. Another piece of research released at a similar time, this one from Act-On [pdf], found that more than one-third of marketers still did not understand the GDPR. Little wonder then, that 3 in 4 US companies are worried about the upcoming regulations, per NetApp [pdf].

Marketing Ops Execs Have More Confidence in Data Cleansing

While marketing operations professionals are on the fence about their GDPR compliance, they’re more confident in their data cleansing ability, rating it a 3.82 on the 5-point scale. Indeed, more than one-third gave themselves a top score in this regard.

Respondents are also relatively confident about their account-based marketing (ABM) abilities, giving themselves an average rating of 3.53. The report notes that there appears to be a strong correlation between data enrichment and ABM capabilities: half of those who consider themselves “poor” (a score of 1) at data enrichment also feel the same way about ABM; while half who consider themselves excellent (a score of 5) at data enrichment also feel they’re excellent at ABM.

Other Survey Highlights

In other results from the study:

  • Marketing operations professionals are as likely to score accounts as they are to score leads (85% each), although they’re more slightly confident in their lead scoring (3.37) than their account scoring (3.25); and
  • Lead routing emerged as their third-most confident area, an encouraging result considering a report last year suggested that on average 1 in every 4 B2B leads is routed to the incorrect account owner.

The full list of data capabilities (and associated ratings) can be seen in the chart above, while the complete survey results, including segmentations by company size, can be found in the report, which is available for download here.

About the Data: The results are based on a survey of 201 US-based respondents conducted in March 2018. Participants came from companies with more than 250 employees, including 53% with more than 1,000 employees.

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