B2B Marketers’ Biggest Go-to-Market Priority? Better Alignment with Sales

September 24, 2021

This article is included in these additional categories:

B2B | Business of Marketing | Customer-Centric | Industries | Internal Collaboration | Lead Generation & Management

DGRFolloze Top B2B GTM Priority Sept2021As marketing (hopefully) moves into a post-pandemic era, marketing professionals are updating their go-to-market priorities. Per a report [download page] from Demand Gen Report and Folloze, 3 in 10 (29%) B2B marketers say their biggest priority is achieving better alignment with sales.

While marketers report their relationship with sales is better than it is with finance, about one-quarter say the relationship between sales and marketing has been a barrier to the success of their digital strategy. As more than half of professionals foresee the merging of sales and marketing departments into one revenue ops team, Demand Gen Report and Folloze’s survey of more than 100 marketing professionals finds that alignment between the two departments has become their biggest go-to-market priority.

Research from McKinsey shows that the majority of B2B marketers surveyed believe the go-to-market models that came about due to the pandemic will be sustained for at least the next 12 months. About half (51%) of the respondents to this more recent survey see their go-to-market organization changing to a hybrid model, where marketing takes the lead on digital selling and self-service across the entire customer lifestyle with equal support from the direct sales team. Some 3 in 10 (31%) envision marketing driving all digital selling across the entire lifecycle, with less support from the direct sales team.

With either scenario, it makes sense that 26% share of respondents say that their biggest go-to-market priority is to expand the scope of responsibilities to include full customer lifecycle marketing.

One-fifth (21%) of marketers see the improvement of their account-based marketing as their biggest go-to-marketing priority. This is a strategy both sales and marketing appear to be on board with. Other research from Market Resource Partners (MRP) found that even though marketers say their ABM pace increased during the pandemic, many say the pandemic changed their account profiles as well as disrupted the way they market and sell products.

The remaining share of respondents to this latest survey say that bolstering overall marketing programs for a digital-only market experience (16%) and strengthening partner and channel programs to drive sources of revenue (7%) are their biggest go-to-market priorities in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: Findings are based on an April 2021 survey of 104 B2B marketing executives and professionals from a range of industries and company sizes.

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