No one ever said generating revenue and customer leads was easy. Now a new study notes that the vast majority of customer leads from marketing campaigns get rejected by sales teams.

And yet the largest percentage of survey respondents in that study—70%—say they measure their success in marketing campaigns by the number of customer leads and the volume of revenue they generate.

The study was based on a May 2015 survey of 321 B2B marketing professionals in the United States, including more than half who work at companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The study was conducted by Heinz Marketing on behalf of 6sense, a provider of marketing “predictive analytics” software designed to predict the likelihood that people targeted in marketing campaigns will turn into paying customers.

The study notes that only 31% of respondents currently use predictive analytics software, and that of that 31%, only 17% have been using it for three or more years. In other words, only 5% of the entire number of 321 respondents have been using predictive analytics for three or more years. But the study also notes that 54% of all respondents said they were likely to begin using predictive analytics within the next one to three years.

The study noted the following percentages of respondents who said they used the following data types to score customer prospects:

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  • Activity on our web sites and in email campaigns, 76%
  • Personal data including title, position, contact information, 73%
  • Company date such as size and revenue, 675
  • Search terms and keywords, 39%
  • Technologies and services a prospect uses, 19%

The study noted the following percentages of respondents who cited the following as among their company’s primary goals for predictive analytics:

  • Increase the quality of customer leads, 68%
  • Increase the volume of customer leads, 64%
  • Increase the number of sales-qualified leads, 54%
  • Find new prospects, 51%
  • Improve marketing campaign results through personalized messages, 48%
  • Get insights regarding customers’ position in the buying journey, 43%
  • Learn which products prospects are considering, 42%

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