Let’s focus on B2B marketing today. We have a very interesting report on Request for Proposal (RFP) management from Loopio. Are you surprised that RFPs account for 27% of software sales revenue vs 41% across all industries? More here on RFP challenges, timelines, and the age-old question: How many SMEs does it take to answer an RFP?
The paralyzing complexity of today’s martech landscape has led investors to bet that marketers seek simplicity by buying all-in-one suites. At least, that’s how we read news that private equity-owned Episerver has bought B2B ecommerce firm Insite Software just one month after purchasing the idio recommendation engine. The deal comes just one week after Episerver competitor Acquia expanded its own footprint by buying the AgilOne CDP.
Security worries could put IT back in control. Software-as-a-service enables much self-service IT but just 19% of IT executives said 75% of their SaaS vendors meet all security requirements, according a Pulse Q&A survey for Archive360. Three quarters don’t control encryption keys with a majority of their SaaS vendors and 63% expect to retire SaaS applications that don’t provide that control.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.