Don’t feel left out, B2B marketers. Here’s a Forrester report for you, sponsored by Salesforce B2B Commerce (formerly CloudCraze). It sheds some light on the perennial suite-vs-best-of-breed debate: 13% of respondents use a single vendor stack for all their B2B selling needs, 40% use one primary vendor and supplement as needed, 37% assemble best-of-breed tools, and 9% use a home-grown solution. Good to know.
Short of randomly asking “But will it scale?” you can always sound smart in a meeting by saying the real challenge is people, not technology. Here’s proof: a survey of Fortune 1000 executives from tech advisors NewVantage Partners, which found that 95% of respondents cited cultural factors as blocking big data adoption, compared with just 5% citing technology. You can almost hear the teeth grind as fewer claimed measurable results than in last year’s survey.
Maybe CMOs would be more successful if they spent less time answering surveys. Here’s one more, this time by partner marketing specialist WorkSpan. They found that just 11% of marketers are confident their budget is spent effectively. Perhaps hoping to save marketers some time, WorkSpan reported results in a press release without publishing the report itself. And, I was just kidding about CMO surveys: 68% of study respondents held non-CMO titles.
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.