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ResearchCorp Study Highlights Top Challenges of Marketing Executives
[September 25, 2008]

ResearchCorp Study Highlights Top Challenges of Marketing Executives


TMCnet Contributing Editor
 
A survey conducted by ResearchCorp, in partnership with Pinpointe, has revealed the top challenges faced by marketing executives. The “Sales and Marketing Automation Survey – August 2008” report analyzes the insights of 443 sales and marketing decision-makers at medium and large U.S. corporations.
 
The study was conducted jointly by ResearchCorp and Pinpointe, provider of an e-mail marketing automation platform. The objective of the survey was to gain understanding about the following: 

  • What are the top challenges that keep marketing and sales professionals up at night?
  • What infrastructure do companies have in place to address SFA and marketing automation?
  • What is the “state of the market” with respect to SFA and marketing automation implementations?
Respondents to the survey included independent marketing and sales professionals, responsible for messaging systems. The survey was completed through an online tool. Since the respondents are employed by organizations with at least 250 employees, the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market was not represented in this study. The report is available for free download at the Pinpointe Web site.
 
The top challenges faced by B2B and B2C marketing executives consist of:
  • Keeping the prospect database ‘clean’, complete, accurate and useful. Quantity of contact data also remains a challenge.
  • Being able to calculate a meaningful ROI on marketing spend
  • Generating high quality sales leads for the sales team
Companies have turned to sales force automation (SFA) products in order to minimize the challenges faced. According to the report, 77 percent of companies’ use e-mail marketing and only less than 10 percent use tools to perform accurate, behavioral based targeting or segmentation, nurture prospects, score leads and automatically route the leads to appropriate sales teams.
 
As per the survey, a major chasm exists between marketing and sales teams of a company. Only about 7.9 percent companies have a well connected link between their SFA and Marketing Automation platforms. Salesforce.com (News - Alert) leads the SFA pack in the ability to keep its customers happy. Around 72 percent of Salesforce’s customers are culturally committed to using Salesforce.com.
 
INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2008 — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year — concluded September 18th  in Los Angeles, California. Thousands of attendees flocked to the event for three valuable days of exhibits, conferences and networking opportunities. Mark your calendar now for ITEXPO East 2009, February 2-4, 2009, in sunny Miami, Florida.
 
Read archived editions of Show Daily eNewsletters from ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2008 here. See you in February!

Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Calvin's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Mae Kowalke

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