Over the past few weeks I’ve been on the road with our B2B Marketing University series — most recently in Palo Alto and Boston, and this week in Atlanta. The first two events were attended by more than 330 B2B marketers, and we anticipate 175 attendees this Thursday here in Atlanta.
Given the large turnout of B2B marketers, we’ve seized the opportunity to get a better sense of what is on marketers’ minds — conducting a pre-event survey for all of our events. The results are just in from Atlanta, and I’m analyzing them alongside Palo Alto and Boston.
We asked a series of questions about B2B marketers’ greatest challenges, as well as the current state of their adoption of key marketing technologies.
The results were interesting — providing a solid glimpse into the current landscape — and so I thought I’d share the results from two of these questions with you.
Note that for both charts n = 232.
What issues are most ‘top of mind’ for B2B marketers?
The first question looked at those issues that are most ‘top of mind’ with B2B marketers. We asked them to rank their top issue from a menu of eight choices.
The number-one topic was ’social media/inbound marketing’ with 56% of respondents saying this is their top issue.
Number two and three issues were marketing automation and marketing accountability/ROI, together almost tied for a close second at 37% and 36% of respondents, respectively.
What is your current CRM platform?
The second question looked at the current CRM platform B2B marketers are using.
The response to this question was eye-popping with Salesforce.com by far the number-one-most-adopted platform — by a landslide.
Number two was ‘no CRM platform’ or a non-brand-name CRM platform.
Honorable mentions came in from the Oracle/Siebel/Peoplesoft family of platforms — which in total had a strong showing in fourth place — and Microsoft Dynamics CRM — which came in a close fifth.
Clearly the favorite among B2B Marketers today is Salesforce.com by a significant margin.
Incredible that so many are using “No CRM Solution” or “Other”, great opportunity for getting all the things described comes with using a system.
Sincerely,
Justin
I wonder if Open Source CRM solutions like Sugar CRM are included in the “Other” vertical?
Seems a bit misleading.
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[...] Over the course of two and half months of the Fall B2B Marketing University series, we polled the nearly 600 B2B marketers who attended the series, asking them questions about the state of their marketing automation adoption. (In fact, I reported on some early results from these surveys in a post last November.) [...]
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