80% Of B2B Buyers Turned Off By Aggressive Sales And Marketing
Sales and marketing have yet to align with how the modern B2B buyer wants to engage with businesses, according to news research from Dun & Bradstreet.
Sales and marketing have yet to align with how the modern B2B buyer wants to engage with businesses, according to new research from Dun & Bradstreet.
The report, titled “The State Of Sales Acceleration,” surveyed 312 B2B buyers and 300 sales and marketing professionals. It found that while sales and marketing professionals understand the importance that data plays—92% said it’s of great importance—buyers still believe sales and marketing are not prepared when they talk to them.
“Even though marketing and sales professionals understand that data is important, they’re not necessarily getting the results that they expect,” said Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet.
According to the report, 85% of sellers said the right data saves them time, but it still takes them more than two hours to research a prospect before reaching out. On the other hand, marketers said that although they have the data and insights at their disposal, marketing campaigns have a win rate of just 17%, on average.
In addition, while 58% of marketers are currently using account-based marketing and 26% are using artificial intelligence, only 51% of B2B buyers believe that the use of data has improved communications from marketing and sales teams. In fact, 48% of surveyed buyers still believe the communications they receive are not at all relevant to their roles. In fact, a whopping 80% of buyers decided not to make a purchase due to aggressive sales and marketing tactics.
“I think the biggest implication is that if sales and marketing execs don’t invest in modern ways to accelerate the sales process, they’re just not going to grow,” Dave said. “It’s critical for sales and marketers to have good, clean, integrated data. It’s critical that sales and marketers are looking at the same data sets when they’re executing programs or engaging in sales cycles.”