Marketers Grow Confident in Ability to Hit Revenue Goals

Today’s marketers are growing confident in their ability to achieve revenue goals, and research shows they are aligning with more business objectives as well.

The “2017 State of Pipeline Marketing” report recently looked at how marketers are budgeting, achieving their goals, and prioritizing for the future. The statistics showed that on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being “extremely confident”), the majority of marketers (45.1 percent) give themselves a 4 in terms of their team’s plan to hit marketing revenue goals.

To measure their marketing performance, most respondents (30.4 percent) stated that they use opportunities/pipeline as their primary key performance indicator. Revenue (18.7 percent), MQLs (10.7 percent) and ROI (10.4 percent) also made the list of top metrics.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63.3 percent) scored themselves a 4 or a 5 in terms of how well their marketing goals align with broader business objectives.  The majority (42.3 percent) said their top priority is to convert leads into customers this year, followed by generating more leads (35.4 percent).

The State of Pipeline Marketing report is sponsored by Bizible, Heinz Marketing, LinkedIn, Radius, and Uberflip.

Setting Priorities and Measuring Marketing Achievements

The 2016 “State of Pipeline Marketing” report showed similar results in terms of marketers’ main business priorities.

The results indicated that the majority of marketers (45.7 percent) were concerned with generating more leads. This was followed by converting leads into customers/revenue (34.3 percent).

However, there was a difference in the primary metrics respondents use for measuring marketing performance this year. While the majority said that they utilize opportunities/pipeline in 2017, most respondents who showed a positive ROI in 2016 said they primarily used total revenue (26.8 percent).