The most basic of all business questions is: What drives high performance? For years, the effort to find the “secret sauce” for achieving high performance has probably consumed more brainpower than any other single business topic. It’s been, and still is, the modern-day business equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail.
The desire to understand what drives high performance is widespread in the marketing world, and dozens of research studies have been devoted to solving the marketing performance puzzle. Earlier this year, Salesforce published a research report that includes several interesting insights on the practices of high-performing marketing teams.
The 2016 State of Marketing report is based on a worldwide survey that produced 3,975 responses from marketing leaders. Twenty-six percent of the respondents were affiliated with B2C companies, 29% with B2B companies, and 45% with B2B2C companies.
For this report, Salesforce divided survey respondents into three cohorts:
- High performers (18% of the respondents) were those who were “extremely satisfied” with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company’s marketing investments.
- Moderate performers (68% of the respondents) were those who were “very or moderately satisfied” with the outcomes produced by their marketing efforts.
- Underperformers (14% of the respondents) were those who were “slightly or not at all satisfied” with their marketing results.
- 7.6x more likely than underperformers to be “heavy” adopters of marketing tools and technologies
- 10.7x more likely than underperformers to be extensively using predictive intelligence technologies in their marketing efforts
- 6.7x more likely than underperformers to be extensively using marketing automation
- 2.8x more likely than underperformers to be substantially increasing spending on marketing tools and technologies
