Marketing Report Card Benchmark Report

During January and February of 2014, we partnered with Pardot to conduct a survey on the current landscape of the Marketing spectrum, which has turned into a Marketing Report Card of sorts.  The goal of this report to help marketers understand the shift of Marketing's role in an organization from a lead generation funnel to a strategic piece of the organizational puzzle.  

Our Chief Analyst, Jerry Rackley, analyzed the survey data and some of his key findings from this report include:

• Over half of organizations (59%) view marketing as either a necessary or unnecessary expense.  Marketers are more likely to view their own function as an expense (65%) than non-marketers (50%).
• Marketing organizations identified as “indispensable” in helping achieve business objectives are more strategically oriented, have better alignment with sales, and use analytics to a greater extent to guide their efforts.
• Marketing skills correlate strongly to revenue growth.  Measuring skills of the marketing team on a scale from one to seven where 1 = obsolete or lagging and 7 = state-of-the-art, the average was 4.8.