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September 23 2008

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ResearchCorp Survey Reveals Marketing Executives’ Top Challenges & Concerns

Data Quality and Limited Ability to Determine ROI Top List

Santa Clara, California — September 23, 2008 — A ResearchCorp survey, conducted in partnership with Pinpointe (www.pinpointe.com), a provider of on-demand email marketing, reveals the top challenges Marketing execs are facing and what are they doing to address the challenges.  The complete report analyzes the results of 443 sales and marketing decision makers at medium and large US corporations.

Report Identifies Top Marketing Challenges

The top challenges keeping B2B and B2C Marketing Executives up at night are covered in detail within the final report.  Highlights of the top challenges are:

• Keeping prospect databases ‘clean’, complete, accurate and useful.  Quantity of contact data is a challenge for most companies: 42% have 10,000 or fewer names, while only 16.6% have more than 50,000 prospects in their Enterprise prospect database.
• Being able to calculate a meaningful ROI on marketing spend.
• Generating enough high quality sales leads for the sales team.

SFA and Marketing Automation

In order to minimize these challenges, companies have embraces Sales Force Automation (SFA) products, but most B2B marketers continue to rely primarily on tools such as email marketing and web analytics, and have not yet fully embraced more powerful marketing automation products and processes.  77% of companies are using email marketing, while less than 10% are using tools to perform more accurate, behavioral based targeting and/or segmentation, nurture prospects, score leads and automatically route those leads to appropriate sales teams.

The study also reveals that a chasm exists between marketing and sales from a process and infrastructure perspective – only 7.9% companies have a well connected link between their SFA and Marketing Automation (“MA”) platforms.

As for SFA, Salesforce.com was ahead of the SFA pack with respect to the Company’s ability to keep their customers happy.  Approximately 72% of customers using Salesforce.com indicate they are “culturally committed to using Salesforce.com” and pleased with the product’s demonstrated results.

About The Study

The study was conducted jointly by ResearchCorp and by Pinpointe, a leading Email Service Provider.  443 respondents from Marketing departments completed the online survey.  All survey respondents were employed by organizations with at least 250 employees, so the Small / Medium Business (“SMB’) Segment is not represented in this report.

Report Copy

The full report is available free of charge and can be downloaded at:

http://www.pinpointe.com/resources/marketing-automation-survey-2008-reg

The report may be redistributed and cited freely, provided that a) the content is not modified and b) the report source is properly recognized.

About Pinpointe

Pinpointe is an Email Service Provider.  Pinpointe’s on-demand email marketing system empowers thousands of B2B marketers to target and personalize their email communications based on prospects’ response (or lack of response) to previous email campaigns. Pinpointe’s email marketing helps marketers stay in touch with their prospects, and deliver more quality opportunities to the sales team.

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