Alignment between marketing and sales has been an on-going discussion in the business world from the time when corporates have come into existence. Sales professionals have been long complaining that the leads provided by marketers are not good enough and marketers have been complaining that salespeople are not properly working on the leads. It’s a common accusation that marketers just focus on filling up the top of the funnel with maximum leads leaving the sales team to put in double the efforts. The only solution for this is, rather than focusing on the top of the funnel the attention should be on impacting the entire funnel based on revenue which is what Pipeline marketing is about.

Pipeline marketing is considered as the next phase of lead generation that connects marketing and sales data for better decision making and achieve goals based on revenue. Lead generation which was earlier considered a method for marketers to generate plenty of leads to pass along to the sales team can be transformed to a more goal oriented strategic approach based on revenue. Rather than the primitive model where marketers focused on just filling the top of the funnel with leads, pipeline marketing is inclusive of all channels and pipelines.

According to Bizible “Pipeline marketing is what you’re doing while content marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and growth hacking are how you do it”.

After surveying around 350 B2B and B2C marketers with sales team, Bizible released their third annual State of Pipeline Marketing Report which gives valuable insights to the stats regarding how marketers drive growth into the business using down-funnel metrics, like sales opportunities, pipeline, and revenue for driving growth.

Also Read: The science behind prospecting and pipelining customers

Let’s get to the main trends that we have to be aware of in 2017 from the published report.

1.CONVERTING LEADS TO CUSTOMERS:

While considering the over-all benefit of the organization, it’s not the question of how many leads have been made or how many deals have been closed but the overall profit that the company is making. For this, the marketers should be focused on generating quality leads while focusing on the overall revenue that can be generated using it.

In 2016 only 34.1% of the overall top marketing priority was regarding converting leads to revenue while generating more leads was up to 45.7%. Now in 2017 converting leads to revenue has turned out to be 42.3% while the priority of generating more leads have gone down to 35.4%.

WHAT IS YOUR TOP MARKETING PRIORITY THIS YEAR?