In August 2008, Pinpointe.com and ResearchCorp.org conducted a survey of 443 sales and marketing decision makers to gain insights into the state of marketing automation and email marketing in the enterprise. Respondents included a mix of B2B and B2C companies.

Some key findings include:

What are the top challenges that keep marketing and sales professionals up at night?
The top headache reported was data quality - keeping data prospect databases 'clean' and useful. This topped our list for B2B and B2C companies by a long shot. Quantity of contact data is also a challenge for most companies: 42% have 10,000 or fewer prospect contacts. The second greatest challenge is calculating a meaningful ROI on marketing spend, which leads to the third and now obvious challenge: getting enough leads to feed the sales machine.

What infrastructure do companies have in place to address SFA, email marketing and marketing automation?
We had over 2 dozen vendors named in total. However salesforce.com topped the list overall in both market penetration, and customer satisfaction, by a wide margin. Participants shared their views on nearly a dozen systems.

Which marketing programs do companies find to be the most effective?
We found that B2B companies still rely on traditional programs, and have not yet embraced social media. In contrast, B2C companies list social media as their top choice of programs. Participants rate their experiences and provide feedback on 10 different marketing programs.

Get the full report here.

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