A startling 54% of sales leads generated by marketing are seen as poorly qualified or underqualified. And 58% of firms agree it is difficult to quantify marketing’s contribution to revenue, according to the 2022 CRM Impact Report, a study released Monday by SugarCRM, conducted by Arlington Research.
Moreover, 27% of sales leads are never followed up because of lack of confidence in their quality or a lack of understanding of who has ownership.
At the same time, 55% of brands cannot identify customers at risk of leaving and 57% struggle to track customer churn rates. And 63% say misalignment between sales and marketing hurts growth. They cite:
All that said, 86% of sales teams use AI to augment one or more business processes. And 91% expect to use AI over the next 24 months, with 49% saying they expect to use it a lot and 42% saying they will use it to some degree.
AI solutions typically are used for the following:
Meanwhile, U.S. respondents cite these factors affecting their businesses:
“Companies face a daunting scenario — struggling to fill the top of the funnel with qualified leads while losing customers at the bottom of the funnel,” says Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM. “A key contributor to losses on each side of this equation is a lack of data.”
Arlington Research surveyed 1,600 sales and marketing decision makers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Australia.