• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 20, 2022

Blame it on the Great Resignation or on pinched hiring budgets, but B2B marketing teams are overworked and understaffed, according to A Partnership Is Born: Product Marketing And Sales Find Happiness, a study by Aventi Group. 

Asked about their challenges, B2B marketers affirmed three:

• Not enough people/staff — 67% 
• Too many priorities/projects — 67%
• Time to hire and train product marketing talent — 33%

The lack of staff is perhaps the worst issue, leading to these consequences: 

• Low team morale or team burnout — 63%
• Ineffective campaigns or launches — 56% 
• Attrition of highly-skilled team members — 40%
• Inability to achieve revenue goals — 36%

Yet product marketing teams are now being tasked with these priorities, probably leading to more all-nighters and staff burnout: 

• Sales enablement — 61%
• Go-to-market strategy — 56%
• Product launch — 53% 
• Content development — 46% 

The solution? B2B teams need to add resources in these areas to meet their goals:  

• Sales enablement — 57%
• Content development — 56%
• Strategy — 49%
• Programs — 41% 

Indeed, here are some of the things B2B teams say they would achieve if they only had the time and resources:

• Create dynamic, robust content for sales & marketing — 63%
• Create strong, targeted messaging/positioning — 60% 
• Help drive campaigns and demand — 56% 
• Build a resilient go-to-market planning process — 51% 

Will they soon have the staff to achieve all this? Not likely. It takes most of them at least a few months to fill senior marketing positions:

• Less than a month — 2%
• 1-3 months — 51%
• 4-8 months — 40% 
• More than 6 months — 6%

It may be even more difficult to fill slots in such specialized areas as email marketing.  

Here’s the punchline — that outsourcing of product marketing initiatives is going to increase in the next year, at least for some: 

• Increase by 25-50% — 10% 
• Increase by 10-25% — 20%
• Increase by up to 10% — 11% 
• Stay consistent — 47% 

What would they gain from outsourcing?

• Faster time to market — 49% 
• Ability to meet/exceed objectives/KPIs — 31%
• More product marketing expertise — 23%

Aventi Group recently asked a few dozen B2B executives to share their views.