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.