• by Bill Duggan , Yesterday

It’s been said that confidence is sexy. And so is B2B marketing.

B2B is big business. While it’s often overshadowed by B2C, it shouldn’t be. One economist estimates that B2B is twice the size of B2C, representing about 65 percent of global revenues and profits, 68 percent of global assets, and 63 percent of global enterprise value. Big business indeed. 

ANA just released the report, “The Confident B2B Marketer,” done in collaboration with NewtonX, based on a survey with 200 respondents, plus follow-up qualitative. A Confident B2B Marketer is defined as someone “extremely or very confident in their ability to measure marketing’s impact on financial performance.” That group makes up 39 percent of B2B leaders surveyed. In addition to their ability to measure financial impact, Confident Marketers are defined by the following key characteristics: 

• Confident Marketers are nearly four times more likely than their peers to report a fully aligned relationship with sales, characterized by shared goals, joint planning, and strong trust. 

• Action: Effective sales and marketing alignment is built on joint planning and data transparency. Set up a recurring meeting with sales to track future business and align on a single shared dashboard. 

• Confident Marketers strike a balance between brand and demand investment. Nearly half (47 percent) report an equal split between brand and demand tactics, compared to 37 percent of their less-confident peers. A key driver of balanced brand to demand investment is the 95-5 rule, which reflects the fact that, on average, only 5 percent of B2B companies are in-market for a specific product/solution at a given time, with 95 percent out of market. This suggests that B2B marketers should invest to build brand salience and mental availability among out-of-market buying groups to create future demand.

• Action: Stop treating brand and demand as a trade-off. Justify brand investment by treating it as your future pipeline and linking it to long-term growth. 

• Confident Marketers are three times more likely to be very confident that their marketing helps build internal consensus and drives organizational buy-in.

• Action: Redefine your core metric from individual leads to the entire buyer group. Shift from the individual MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to the Qualified Buyer Group (QBG), because engaging a larger committee can improve win rates. Blend structured data and sales insights to uncover all buying group stakeholders. 

• Confident Marketers are twice as likely to possess superior measurement and attribution capabilities.

• Action: Use measurement to elevate C-suite credibility by adopting a holistic scorecard that covers human, customer, and commercial metrics to explain the “why” behind the results, not just the “what.” Organizations that build advanced attribution approaches translate marketing activity to business performance and strengthen marketing’s role as an engine for sustained growth and confident decision-making. 

• Confident Marketers have a much stronger data foundation; they are nearly twice as likely to have fully or mostly integrated data systems.

• Action: Shift focus from data collection to insight activation, as the majority of marketers say data fragmentation limits their effectiveness significantly or extremely. As one CEO stated, there is an “abundance of data, but a dearth of insight.” Build a process to turn marketing data into “active intelligence for sales teams.” 

• Confident Marketers are far ahead on AI readiness; they are four times more likely than their less-confident counterparts to have a martech stack fully or mostly built for an autonomous AI future (i.e., ready for advanced AI-powered automation). 

• Action: Use AI for strategic process transformation, not just tactical efficiencies. Don’t just settle for small efficiencies. One leader used AI to autonomously create 25 percent of the sales pipeline, while another cut a project from two years to two months. 

Confident B2B Marketers are sexy. And learning from their actions provides a roadmap for others to increase their sex appeal and drive business growth.