Genius.com’s B2B Marketing Skills Survey

As part of recruiting support I provide to OpenView’s expansion stage portfolio companies, I often help to recruit for sales and marketing support positions. I am interested the ever evolving role of the B2B marketer and their alignment with sales, and Genius.com recently published a B2B Marketing Skills Survey which discusses these issues. Genius.com surveyed a total of 516 B2B and B2B/B2C marketers across a wide spectrum of industries, including technology, and one of their key findings was that in order to meet revenue and ROI goals, marketers need to adopt new skills.

According to Genius.com, of the marketing respondents surveyed, very few B2B marketers cited being “sales-driven” (the ability to map marketing to revenue) as their strongest capability, despite the fact that focusing on revenue and driving qualified opportunities were viewed as critical to success. While only 17% listed “sales-driven” as their strongest skill, “creativity”, “strategic”, and “analytical” were all seen by more respondents as their greatest strength. Of those marketers surveyed, 40% indicated that their greatest area of improvement was “sales”, which was by far the highest percentage of all areas of improvement listed.

Given the discrepancy between the surveyed marketers’ assessment of their own sales skills and the importance that they feel it has to their success, it is evident that many marketers need more sales training than they are getting or are giving themselves. Do you think that the same is true for your company’s marketing team?

For additional information on Genius.com’s findings, check out their full survey results here.