"In five years, marketing and sales will no longer exist."
This statement was the focal point of this year's State of Inbound Report, which argued that with the progression of technology and how customers are getting their information, marketing and sales positions will become obsolete.
This is a two-fold problem in the fact that most modern buyers use salespeople as a last resort, meanwhile marketers don't seem to be producing the kind of content that buyers want to see.
And sadly, the stats confirm it.
This blog will review the key points of The State of Inbound 2016 Report by including the key benchmark data of today and future predictions in the areas of sales, marketing, and business.
So let's dig in!
Download the full version of The State of Inbound 2016 Report and follow along!
Hubspot, the agency who produces this report, gathered statistics from more than 4,500 respondents in more than 132 countries, the majority of which were non-Hubspot customers making under $1 million each year. Majority also showed that the respondents were mostly marketing professionals specializing in B2B, B2C, small and mid-sized businesses.
When asked to think specifically about inbound marketing projects, company's listed their top three priorities as growing SEO, blog content creation, and content distribution.
This has changed from previous years.
In 2014, the top three priorities were blog content creation, growing SEO, and content distribution. Additionally, we see that webinars, once ranked number four in 2014 and number seven in 2015, now no longer rank in the top nine priorities for marketers in 2016.
One thing that hasn't changed through the years is the view on what is the most overrated marketing tactic. Can you guess it? If you guessed outbound marketing (paid advertisement), you'd be right. Paid advertisement ranked as the most overrated marketing tactic by both outbound and inbound marketing agencies who were surveyed, coming in at 31 and 33 percent between the two. This is more than two times the amount of the next highest overrated tactic---online paid advertising.
As video content popularity continues to rise among the modern buyer, the future looks as if it will have a lot of video marketing in it as well.
According to the survey, 48 percent of marketers are planning on utilizing Youtube and 39 percent are planning to use Facebook video. Instagram, Snapchat, messaging apps and podcasts are also among the top contenders for future marketing plans.
When asked to think specifically about what their company's top sales priorities were for the next year, salespeople responded accordingly: closing more deals.
With that response garnering 70 percent in 2016 and 72 percent in 2015, it is clear that closing more deals is always going to be a top priority for salespeople.
Interestingly enough, the data also showed that improving the efficiency of the sales funnel is a very important factor for salespeople as it has ranked for the last two years at 47 percent.
Both systems show significant growth from the previous year, whereas significant drops can be seen from those who previously used Google Docs and physical files in 2015.
Next year, we will see a giant shift of power from the salesperson to the buyer. This is also known as the Inbound Sales Methodology. For salespeople to remain relevant to the modern buyer they must make seven strategic changes to their methods:
Overall we see a significant change for the future of marketing and sales. If your goal is to stay in the game, you're just going to have to adapt.
In addition to the report, Hubspot is hosting five online webinar events this week that gain insights and predictions from industry leaders such as Joanna Lord of ClassPass, Larry Kim of WordStream, and Rob Go of NextView Ventures. Below is the schedule: