CMOs Share Key Benchmarks for 2021

Leading a marketing team through the unchartered waters of an unprecedented global crisis isn't the easiest job in the world, and I've found tremendous value in sharing learnings with other CMOs. Through many virtual roundtables, peers have shared really valuable insights and many of us have been asking each other similar questions about what's working to build pipeline and how we're allocating budgets in 2021. Oddly, I couldn't find a single recent industry survey or study that gathered real data on what B2B SaaS CMOs have found was really working in the latter half of 2020 and how people were thinking about 2021 - so I went out and asked my peers. Nearly 2 dozen CMOs took the time to respond, and I'm pleased to share the results in the Slideshare.

Before you look at the results, it's important to note a key caveat: there's no such thing as one-size-fits-all. Differences in company revenue, company/industry stage of maturity, and average transaction size mean it's difficult to reach broad conclusions. The ranges of results from the survey shows this. What works for a category-leading company at $200M in revenue with an average new deal size of $125K will be very different from what's best for an emerging $25M company with a $25K ASP. Still, I think the general direction is very enlightening. Here are 3 highlights:

Budgets Increasing by 20-30% or More in 2021

First, it's great to see evidence that Marketing is playing a key role in growth going into 2021. 79% of CMOs are seeing their budgets increase in 2021, 57% said their budgets will increase by 20% or more, and 43% said their budgets will increase by more than 30%.

Most Pipeline Coming from Website/SEO, Outbound, Webinars, and Referrals

Not surprisingly, old sources of pipeline like live events have shriveled up and died, and company's websites are now the workhorse for pipeline generation, with nearly 25% of pipeline coming through that channel on average. Just behind that was good old-fashioned outbound prospecting and cold-calling. Webinars, referrals, and content marketing round out the top 5 sources of pipeline. Outside of the survey, my peers and I have all experienced the pains of negotiating with 3rd party events companies (e.g. a prominent unnamed analyst firm) for their virtual versions of previous live events. General consensus is that the price for the retooled virtual event is vastly inflated relative to the much lower value delivered to vendors from the virtual events, so a lot of us are passing on those and using those funds more productively in other pipeline building channels.

Paid Digital Demand Gen Gets the Biggest Budget

Among the most interesting findings was the difference between top pipeline sources and top areas of investment. CMOs said on average that they'll put 35% of their budget toward paid digital demand generation (e.g. digital agency, paid social, PPC/search ads, retargeting, account-based advertising, email list purchases, content syndication). One might justifiably ask, why CMOS would invest so much budget on paid digital and relatively less for unpaid digital if SEO/website is the workhorse for pipeline building? My take on this is that it makes perfect sense. Growing website traffic via SEO and website conversions takes a lot of time, hard work, and patience, and while it may be labor and people-intensive, there's just so much in budget dollars you can pragmatically spend on SEO (external contractors/agencies or internal) and your website. In contrast, the ceiling for spending responsibly on paid digital is much higher. CMOs have a variety of channels that may be working today or that your digital teams want to test and validate. Some of those channels can be costly at scale, and it's relatively to outsource and scale if you don't have the in-house resources. This isn't to say CMOs are spending on paid digital frivolously - it's just that this area is much costlier per lead and the ceiling on spend that will still yield meaningful pipeline is much higher.

There are many other interesting results from the survey. Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks again to the other CMOs for taking the time to respond to the survey.