Most B2B Marketers Are Still Buying Blind. Are You One of Them?
Most B2B marketers are still relying on basic media buying and lead gen strategies. Leads are generated, but too often get passed to sales without context, or worse, they sit in spreadsheets, get stale and expire. And most still aren’t tapping into their lead and customer data to improve how they target media. This is highly valuable first-party data that isn’t being leveraged. That means a lot of performance is being left on the table.
The numbers back this up:
• Nearly two-thirds of B2B marketers say they’re only at a “novice” or “intermediate” level when it comes to integrating CRM and other first-party data.
• Fewer than half of U.S. marketers and agencies consistently use their first-party data to create proprietary identifiers when buying media.
It’s no surprise campaigns underperform and quickly plateau. The tools exist to create and optimize them using the data, but most companies don’t have a process in place to easily identify and activate it.
Closing the Gap
At our agency, we have developed a system we call ProspectAIQ. It is a combination of tools and processes that address this issue head-on. It pulls in leads from all sources—trade shows, web forms, customer databases, paid campaigns—and enriches them with information that helps sales prioritize and more effectively engage with prospects. Then, it closes the loop by tracking outcomes and feeding that information back into your media strategy and buying, helping sharpen your targeting and increasing efficiency over time.
ProspectAIQ is not one of these services that automates your sales outreach and tries to replace salespeople with AI and bots—it is a catalyst to help your sales team start stronger conversations and build trust faster. And it helps marketing spend smarter by incorporating real outcomes into media buying.
At the end of the day, nothing replaces relationships in B2B. But by making your data work harder, you can get to those relationships sooner—and with less wasted effort along the way.
Learn more about how ProspectAIQ can turn your first-party data into sharper targeting, richer leads, and better sales conversations.
