HubSpot recently published the “The State of Inbound 2017” report, which surveyed 6,399 professionals in 141 countries. 

This comprehensive state of inbound report includes:

• The State of Marketing and Sales
  • Top Marketing Priorities
  • Inbound Marketing Priorities
  • Sales Priorities
  • Marketing Challenges
  • Sales Challenges
• The State of the Business
  • Is Marketing Effective?
  • Marketing and Sales Alignment
  • The Sales Business
  • The Marketing Business
• Looking to the Future
  • Main Disrupter: Video
  • Potential Disrupters: AI & VR
  • Constant Disrupter: Social
  • Preparing for Disrupters
  • Sales Disrupter: Changing Preferences
• Understanding the Modern Buyer
  • Trusted Sources of Information
  • How People Like to Communicate
• Evolution of the State of Inbound: Trend Data
  • Sales Evolving
  • Priorities Remain Consistent

Below are hightlights of the report.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Source: The State of Inbound 2017, HubSpot

Only 22% of professionals surveyed said that their marketing and sales departments to tightly aligned. Alignment in any company is vital for success. Clearly there are tremendous opportunities for improvement. It was also interesting, but not suprising, that 69% of C-Level executives believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective; however, 55% of individual contributors doing the work believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective.

Top Marketing Challenges and Priorities

Source: The State of Inbound 2017, HubSpot

Overall, 63% of marketers say their top challenge is generating traffic and leads. This remains a consistent theme in marketing departments.

Video Marketing is a Growing Priority

Source: The State of Inbound 2017, HubSpot

Mobile is a driving force with video and customers are gravitating to video. Although written content is still king, video is beginning to play a vital role in getting your message communicate to your target audience.

Top Sales Challenges

Source: The State of Inbound 2017, HubSpot

In todays world sales reps are finding it more difficult to get responses from their prospects using traditional outbound sales tactics. This should be no surprise. In todays world, customer want to do their research online on their own time, get educated and then reach out to a sales team when they are ready to make a purchase.

Sales Team Productivty

Source: The State of Inbound 2017, HubSpot

Even while there have been advances in sales tech, sales reps are stating that they are wasting a lot of their sales time input data into CRM systems. 57% of reps stated that they are spending up to an hour of day doing data entry.

Download the full report.