B2B skills gaps and John Lewis’s U-turn: Your Marketing Week
At the end of every week, we look at the key stories, offering our view on what they mean for you and the industry. From new research revealing the key skills B2B marketers feel they are lacking to John Lewis reviving its ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ price promise, it’s been a busy week. Here is my take.
Data is a means, but not an end
Most marketers, everywhere, feel like they don’t have sufficient data and analytics skills, it seems. Echoing the results of our Career & Salary Survey of all marketers earlier this year, the first set of results from our State of B2B Marketing survey were published this week. The ability to manage, extract, understand and interpret data chief among the areas where B2B marketers say they are wanting.
It is difficult to conclude with any certainty whether the gap is even more pronounced in B2B than among peers in B2C. Across the board, though, there is a lag between the volume of data available and the confidence to make sense of it. In many B2B marketing teams, data is in silo, and unorganised, with marketing technology misused or misunderstood, breeding a sense of anxiety. Interestingly, customer insight was ranked as the most important component for success in the coming years. They know what the outcome needs to be from data, but are not yet confident they have the means to get there.