Half of B2B professionals lack confidence in the quality of their data, according to

Dun & Bradstreet’s annual



B2B Marketing Data Report

,

which surveys 250 B2B sales and marketing professionals.

The amount of marketers stating

data quality is important to sales and marketing functions

has continued to increase, with 15% more saying this is the case than in 2016.

The top five activities

marketers identify data playing a crucial role in include campaign execution, personalised content and messaging

, sales prospecting and closing, generating customer insights with analytics, and lead qualification and scoring.

Similarly, despite massive investments in CRMs and other systems, nearly 40% of respondents claim to be beginners or novices at integrating data with their CRM, and 90% say it is difficult to align sales and marketing data about companies when executing programs across multiple channels.

Marketers still struggling with integrating data

The report also shows ABM may not be as prevalent as previously thought, with only one-third of surveyed companies implemented ABM programs, while just one-third (33%) of respondents state they are confident in the ability to attribute specific marketing activities to the buyer’s journey.

Josh Mueller, global head of marketing for Dun & Bradstreet, said: “B2B companies are currently at a crossroads. They overwhelmingly understand the value of data to their organisations, but have not yet figured out how to collect, integrate and apply that data in insightful ways to help make business decisions.”