Leaders must continue to invest in external partners and data. With partners’ help, they’ll be better positioned to activate their data to advance priority marketing and sales activities, including improving digital selling, account-based marketing, lead quality, data consistency, and creating personalized experiences in their customers’ and prospects’ journeys.
Laggards associate important benefits with improving their data activation maturity, including their ability to drive expansion within accounts, improve marketing efficiency, strengthen their brand, promote data consistency between marketing and sales teams, and improve lead quality.

Take a glance at the service partners or solutions that companies will invest in to change in the next year:

• 71% of surveyed leaders mentioned that they will increase spending in optimizing their marketing and sales activities.
• 69% reported that they will spend more on building a master customer database to link data sources and systems.
• 65% said that they will increase spending on the third data party in the next 12 months.

A Graph Shows Companies Spending Areas to Change in The Next Year, 2018.