Mike Burnett: Hello, this is Mike Burnett, principal and co-leader of the Business Services practice here at the Alexander Group. Today I’m going to be sharing some highlights from our recent 2024 Sales Pulse survey. Now, this survey is something that we run on an annual basis, typically targeting the fortune 1000 across various industries. And what we’re typically asking is what are their priorities for 2024? What are their growth objectives across the different go-to-market functions? What are the investments and strategies that they’re deploying in order to achieve their objectives? In this sample that we’re going to walk through, it consists of 45 participants from the business-to-business services and financial services space.
I think some good news coming out of the study is that folks are relatively optimistic about their ability to achieve 2024 goals. You can see in the past, we’ve typically seen actual growth or projected growth just hovering around 10%. There’s no change in growth expectations for 2024. However, on the right-hand side, you can see a much higher percentage of our participants being optimistic about being able to achieve those goals for 2024 – a definite change from what we’ve seen over the past few years in terms of mixed results and expectations.
Secondly, we’re seeing an increase in terms of overall investment in go-to-market functions across the board. When we’re saying go-to-market, that consists of marketing, sales, service and customer success, as well as revenue or sales operations functions.
Now, we asked what were the top investment priorities for each of these functions throughout the year. In marketing, it was interesting to see lead generation roles and investment in AI and marketing analytics topping the list. In terms of sales, no specific areas, but we were seeing a 7% projected increase to annual sales expense for service and customer success, just additional resources in the form of customer success as well as self-service tools. Lastly, revenue and sales operations were really pivoting into developing and honing tools and programs that will help enable sellers on a day-to-day basis.
Lastly, we did a deeper dive into where folks are looking to implement AI, and far and away marketing came away as the clear top priority from an AI implementation standpoint. Folks are either in the process of implementing or plan to implement throughout the course of 2024 and beyond. Now, when we asked about what are the top use cases that organizations are looking for as it relates to AI implementation, marketing content generation was far and away number one. You can see search engine optimization, lead scoring and optimization were close seconds. However, marketing content generation was at the top of the list.
Those are just some highlights from this year’s study. If you’re interested in learning more, please go to www.AlexanderGroup.com to either request a briefing or to connect and continue the discussion. Thank you.
