B2B revenue leaders are fighting a battle on two fronts: standing out in a crowded market and making every dollar work harder than ever before. In 2024, positioning products as “must-haves” and differentiating from competitors topped their list of challenges—while shrinking budgets made it harder than ever to be seen. Longer sales cycles and increased customer churn are evidence that B2B brands are struggling to tell a credible value story.
We kicked off 2025 sharing these insights and more from Norwest’s 2024 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report during our webinar with David Rudnitsky (Principal, CRO Operating Executive), Ranjeet Vidwans (Senior Advisor, Marketing), and me, Renée Cohen (Vice President, Marketing Operating Executive). Last year we surveyed 195 sales and marketing leaders from VC- and PE-backed B2B companies to ask them about their current budgets and team sizes, program priorities, performance, and top challenges. Let’s dive in.
Hold On for One More Day: Budgeting for Stability
In our 2023 benchmark report, we anticipated a pullback in budgets heading into 2024. Turns out pullback was an understatement. Budgets weren’t just trimmed—they were slashed. For companies generating $25-$100M in revenue, marketers report operating with as little as half of what they were spending in the previous year.
When we dug deeper and looked at the planned growth rates year over year, we found a cause. Some companies, particularly venture-backed ones, are planning to sacrifice growth to preserve cash. In 2023 we found 38 percent of these companies were planning to grow their revenue by at least 50 percent and in 2024 that number had dropped to only 9 percent of companies in these cohorts planning for growth at that rate.
This aligns with what sales leaders reported when we asked them if they’ve had to make any adjustments to their revenue targets. In the past 12 months, venture-backed companies report that they are much more likely to have decreased their revenue targets and less likely to have increased their revenue targets compared to their PE-backed counterparts. This was particularly true for companies under $100M in revenue, with a less significant difference between VC- and PE-backed companies over $100M revenue.
For venture-backed companies, stability is key to creating optionality for future funding or M&A paths. Many have found it’s better to sacrifice growth in the short-term, as long as costs are managed.
Under Pressure: The Battle for Buyer Urgency
The greatest challenge for revenue leaders today? Convincing buyers they can’t wait. Without this sense of urgency, deals stall, retention suffers, and long-term growth becomes an uphill battle. We counsel our CEOs and founders to look at this as a challenge for their entire leadership teams to solve. In 2025 we expect to see more investment in audience and ICP research, win/loss analyses, and competitive intel.
Recordings of customer calls and research do no good sitting on drives. Your marketing and product team need to be tightly aligned on the vision. As Chandar Pattabhiram, Chief Go-to-Market Officer at Workato, advised at Norwest’s 2024 growth marketing summit: apply this deep knowledge of your customer to identify the “onlyness” of your product that excites your buyer.
Only [your company] gives [your audience] [your differentiating capability]. If you can’t complete this statement succinctly, you have some work to do.
Don’t Stop Believin’ (in Shorter Sales Cycles)
Sales leaders report that sales cycles have continued to lengthen. And companies selling primarily to the mid-market with an average annual contract value (ACV) of $50-$100K are facing the greatest headwinds, reporting that it takes on average 9 months to close a deal.
In other words, it’s taking nearly as long to close a deal in the $50-$100K ACV range as it is for enterprise-sized offerings at >$100K. As CEOs and their GTM teams evaluate plans to move up- or down-market, expect that deal velocity may not be much faster with mid-market buyers than enterprise prospects in the near term.
Express Yourself: Product Marketing Roles in High Demand
As sales cycles grow longer and buyer urgency fades, the pressure falls squarely on product marketing teams to break through the noise with clear, compelling positioning. Brands need to stop sounding like everyone else to attract new audiences with fewer distribution dollars. That goal is reflected in marketing leaders’ hiring priorities.
Unsurprisingly, marketing leaders report that product marketing is the top skill they’re hiring for in the next 12 months. This makes sense, given that the top challenges reported were positioning and differentiation. With increased product marketing support, teams will begin investing in developing more competitive and audience research, market landscape analysis, and crisper ICP definitions (that go beyond the basics of industry and company size). All this intelligence will fuel sharper positioning and messaging. Storytelling is the skill that will set the best product marketing leaders apart from the rest.
Additionally, the hiring plans show that marketing leaders may be favoring more generalist positions in product marketing and demand gen, with other more specialized functions falling behind. Marketing ops (20 percent reported planning to hire) may be covered by a combination of demand gen and digital marketing leaders. Content (19 percent hiring) may be outsourced. Customer marketing (16%) and partner marketing (14%) may be put on hold or covered with support of the demand gen and PMM teams.
Teach Your AEs Well
A brilliant product strategy and crisp messaging are only half the battle. Without strong sales enablement, AEs struggle to connect the dots, leading to inconsistent outcomes and missed opportunities.
A healthy sales enablement function will arm your AEs to execute more fulsome discovery with prospects, get higher in the org—faster—and ensure the deal process is followed consistently so you can trust your forecasted revenue and see fewer slipped close dates.
After $25M in ARR, over 83 percent of organizations have sales-enablement coverage as part of someone’s remit, with 72 percent of orgs having dedicated ownership in the form of at least one FTE or outsourced team. For earlier-stage organizations who report no formal program, consider if a combination of product marketing and revops, closely aligned with your sales leadership, can fill some of the enablement gaps. Your ability to forecast accurately and create predictable outcomes may depend on it.
It’s a New Dawn, It’s a New Day, It’s a New Life—for MQLs
Marketers are rethinking everything they know about MQLs. While 86 percent still rely on them to some degree, the industry is witnessing a seismic shift away from traditional lead scoring—and for good reason.
Lead scoring is the process of giving an individual who engaged with your brand some “points” based on their firmographic fit for your ICP (how close in industry, company size, title of the person, etc. to your ideal buyer) and additional points for the quality or quantity of activity they engaged in (downloaded content, registered for a webinar, stopped by for a tradeshow booth scan, etc.). In 2023, over half of marketing leaders reported using lead scoring to define their MQLs. In 2024, only 38 percent are using this method.
We track MQLs for three reasons:
- Help sales to prioritize outreach when lead volumes are higher than their capacity to follow up
- Predict ideal timing for human contact, assuming a lead is researching with intent to purchase
- Aid in revenue modeling, so companies and teams can forecast programs to hit an MQL target with the expectation that a predictable percentage of those MQLs will turn into opportunities
The reality is that many startups targeting enterprise buyers don’t have so many leads that their teams couldn’t follow up with at least the top ICP fit names. And lead scoring is so variable and arbitrary that this approach has not been a predictor of intent, leading to inaccurate forecasting and frustrated partnerships between marketing and sales. And finally, MQL conversion rates to opportunities are so bumpy and inconsistent that it often doesn’t pencil accurately when forecasting.
Additional data in our survey suggest marketing leaders are putting greater emphasis on creating meetings for their sellers. As companies seek stability and predictability in their revenue creation, meetings with qualified buyers will become a much more reliable leading indicator than MQL volume.
RevOps: I Get By With a Little Help From My AI
The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here. Over 60 percent of revenue leaders plan to adopt every AI use case we surveyed, fundamentally reshaping how sales and marketing teams operate. It’s not a question of “will sales and marketing leaders adopt AI,” but rather “how.” The majority have already adopted generative AI for brainstorming and content creation.
The hottest emerging use cases take a more agentic approach, ingesting data from various sources and building custom messages and campaign variations based on target audience, their past activity and engagement, and predicting the “next best” message or action to pull the prospect down the funnel.
Revenue operations teams will need to ramp up on this frenetically shifting landscape. Early adopters will need to test rapidly, while avoiding distracting their teams with shiny new objects. Those who identify the new tech stack to find predictable sources of revenue and accelerate penetration into high-converting segments are going to win an operational advantage—for a time. Within a few years, we will begin to see broader market adoption as the new AI tech stack standards emerge.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
It’s clear that the “growth at all costs” playbook has been shelved—for now. For 2025, stability, predictability, and operational excellence aren’t just priorities—they’re lifelines.
To win, B2B companies must be bold and opinionated. Differentiation is no longer optional—it’s a means of survival.
If there’s one key insight from our 2024 benchmark survey, it’s this: to win, B2B companies must be bold and opinionated. Differentiation is no longer optional—it’s a means of survival:
- Marketing leaders: Stop blending in. Develop messaging and positioning that are unique, resonant, and impossible to ignore.
- Sales leaders: Equip every AE with a deep understanding of customer value drivers and a crystal-clear articulation of your product’s impact.
- Product leaders: Collaborate with your revenue teams to identify and sharpen the unique capabilities that set your offering apart.
Success in 2025 will favor those who embrace clarity, focus, and an unrelenting commitment to standing out in crowded markets. The companies willing to rise to the challenge will find efficiency in attracting and retaining customers. The real question is: who’s ready to stand apart?
For more insights, download the full 2024 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report and watch the webinar below.
Let’s discuss! How do our findings compare with your experience? Share your perspectives with me on LinkedIn. (Bonus points if you can guess the songs that inspired my subheads. 😊)