Beyond Leads: Marketing Operations in 2025

For all the hype, Generative AI rarely features in everyday marketing discourse. Marketers have bigger concerns than implementing cutting edge technology. Budgetary pressures mean that everyone is being asked to do more with less. This has resulted in a focus on funnel optimisation and improved analytics to guide better decision-making.

Focus on Conversion Rates

Above all, the business wants to see fewer wasted leads. Lead conversion rates are in decline, and CMOs are being asked to reverse that trend. That's a cross-departmental effort, which relies on the improved sales and marketing alignment built up in recent years. BDRs have a difficult job, which isn't getting any easier. They face increasingly complex challenges around lead quality and the ability to reach prospects. Marketing has a key role in overcoming these concerns.

Generally, a focus on BDR efficiency results in more comprehensive lead qualification criteria. The aim is to increase lead conversion rates by only passing the best leads to BDRs for follow up. Reducing poor quality MQLs should allow more time and effort to be assigned to each lead, increasing marketing's overall pipeline contribution. This is leading to a renewed focus on ABM.

Enter the ABM Funnel

According to advocates, ABM is the best way to deliver the required improvements in lead quality. Now, ABM is hardly new, but historically it has rarely extended beyond the programs team. That has changed. ABM methodology is starting to become a significant part of the overall marketing operating model. One of the big trends of 2024 was a shift towards account qualification over lead qualification. Expect that to continue.

Operations teams are being asked to implement an account based funnel, that runs alongside the traditional lead funnel. Both account readiness and lead readiness are evaluated at every stage of the funnel to ensure that leads are genuinely ready to engage with sales. This is one of the key drivers behind the success of 6sense and other intent data platforms, because they expand the range of activities considered in scoring, which should result in better quality leads. However, no single technology can solve the deficiencies of traditional lead qualification approaches. Manual scoring still operates alongside the predictive models, although such models do incorporate a wider range of attributes than in the past.

Propensity & Predictive Data

The rise of intent data illustrates the new possibilities unlocked by AI technologies. AI-powered account propensity is now a vital component of any viable lead scoring model. It enables a greater focus on data-driven account selection. Propensity modelling has become much more common, primarily as a way of tiering the entire addressable market, but also for identifying target accounts. In doing so, it provides an objective measurement of account interest that can be trusted by the entire go to market team.

After all, better alignment and higher conversion rates require better data. Marketers have spent the last few years rigorously trying to improve data quality. While no one believes their marketing data to be high quality, it has improved. Third-party data sources have been integrated, and data cleansing workflows have been implemented. However, many organisations have reached the point where additional data sources don't justify the cost. The next step is to bring everything together in the systems where it is needed. Then, AI can be used to identify pockets of prospects that have been underserved by existing campaigns.

Expanded Analytics

With budgets still tight, there is an increased focus on each individual campaign. Marketing leaders are looking for activities that aren't delivering to the business, so that money can be reallocated to new concepts. However, the days when ROI was measured only in MQLs are long gone. Businesses want to see the full impact of every campaign on both brand reputation and the sales funnel. That has led to a renewed interest in marketing influence reporting. CMOs want to understand how campaigns impact existing opportunities rather than just looking at marketing sourced pipeline.

This is because many boards have discovered the limitations of demand generation, and are looking for new ways to measure the ROI on marketing investment. Brand is one metric under examination, but ultimately marketing must be able to demonstrate the ability to boost conversion rates, accelerate close dates and inflate deal sizes. If not, then CMOs will have much more difficult questions to answer.