Dive Brief:

• According to BrightFunnel, B2B deals were more difficult and took longer to close in 2015 than last year.
• Compared to 2014, B2B deals in 2015 took 52% more marketing touches and lead-to-revenue sales cycles increased 32%.
• In other BrightFunnel news, it recently announced a $6 million series A investment round led by Crosslink Capital.

Dive Insight:

If B2B marketers felt like 2015 was a particularly tough year to get deals closed, new stats from BrightFunnel back up that feeling.

Both marketing touches and total sales cycle increased in 2015 over 2014 before B2B deals were closed. Marketing had to make an average of 17.6 campaign touches from lead-to-close, a 52% increase over last year. BrightFunnel broke the buying cycle into two parts – pre-sales cycle and during the sales cycle – and found 53% of marketing touches come in what was defined as pre-sales cycle and 47% during the sales cycle. The average overall lead-to-revenue cycle for “high growth” tech firms is 512 days, with the average sales cycle at 108 days.

"Changing buying behavior has fundamentally changed marketing and sales," BrightFunnel CEO Nadim Hossain told Marketing Dive. "Consumer behavior is changing for a number of reasons: there are many new channels to engage with customers (e.g. social); consumers have changing expectations and preferences (e.g. preference for text vs. voice; automated vs. human); and the always-on, mobile Internet."

Hossain added that B2B marketing has become easier because of the amount of research B2B buyers now do before interacting with a sales rep, but it has also become harder because, as he put it, “marketers have to re-train their brains to look at all those steps in the buyer's journey, and figure out how they are going to serve the prospect customer at each step.”