When it comes to martech, you can have too much of a good thing. And companies that disregard marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) do so at their own peril. Those are two key takeaways from Pipeline360’s 2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth report. The findings are based on a February 2025 survey of 534 B2B marketing professionals in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Tech Is Good, But Insights Are Better
When asked what he considered among the most surprising findings, Pipeline360 CMO Matt Hummel doesn’t hesitate. “Marketers are fed up with their tech stacks, and they find them to be marginally inefficient. Beyond that, they’re looking for more outcomes and less tech,” he says. “The tech in and of itself isn’t inherently bad. It’s just not plug-and-play in the way that I think it was promised to a lot of marketers.”
That only 27% of respondents expected to invest in marketing ops and technology this year, compared with 47% of last year’s respondents, reflects this disenchantment. “The disheartening part of that statistic is regarding the marketing ops,” Hummel says. “Marketing ops can be such a great asset to unlocking growth within marketing. One of the biggest differentiators between high performers and low performers is a marketer’s ability not just to have access to good data but to understand how to utilize it. That’s a key role marketing ops can play.”
Among this year’s survey participants, 36% described their current martech stack as “functional but limited,” with another 17% calling their martech “somewhat useful but disorganized” and 4% declaring it ineffective. Only 32% characterized their martech stack as “streamlined and effective” and 11% as “optimized and impactful.”
Respondents at high-performing companies, however—those that had achieved most or all of their pipeline goals—were appreciably more likely to view their martech positively: 49% described it as “streamlined and effective” and 23% as “optimized and impactful.” “When companies have begun not just to cut their technology costs but to streamline it, creating a more efficient tech stack, that actually improved their results,” Hummel says.
What the majority of marketers (69%) want instead of new tech are insights delivered to them. This desire for delivered insights and “done for you” services will likely only grow as more companies reduce their tech and analytics teams: “Companies need that overlay of insights.”
A Shift in Valued KPIs
Attitudes toward martech weren’t the only changes reported. Whereas revenue generated was the most popular KPI among last year’s respondents, with 62% using it as a metric, just 42% of this year’s respondents did. Website traffic was this year’s top metric, used by 43%. The value placed on this top-of-funnel KPI can be viewed as marketers’ recognizing the importance of brand awareness and demand generation.
At the same time, the declining emphasis on MQLs suggests that many marketers don’t appreciate the importance of mid-funnel metrics. Half of last year’s survey respondents used MQLs as a metric, compared with 29% of this year’s participants, 39% of whom used bottom-funnel sales-qualified leads (SQLs) as a KPI. High-performing companies, however, were just as apt to measure MQLs as SQLs, with 43% tracking each. Conversely, while 40% of low performers measured SQLs, only 20% tracked MQLs.
Given that sales cycles are lengthening, more businesses may come to reevaluate the importance of nurturing MQLs. Eighteen percent of respondents reported that cycles have increased at least four months on average; 28% posted an increase of 2-4 months, and another 28% said the increase was less. Just 19% of survey participants weren’t seeing longer cycles, with 7% unsure.
Companies’ hesitancy to make major purchases amid the current economic uncertainty is doubtless one reason for longer sales cycles. Another is an increase in the number of stakeholders involved in buying decisions. Hummel suggests addressing this head-on, by seeking out and including the “dark buyers”—those you might not have realized were influential in the decision—earlier in the process.
A Gap in Lead Nurturing Capabilities
Lead nurturing was one area in which high-performing companies were appreciably more effective than low performers. While 69% of respondents at top-performing companies described their business as very good or excellent at lead nurturing, a scant 10% of those at low-performing companies said the same. Similar gaps appeared regarding data handling practices (79% of respondents at top performers considered their company’s performance very good or excellent vs 14% at low performers), content quality (85% vs 27%), and marketing-sales alignment (75% vs 24%).
Some organizations blame a lack of marketing-sales alignment on C-suite churn. “The expectation that I’ve heard from a lot of marketers is ‘Sales and marketing alignment happens between the CMO and the CRO,’” says Hummel, who advises establishing regular check-ins, meetings, and other forms of communication between marketing and sales team members, regardless of leadership changes or other factors. He cites a study indicating that nearly two-thirds of marketing teams lack a formal process for exchanging information with sales regarding buyer identification.
Especially given the ongoing economic anxiety and fiscal constraints—32% of respondents faced budget cuts, and 31% reported flat budgets—focusing on fundamentals such as improved communication may be the best strategy for businesses, especially under-performers. The same goes for optimizing the resources at hand.
“Doing more is very rarely the answer. It’s always doing what you’re doing better,” Hummel says. And though he’s referring specifically to data analytics and marketing ops in this instance, it’s advice that could be applied in many other instances as well.
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