What a disappointment.

Despite billions of dollars spent on lead-generation programs and branding campaigns, a significant portion of these expenditures are not driving channel performance or product sell-through, the CMO Council reports, citing its Channel Performance Outlook Study, writes MarketingCharts.

In some cases, marketing and sales activities may well be alienating the channel, reducing trust, confusing the customer and reducing overall productivity and effectiveness, it found.

The CMO Council also released a scorecard for how vendors drive business performance through some of the most critical avenues of customer engagement, purchasing and service worldwide.

Topping the list of channel complaints were lean lead rates, unqualified opportunities, and lackluster marketing campaigns that failed to connect with the customer.

Lack of cooperation between the channel and field marketing groups also surfaced as a significant issue, as well as the perennial problem of key account conflict with direct selling groups inside vendor organizations.

(Additional findings from the study are available at MarketingCharts.)

"With as much as 80% of business leads languishing, lost or ineffectually handled, there is a big top-line revenue benefit for vendors seeking to increase yield, productivity and accountability throughout the channel," said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.

The findings of the Channel Performance Outlook study are in line with similar results of a Customer Affinity Index report released earlier in the year by the CMO Council, which reveals further vendor-channel disconnects.

In that poll, only 3% of channel partners indicated that their vendors are extremely well aligned around the end customer, and only 8% of vendor marketing respondents said they do an extremely good job of teaming with the channel to build stronger customer affinity.