When it comes to comprehensive inbound marketing tools for marketers, HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report 2015 is one of the best resources around. Packed with details and stats, the report is a must read for all inbound marketers.2015’s State of Inbound shows three out of four marketers worldwide select inbound methods above traditional outbound marketing tactics. And while we suggest you read the report for yourself, we thought we’d share our three most interesting marketing stats to takeaway if you don’t have time to read it all for yourself:

1. Proving Return on Investment (ROI)

If there is one biggest takeaway, it is that tracking positive ROI will secure future marketing budgets. Proving and tracking ROI also happens to be the number one challenge marketers face.

As the HubSpot survey points out, respondents were “20% more likely to receive a higher budget in 2015 if ROI was tracked in the first place.” Expect this trend to continue in 2016 as tracking inbound and outbound campaigns becomes more efficient.

2. Smarketing is Teamwork

Smarketing is also the path to business success. Combining ‘sales’ and ‘marketing’ Smarketing is a term HubSpot started. It represents sales and marketing departments actually working together as a team.

For some reason, there can typically be misconceptions and miscommunication between the two departments. They aren’t always playing on the same team. But in order for any company to be successful, both need to be efficient for inbound to work.

That’s why 47% said they saw a greater increase in revenue when they had a service-level agreement between the two entities. That means sales and marketing agree to provide a set amount of visitors, leads and customers. They also set parameters on how and when to transfer leads between each other.

3. Inbound Leads Cost Less

Through reports over previous years, HubSpot has been able to track the average cost per lead (outbound vs. inbound). We now can see that inbound leads still cost less than their outbound counterparts.

The report breaks down the average cost per lead by North American B2B company size. When looking at businesses with 51-200 employees, inbound leads cost about a third of those found from outbound activities on average.

Conclusion

Overall, it would seem more businesses and agencies are beginning to adopt inbound marketing. They appear to understand philosophies behind which activities drive the best return.

Demonstrating their success is the key to increasing future budgets. Both marketing and sales teams must also acknowledge their mutual dependencies, outline responsibilities, and work together towards business objectives.

If you aren’t practicing proactive, performance-driven marketing, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate your current strategy. If these trends continue, it is not long before outdated marketers fall behind.