Behold New Marketing Tablets from on High SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall
The mighty oracle of modern digital marketing has delivered us a new groovy epiphany to lead us mortals into the light of righteous marketing. My dear friend and guru on these matters, Intelligent Demand’s John Common gives a first-person account first-person account from the burning bush. Save yourself time and read his well laid out 2,500 words to get the story. Or read his last 400 words covering eight thoughts summarizing the key points.
No argument SiriusDecisions is considered the McKinsey of digital marketing thinking. When outside credibility is necessary to spark digital marketing investments inside $1B+ companies, they have the horsepower to get cross-functional senior executives saluting.
The new construct encouragingly unlocked another B2B purchase process level recognizing multiple operators in B2B purchases - aka the Demand Unit. Further, they venture into creating demand against buyer personas, needs, and solutions. Agonizingly, this framework, like the others, fails to call out and operate on sales process insights.
The Sirius culture of SLA based lead management sets in motion adversarial us (marketing) vs. them (sales) relationships. Appealing to marketing, SLA’s sensibly guard lead supply and nurture contributions to unappreciative and undisciplined sales forces. This marketing champion centric world view is partially responsible for unwinding the single largest demand spend component of most B2B enterprises, the sales force.
The latest framework fails to call out essential elements further stove-piping sales and marketing processes. Close sales and marketing process collaboration creates the biggest impact on market performance, especially applied in long purchase cycles and is the new best practice.
Sirius, please send a few of your best thinkers to a Miller Heiman or Sandler sales training to absorb a few core elements. They train how to capture this data in Salesforce using beautiful machine-readable templates (read: fields accessible by marketing engines):
- Prospective accounts have decision makers and influencers
- Each has different buyer personas discoverable through marketing
- Each is on a scale ranging detractor > promoter
- Each is on a scale ranging no power > final authority
Before systems like Eloqua, no one could coordinate single dimension dynamic marketing programs let alone the four above for each prospect. The activity-aware artificial intelligence that adjusts lead nurturing dynamically is the point. Why leave the most relevant data and methods out of the process? If the lead and nurturing program has value to the sales process, they will use it.