Summit 2007: Lessons Learned
What could have possibly happened in the desert that I simply couldn’t wait to share with you? Of course, I'm referring to our recent conference for sales and marketing leaders titled “SiriusDecisions Summit 2007: Return on Integration,” held in May in Las Vegas. The conference featured presentations from SiriusDecisions thought leaders as well as senior executives from organizations including Dow Jones, EMC, Salesforce.com and Software AG. It also gave me a wonderful opportunity to chat with a wide range of your peers to see what they are feverishly working to implement; I thought I would share the five key topics that seemed to be gaining the most mindshare.
ONE: A NEW KIND OF ROI
It’s the question that marketers have been trying to solve since the dawn of time: How much revenue does a dollar invested in marketing yield? Our theme of return on integration demonstrated that there are better ways to ask (and answer) this question, with thoughts that included:
Funnel-long participation: In the b-to-b world, marketing will never generate a dollar of revenue on its own. Instead, it must carefully coordinate and work with sales to facilitate a customer’s buying process from cold to close. This is why we continue to see marketing move its measurement aims toward creating/sourcing demand, and impacting opportunities created by sales.
Critical intersections: There are three key outputs a b-to-b organization must focus on to be successful: reputation, demand and revenue (generated through the optimization of the sales function). A return on integration philosophy examines the areas of overlap between these outputs, and focuses on the resulting metrics from the intersections as those that are most critical to report.
TWO: FIELD MARKETING 2.0
At our Summit, we introduced the next generation of field marketing – 2.0 – which takes the concepts developed in field marketing 1.0 and applies them in an adaptable, situational fashion that allow for different scenarios within a complex business to be addressed. At the heart of the ability to be both adaptable and situational is an emerging group of technologies, especially when overlayed onto advanced processes and strategies.
THREE: SALES READINESS, HERE TO STAY
Sales readiness is an emerging function under the sales operations banner that focuses on maximizing field, product and corporate marketing’s impact on sales. As a result of this role, a sales function can more effectively absorb everything from marketing-generated leads to new product launches. Our research currently indicates that roughly 25 percent of b-to-b organizations have developed a unique sales readiness function; those who have, devote approximately 15 percent of their sales operations resources to it. If discussions at the Summit are any indication, both of these percentages can be expected to shoot up in the not-so-distant future.
FOUR: USER-GENERATED CONTENT
Customers, salespeople and influencers are creating content about your organization; companies that embrace this fact rather than fight it will find themselves ahead of their competitors. At the Summit, we discussed the growing role of blogs in an overall b-to-b communications strategy; in fact, 22 of the world’s top 100 Web sites by traffic are now blogs. While you may not have the desire or the bandwidth to sponsor and/or manage your own blogs, you must become aware of those blogs that are talking about your company, and its products or services on a regular basis.
FIVE: GREATER INVESTMENT?
With stronger integration and a better ability to drive reputation, demand and revenue, marketing and sales will be better able to build their cases for increased investment. The question is, where will this investment take place? At the Summit, we discussed the continued shift of the b-to-b marketing function toward demand creation (and funnel support), and away from the branding and advertising efforts that spent much but generated little in the 1990s. To this end, even organizations that are greater than $1 billion in revenue commonly spend more than 40 percent of marketing dollars on field marketing (a number that jumps to nearly 60 percent for organizations $100 million and less in revenue), a fact that would have been unheard of 10 years ago. On the sales side, more dollars are being allotted around functions and activity that specifically drive sales productivity, from operations to readiness.
If there was one common theme from all the participants at the Summit, it was that marketing and sales have bought in to the concept of integration; they are now wrestling with exactly what this means. For those of you who were unable to join us at this year’s event, I'll ask this question: How far have you traveled down this road? Trust me; if your journey has yet to begin, I can point to a number of your competitors who are taking advantage of your slow start.
