B2b Marketers Discuss The Impact Of Siriusdecisions' New Go-to-market Execution Model

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sharminakter5
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B2b Marketers Discuss The Impact Of Siriusdecisions' New Go-to-market Execution Model

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At its annual summit last month, SiriusDecision unveiled several new frameworks and templates. The Go-to-Market execution model, which was designed to help organizations move from a product-centric mindset to an audience-centric mindset, has garnered a lot of attention of the B2B community. Customer centricity has been a hot topic for some time, but the lack of alignment between sales, marketing, and product teams continues to plague many B2B organizations. SiriusDecisions positions the model as a way to bridge internal gaps and encourage everyone to see and engage from the same perspective. But how did the B2B world react to this new model a month later? Does it align with organizations goals and priorities, or is it just too complex and out of reach for most? Below, B2B practitioners, consultants and experts share their thoughts on the new model, as well as the challenges they think organizations will face as they strive to evolve. B2B practitioners Andrea Eaton, Director of Solutions Marketing and Sales Enablement, Bottomline Technologies “We always focus on being audience-centric. Some examples of how we are working to market in an audience-centric way include the recent segmentation of our customer and prospect marketing lists in Marketo into personas and our current plan to create a customer engagement engine (nurture program automated) with separately tailored content tracks for five individual buyers.




In this program, our Strategic Finance Persona (a C-level corporate finance executive), will receive emails promoting content more relevant to their strategic responsibilities for the overall financial health and strategy of their organization, while our Accounts Payable Persona will receive emails promoting more tactical tips and best practices to minimize their day-to-day AP process headaches, reduce the perception of AP as a cost center, etc As B2B brands attempt to transition to an audience-centric mindset, I foresee some challenges. Product managers and marketers typically know their company's products or services much more intimately than they know their buying audiences. SiriusDecisions breaks down buyer needs into organizational needs (business issues, higher-level needs and opportunities), functional needs (the operational requirements of the buying center), and individual needs (the job role and psychographic needs of the individual buyer) . Most marketers have tied the capabilities and benefits of their products to needs at the organizational level, but find it increasingly difficult to relate to functional and above all individual needs, as they lack intimate knowledge of each buyer persona - their day-to-day responsibilities, challenges and motivations - which can, of course, vary by size company and industry. How can a product manager or marketer really Ceannaigh Bunachar Sonraí R-phoist & Tógáil Liosta Ríomhphoist go tapa their audience without sitting in their shoes? What are the right steps to build buyer personas (interviews, matchmaking, etc.)? Without a dedicated effort from product management and product marketing to understand, develop, document, and share buyer personas, marketers will find it difficult to move from Christine Elliot, Head of Content Strategy and Operations, Crowe Horwath LLP “We've focused on an audience-based approach for a while – however, we tend to group our audiences together (we have a CXO approach). Given the complexity of B2B Buying Centers and Demand Units, we are trying to find scalable ways to focus content (or create elements within our content) for specific audiences, such as CFO or CFO risks. Although they both participate in central purchasing and demand units for our services, they care about very different things. We absolutely find the new SiriusDecisions model beneficial, and it certainly aligns with our internal priorities. The concept of understanding and targeting units of demand makes so much more sense than trying to target individuals. If you can identify demand units and buying centers, the benefits are enormous. This element of an ABM approach is something we can easily address even if we are not ready for ABM as a whole. This approach can help us establish the business case for ABM across the organization. We may find it easier to adopt the new model because we don't have a separate product feature.




Those with go-to-market responsibilities also serve as product managers – so there is some built-in synergy. Creating strong collaboration across functions is important to successfully shifting to an audience-centric approach. Experts & Consultants Ardath Albee, author and CEO, Marketing Interactions “Becoming audience-centric is a goal for all of my clients. To make this transition, they are working to create personas, map purchase journeys, and use these tools to develop relevant content and connected channel experiences. Many of them are also tackling sales enablement initiatives to ensure the transition between marketing and sales is seamless. I think the [SiriusDecisions] framework is about the money, but I also think the way it's structured introduces a lot of complexity. In other words, it sounds good, but the reality is that most businesses will take shortcuts because marketers have a mandate to get things done. It will be interesting to see what happens with the companies that do this. Essentially, making this shift to audience-centric is a new way of thinking. The curse for B2B marketers is that they know too much about their products. This makes it difficult to step into their customers' shoes and look at the buying process from a perspective not rooted in the product. Katie Martell, On-Demand Marketer, Shameless Marketing Truth Teller “The goal for many organizations is simply to make the most of their existing efforts, especially in content and email marketing. Becoming “audience-centric” is the means to that end. I've seen two things work lately: better alignment with customer success to identify customer use cases and focus market education content and messaging in those specific problem areas; and up-to-date information about buyers, whether personas or segments, because they have been produced poorly in the past, not at all, or need to be adjusted as businesses grow. [But] the status quo is a powerful force.



The way companies have historically operated has rewarded a product-driven mentality. Look at how our teams are structured, split by product, or suffer from a massive disconnect between product/marketing/sales and customer. In small businesses – from startups to Series A/Bs – the most dangerous belief holding them back from being “people-centric” is that technology alone will drive business growth. Too often you end up with very expensive technology looking for a problem to solve. It's backward – and dangerous – yet very popular. » James Thomas, Marketing Manager, Allocadia Software “For me and the majority of my peers who have experienced the success and traction of our marketing programs and initiatives, being 'audience and account centric' has been an integral part of our strategy for some time now. In some ways , it almost feels like SiriusDecisions is catching up, compared to the other way around. One strategy that helps us stay focused on our audience is related to ABM. ABM is really about following the people in an account who are likely to decide, influence or block a transaction. Good marketers have been focusing on this for quite some time now. This is why many of us have already changed our definition of a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) to be linked to an account, not a person/lead. For example, we track by single company or division, not by individual. » Pawan Deshpande, Founder and CEO, Curata “I think becoming more audience-centric is a goal for our clients as well as most content marketers. A few steps our current clients take to ensure they reach their focused audience the goals are: to be a more useful resource – to expand beyond their singular brand voice by finding and sharing more of what matters to their audience through curation. Use data to improve and focus – content marketers are learning that they need to go beyond pageviews and shares to understand more precisely how individual content items and types resonate with different personalities within of their target audience. The biggest challenge in moving to an audience-centric approach is getting buy-in from all departments and helping stakeholders understand that moving to an audience-centric strategy doesn't mean walking away.



revenue as a measure of success. It also doesn't mean focusing entirely on reach or impressions. Rather, it's about looking at the metrics at each stage of the funnel to make sure you're focusing on the right audience, the audience is engaged, and ultimately your marketing is growing your business. SiriusDecisions' new model fits perfectly with our existing content marketing pyramid structure that we use to develop content for our marketing team. Our existing framework is intended to enhance our content strategy to focus on what matters to our audience, increase our output on those topics, and thereby create a predictable flow of successful content - hence a like-minded model to complement those goals in other areas of the marketing and sales process is valuable. Aaron Dun, Senior Vice President of Marketing, SnapApp “The Sirius Audience-Centric Framework is an interesting approach to determining how much a marketing organization focuses on truly understanding their audience and how to market to them. The argument that too many companies are stuck thinking "product first" and that driving at scale requires rapid change towards an audience goal is an argument that I'm sure finds a resonated with many marketers. The problem, however, is that it's not really a new concept. I think most marketers have at least pretended to be audience focused for years. Terms like “buyer's journey” and “personality mapping” come to mind as marketing buzzwords in recent years. We can certainly argue about the effectiveness of each marketing organization's ability to deliver on this vision, and I think many CMOs will need to assess the maturity of their team.




But the idea is hardly new, and it is hardly revolutionary. What is new and potentially powerful is having a framework to map out this journey and to highlight areas of challenge for organizations and opportunities to initiate change. One of the biggest challenges that B2B marketers continue to struggle with when thinking about “audience first” is creating content that resonates. And I mean really resonates, it's really focused on the needs of the buyer. Too often, marketers default to content that helps push organizational messages forward, rather than thinking about the unique issues, needs, concerns, hopes, and dreams of each of their key personas. Our job as marketers is to have a deep understanding of these challenges, and then craft content that is tailored to those challenges. Additionally, we need to think about how we deliver this content and stop relying on the same “master-control PDF” tools of yore. Marketers who create content that is well connected to their prospects' challenges, and delivered in a unique and compelling way, will win in an audience-centric world. What do you think of the SiriusDecisions Go-to-Market execution model? Does your organization have plans to implement it? We would love to hear your opinions and plans in the comments section below.
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