If you review the agenda for this year’s Sirius Decisions conference in Las Vegas, there is mention that during the Wednesday Keynote sessions, for the first time in 5 years “it is time once again to evolve this iconic model to provide b-to-b organizations deeper insight and enhanced visibility into demand creation performance.”
Back in 2012 I wrote a 2 part perspective on the re-architected Waterfall model after the Sirius Conference that year and to this day we still get strong engagement activity on our Website – so clearly the waterfall remains a popular topic for our clients. Some recent high engagement on a 2017 newsletter compelled me to write some ideas ahead of the 2017 conference. I think all B2B marketing leaders agree that the waterfall is one of the most important frameworks in B2B marketing over the past 2 decades.
I took a look at the bullets on the agenda and thought it might be interesting to speculate what might change in the framework, plus I took a look back on my blog posts from 5 years ago to see how much of my thinking has or has not changed. MarketOne has been evolving our own set of frameworks which we continue to align thinking with Sirius.
“Discover how the Demand Waterfall® is changing to accommodate a more account-centric approach to demand creation and demand management”
I think the challenge with ABM and the waterfall model is the idea of putting an account at the center of the buying stage measure can be very difficult. Before you even start to define which accounts are at what stage, you need to consider how much the buyer DNA changes when targeting SMB vs. large enterprise accounts. The issue is further complicated when a provider sells solutions across multiple business areas – sales, HR, finance, IT, etc. Then there are other variables to consider – like has this account ever bought from us, are they using our competitors solution and to what degree, are any external factors driving decision making, how aware is the account of my solution(s), do they trust us?
So when you take all this into consideration, an account can be in multiple buying stages at the same time, and the influencers, users and decision makers are likely involved in multiple decisions at any point in time. If you take all that into consideration – every account is at the top of funnel, many of those same accounts are also in the middle of my funnel and then a few are also at the bottom of my funnel.
So with that in mind, can the model truly be “account-centric” when thinking about process, conversion rates and attribution? Take into consideration that these same complexities in B2B have made it hard to deploy the waterfall in a “contact-centric” way – consider poor behaviours like MQL bypass. When I think about a funnel be more buying need-centric and the account becomes the common object that is used to stitch together the ecosystem of influencers, decision makers, partners, competitors, etc. that are the drivers of making a decisions. ABM’s biggest influence on marketing is analytics – because once you can model your accounts you can truly understand what to prescribe, when to prescribe it and who within the account should receive the prescription.
“Understand how advanced analytics is providing a high-resolution view of which prospects are in-market, and how this changes the measurement of an organization’s demand creation process”
This one interest me the most, as it is at the core of what we are doing to re-shape how our clients use assets to target buyers. Before I get into the “in-market” analytics models we are working on, let’s think recall how the waterfall model help bring the sales and marketing teams together to create good practice around how to manage and measure INQ-to-MQL-to-SQL . Before the model, there was little process integration between sales and marketing – so this is where I credit Sirius for helping all us B2B marketers get more aligned with sales. But like any good model, we know more today than we knew yesterday – which is why I expect the model is getting a refresh.
So what did we learn about the model that has marketing thinking differently about “in market” prospects.
- We learned that that not all INQ are top of funnel (recall my bypass comment).
- We learned that active marketing engagement + a good profile does not equal an MQL ready for sales
These are good learnings and are the basis for some of the new analytics based models that MarketOne is validating with our clients and I expect there will be strong alignment with what Sirius will discuss. When you start integrate data across multiple sources (this is step one) – you can begin to group prospects in new and interesting ways to test what truly indicates “in market” status. HINT: it is not always those accounts that are active with marketing today – but in B2B it can be accounts that were active with marketing 6-12 months ago and were deemed “failures” using the traditional waterfall process and measures. This has been some of the foundational thinking behind MarketOne Segmentation framework highlighted in my last blog.
Analytics thrives on having data to analyze – so I am very interested in how Sirius combines their model with changing the measure to be more about ensuring every interaction seeks to understand the individual buyer roles, link buying teams together and gage how aware they are as a collective about your ability to solve their need. This starts by making sure every inquiry is managed with the intent of helping the buyer and gathering intelligence vs. trying to squeeze MQL conversions out and forcing the process to meet MQL objectives. If you focus on research and customer experience – the MQLs will flow out of your process naturally and with less overall effort. I am looking forward to learning more about how Sirius is applying analytics to change the way MQLs emerge and ultimately drive funnel.
“Learn how to measure the progress of demand creation in multi-solution, multiple buying center environments”
I like this one better the concept of account-centric. So hopefully this will be more core to how the waterfall uses what I called need-centric measures and tracks those needs as they move from an idea, to a concept to a deployment of a solution. To understand this we will need to track the engagement and intelligence gather across multiple buyers linked together at the account level.
I also like the idea of “measure the progress” vs. the idea of measuring the “process”. This is at the heart of how we advise our clients to shift measurement when using our segment framework. I have always viewed the waterfall model as a way to create process and then measure that process – which is hugely important to helping all B2B marketers advance their business objectives. However, when we think about buyers – they progress and at time progress is slow, fast or stalls. Cracking the nurture process code is about understanding what variables drive progression and ultimately impact that progress.
“See how to account for customer marketing and selling within the Demand Waterfall®”
This is another part of the model that fits nicely with the MarketOne Segment model. The old waterfall never really focused on what the stages are once a customer is on boarded or even during the on boarding experience. When you think about a waterfall what is at the bottom of it? Another large pool of water of course. This pool tends to get top of funnel messaging and there is never enough focus on the customer lifecycle as they move from first deal to loyal, renewing customer. This segment is an area where untapped share of wallet goes under penetrated and certainly for more services based providers a much higher profit margin opportunity.
So as we all gather in Las Vegas later this month, the highlight will be seeing what Sirius Decisions has in store for us in terms of guidance around one of the most transformational frameworks in B2B. The thing I look most forward to will be to have discussions with marketers who have created their own path to better process, measurement pipeline ROI. The thing about a framework is that it is guidance and context for how to get started. The path we take to achieve our objectives can be unique. But at the end of the day these ideas are what make us the best and brightest in B2B marketing. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
Originally published for MarketOne International in May 2017