Our B2B Marketing agency has subscribed to SiriusDecisions since 2010. This is not an investment that we take lightly, since it’s our largest marketing & training expense by a wide margin. Nevertheless, as an evolving B2B agency, this is a necessary investment in ourselves for a wide variety of reasons.
For marketers who are considering their own investment in SiriusDecisions or working with an agency who subscribes to them, we thought it might helpful to explain our rationale.
1) Cutting-Edge Frameworks, Models and Methodologies
As an agency, our strengths are listening to client needs and then translating them into deliverables to produce results that meet their goals and objectives. We are strategic thinkers, but we aren’t in the business of developing strategic frameworks and models. We leave that to the experts.
SiriusDecisions issues new frameworks and methodologies regularly based on their experience working with thousands of companies. Their Research Directors and thought leaders put months of efforts into developing these models. We use these frameworks and models to guide our thinking and to help us figure how to solve customer problems quickly and efficiently. Here are some of our favourite models from the last couple of years:
Demand Waterfall
Personas
Messaging
Campaign Planning
Channel Program
2) Large Community of Marketers
We have also been a sponsor of the SiriusDecisions Summit for a number of years. Attending the summit is akin to finding your tribe. There are over 3,000 B2B marketers that speak the same language and can relate to the obstacles you’re facing.
Over the years, we have met countless new clients, partners, freelancers and friends with whom we continue to have strong relationships.
As with any tribe, the Kool-Aid consumption can be overwhelming. However, SiriusDecisions tends to appeal to a more senior crowd than events like Marketo Nation and Hubspot’s Inbound, so the brain-washing and groupthink isn’t as obnoxious.
3) Staying on Top of B2B Marketing
It’s really hard to stay on top of everything happening in the B2B marketing space. It’s also challenging to decide what’s an important trend that requires your attention…and what is simply noise or a blip.
SiriusDecisions offers many opportunities to learn about the new technologies and trends, through their regular Forums or through the various sessions and case studies presented at the Summit. The forums are typically an intimate roundtable event with 20-50 invitees, and there’s a specific topic focus. The last forum I attended a couple of months ago was entitled “Customer Marketing and Customer Success: Partnership for Accelerating Growth”. I walked away with several takeaways and thoughts on customer case studies and advocacy that are applicable to our agency as well as our customers
According to Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic, there are now over 5,000 marketing tech solutions. This can be extremely daunting for marketers, as it’s difficult to know which of these companies are good and which ones are impostors. We often get clients asking us for recommendations on certain technologies. If we don’t have a strong POV, we’ll look at the Sirius Marketplace or ask someone at SiriusDecisions for their thoughts on how a technology or vendor fits in the ecosystem, and whether it’s someone to keep on our radar or not.
4) “Sales and Marketing Alignment” Philosophy
It’s intuitive that alignment between sales and marketing is necessary for success. The data consistently bears this out. However, the issue of misalignment in organizations continues to persist even today.
One of SiriusDecisions’s sweet-spots is getting alignment at the top of the organization. They have the credibility to garner the attention and buy-in of the senior leaders in sales, marketing and product, as well as the skill to find common ground and ultimately alignment on objectives and processes.
This philosophy of alignment permeates to many of the other frameworks they produce. As an agency that implements these frameworks, we think this is a very practical approach, because it’s very challenging to implement a marketing program in the absence of sales buy-in. All marketers bear the scars of failed campaigns due to their inability to compel sales to participate or take the porgram seriously.
5) Talented Group of Experts
Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with several strong analysts at Sirius such as Carrie Rediker (Demand Creation), Kathy Contreras (Channel Marketing), Cheri Keith (Personas and Demand Creation) and Maria Chien (Channel Marketing). All of them have several years of practical experience working for enterprise clients. Thus, they understand the enterprise context and the requisite potential traps and landmines (both internal and external) that need to be considered. A consulting firm is only as strong as their consultants and Sirius seems to take this…seriously. (sorry).
6) Second Set of Eyes
We work with several clients that are also Sirius Decisions subscribers. We strongly encourage our clients to share our work (personas, messaging, campaigns) with their SiriusDecisions account team to get some feedback. This serves a couple of purposes; Firstly, our client gets peace of mind that the work we’re doing makes sense for them and sets them up for success. Secondly, we get a 2nd set of objective eyes poking holes and offering constructive ideas aimed at our shared goal of making the client successful.
We will be sponsoring the SiriusDecisions Summit this year in Las Vegas. You can find us at Booth #701. Please drop by to chat, ask any questions and maybe win a coffee mug that seems to be all the rage. If you would like to find out more about our approach, visit www.getlift.com/evolve