The Hidden Message from SiriusDecisions: Serve Your Audience

SiriusDecisions’ B2B Sales and Marketing: Forging a New Alliance was an impressive event last week, and I was glad to have the opportunity to attend. Between companies sharing their own cases on sales and marketing alignment and the planning frameworks, examples and data from SiriusDecisions analysts, it was a three day information firehouse.

Underlying the content I saw a common thread: sales and marketing needs to serve prospective customers. Here is my view on how a service attitude towards prospective customers underlies three of the key messages from SiriusDecisions.

Connecting Thought Leadership to Sales

Perfect alignment

Chris Koch’s most recent headline really caught my attention: Three Ways to Link Marketing to Revenue without Metrics. Beyond a great headline, he has great advice for marketers to ensure content and thought leadership is tightly connected to sales.

Here are Chris’s three key points:

• Connect ideas to offerings: tell a story that extends from vision to implementation
• Use ideas to attract and nurture leads
• Train salespeople to use and talk about ideas