PREDICTIONS

2014How Data Will Change The Playing Field For Marketing And Sales

WE'VE SAID IT BEFORE. IT IS AN AMAZING TIME TO BE WORKING IN MARKETING AND SALES.

Technology has changed the game. Now, more than ever before, we have access to more data and insight to help us market, sell and service our customers. Companies on the cutting edge are learning from consumer counterparts to utilize the wealth of data to improve their businesses. We are pushing overselves to become more data-driven in our decision making and planning. But it's more than just lip service.

So we connected with over 20 thought leaders in marketing and sales and asked the same question:

How will sales and marketing professionals become more data-driven in 2014?

We enjoyed reading everyone's predictions and we hope you will to. Please feel free to add your prediction and share this with anyone you feel would find value in it.

Enjoy! -The Lattice Team

1 Using insight to shorten sales cycles

Companies will marry big data marketing and sales insights with detailed "outside-in" understanding of their buyers' journey to drive higher campaign and sales productivity resulting in 20% shorter sales cycles.

@chriscrandell

Christine Crandell

Chief Experience Innovator

New Business Strategies

2 B2B will model sales and marketing after B2C

Technology accelerates transactions, increases efficiency and lowers the cost of doing business. Technology impacts people's behaviors and in the B2C space, it gets consumers to make decisions in real time. When we get hungry we go to Yelp. When we need a car, we go to Zipcar. B2B buyers demand similar, instant responses in the B2B space. They'll often realize that it is easier to get information and insights about a product or service from a peer than it is from the B2B vendor. In 2014 sales and marketing professionals need to translate information into insights that deliver real value to the customer - in real time.

@gerhard20

Gerhard GschwandtnerCEOSelling Power

3 A deeper understanding of the customer

Sales and marketing professionals have been leveraging data to learn more about their customers. They will continue leverage data and analytics to develop deeper understanding of the customer.

But in the coming year, we will see data and analytics used to bring rich, concrete and specific insights to their customers. These insights will be company, functional and role specific. Sales and marketing people will leverage these to drive specific conversations to help customers improve their businesses and more effectively achieve their goals.

@davidabrock

Dave BrockCEOPartners in EXCELLENCE

4The year of context

We will see great use of "context" in sales and marketing. By context, I mean everything from recent behaviors and activities to location to real-time predictions. Companies will get better at bringing in this rich contextual data and using it to make better decisions about how to prioritize sales team's time and personalize marketing interactions.

@jonmiller

Jon MillerVP Marketing and Co-FounderMarketo

5 New technology brings productivity boosts

Salespeople will see a massive productivity gain by adopting a new wave of technology aimed at them. This technology will help them engage the right prospects at the right time with the right message.

@markroberge

Mark RobergeChief Revenue OfficerHubSpot

6 Culture, data and content

2014 will be about 3 things for sales and marketing: culture, data and content.

The pressure of more customers doing their own research further into the buying process will finally force sales and marketing to transform themselves into truly customer-centric cultures that use data and personalization to deliver valuable, informative and entertaining content.

So while CMOs and heads of sales will need to lead with courage to put customers ahead of worn out notions that overly promotional marketing and the hard sale still work, marketing and sales leaders will be setting up enterprise big data platforms to follow customer trends. Brands will setup real newsrooms, start producing content like a publisher—content their audience wants and needs—personalized to them.

@brennermichael

Michael BrennerVP, Marketing and Content StrategySAP

7 The end of separate systems

The greatest advances in 2014 will come from sales and marketing using the SAME data to prioritize and act on the right, ready-to-engage prospects. Too often today they're using separate systems, separate databases. Pull that data together and magic can happen!

@heinzmarketing

Matt HeinzPresidentHeinz Marketing Inc

8 Leveraging the heck out of technology

With all the hype around content marketing, social ads and ad optimization, etc. in 2014 I predict a year more focused on the business processes connecting sales and marketing. We have all the technology we need. It's time to leverage the heck out of it.

@kaykas

Jascha Kaykas-WolffCMOMindjet

9 Data driven—it's not what you think

There are two types of marketers - those who are trying to become more data driven and those who realize there is WAY more data than just what people downloaded and what web pages they visited. The marketers who have mastered scoring with their marketing automation will begin looking to more data to make better decisions (aka predictive analytics).

@funnelholic

Craig RosenbergPartnerTOPO

10 Change in comp structures

I predict many marketers' new comp plans will reflect revenue performance metrics, not MQLs or any other metric. Data will drive quality pipeline. Jason Long of the Pedowitz Group has it covered in this blog post:

http://www.pedowitzgroup.com/blog/vanity-marketers-your-days-are-numbered

@etratnyek

Erik TratnyekRegional DirectorLattice Engines

11 The transformation of marketing

We've all had a front row seat to the marketing transformation over the past 10 years: digitization, real-time, social media, content marketing, inbound, marketing automation. These were not ephemeral ideas. They transformed marketing. Predictive analytics is now emerging as central to the modern marketing organization and a top focus for 2014.

Leading marketers are leveraging data science to market and sell more intelligently. They are bringing every relevant buying signal — from the web, social, CRM and marketing automation sources — to find, prioritize and close their next customer. Inspired by the awesome predictive analytics engines of Google and Amazon, we are seeing a marketing arms race emerge— powered by data.

@bkardon

BrianKardonCMOLattice Engines

12 Social media will lead demand

We will see more B2B lead gen from social. Marketers are learning how to tap into social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to drive engagement and capture the lead. Services like Social123, LittleBird and InsightPool are helping us figure out better acquisition strategies, find business influencers and append contact information. And the beauty of social is that the account owner is incented to maintain their information, so we will see a higher level of accuracy than from traditional list vendors.

@meisenberg

MeagenEisenbergVP of Demand GenerationDocuSign

13 The buyer remains in control

The buyer’s control of the sales process will continue to grow. Today, the research and prospecting process is dominated by the prospects. They go online, research who has solutions for the problems they’re facing, read case studies and talk to their colleagues. In 2014 and beyond this domination of the buying process will continue into the qualification and solution design stages of the pipeline with prospects visiting your website and determining whether or not you’re qualified to do business with them, not the other way around! Prospects are taking action and reaching out to sellers proactively more than ever before! Before, they didn't know you were there until you called. Today, you don't know they are there until they buy!

@engagecolleen

Colleen FrancisPresidentEngage Selling

14 The journey to repeatable success

Given the various evolving technologies, applications and digital channels, organizations really need to think big about how they approach their audiences. Integrated strategic measures are critical to delivering on the promise of relevance and value, and data fuels the ability to refine communications.

One of the ways data will support the alignment of marketing and sales is by enabling the two teams to maximize the value of their respective reporting and analyses. When everyone understands how to analyze data in ways that are meaningful to key performance indicators, organizations can improve on their commitments to repeatable success.

@amandaf_batista

AmandaBatistaContent Marketing ManagerOracle Eloqua

15 The rise of smarketing

The departments of marketing and sales give the first steps towards an inevitable merger to a new department called smarketing. The digital disruption of all businesses leads to the creation of this new multidisciplinary group.

@joaofmferreira

João FerreiraCCOSanitop

16 Too much personalization?

I think the industry is going to become too hyperfocused on personalization/segmentation to the point where they are making decisions based on sample sizes that are just too small. This type of advanced tech is great for big companies and fun to write about, but may not be applicable to most people interested in data-driven marketing.

On a more positive note, I think there will be a further trend to use qualitative data to start 'humanizing' the quantitative data we gather in our analytics platforms. Numbers are in a vacuum, and it is our job as marketers to make the numbers 'real' to make strategic business decisions. 2014 will [hopefully] be the year that bridges the gap between the data-centric & the user-centric.

@jtrondeau

JustinRondeauChief Editor & Testing EvangelistWhichTestWon

17 Optimize and predict!

I want to believe that 2014 will be the year organizations begin to use their data to optimize and become more predictive. In looking at some of the recent studies, it is clear that many B2B organizations are still grappling with how to use their data as a key strategic driver of their business. The tools and access to data are more prevalent than ever and 2014 needs to be the year where the application of this insight is applied to drive Customer Lifetime Value and revenue outcomes.

@cahidalgo

CarlosHidalgoCEOANNUITAS

18 The democratization of data science

In 2014, marketers will realize that they can harvest the buying signals from the web, social media and 3rd party data sources to improve every aspect of demand generation and sales. The prize will go to those who do this first by following the practices of Internet-scale companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix and focusing on drawing insights from data to make predictions about who is likely to buy next. All the pieces are now in place – the cloud, large installed bases of CRM and marketing automation systems and the exploding data volume. Predictive marketing and sales applications will democratize the power of buying signals for everyone, no team of data scientists required.

@shashisf

Shashi UpadhyayCEOLattice Engines

19 A focus on online and account-level

With 67 percent of the buyer's journey happening online, and not all of it at the start of the journey, sales has a big interest in knowing what's happening online and what to do about it. Next year will see tighter alignment of tools that give visibility into online behavior and delivery of sales enablement that makes it more efficient for reps to follow up with the right response. We'll also see marketers doing a better job of planning their efforts against account-level objectives and not just general market assumptions. Finally, 2014 will be seen as the year b-to-b got serious about customer experience, with sales and marketing defining their roles in the post-sale relationship based on understanding customer needs and behavior online and off.

@megheuer

Megan HeuerVP and Group Director, Data-Driven MarketingSiriusDecisions

20 Data will provide a leg up on the competition

Based on the results of our 2014 Sales Performance Optimization (SPO) study, we continue to see a deterioration in the conversion rate of leads to first discussions. To overcome this, marketing first needs to do a more effective job of analyzing which prospects are more likely vs. less likely to want to engage with their firm, and then execute targeted lead gen campaigns towards those accounts.

Sales then needs to thoroughly research those accounts to develop compelling reasons for why the prospect should agree to include a salesperson in their "buying" process. Vendors who succeed at leveraging data to accomplish both these tasks will have a significant leg up on their competition.

@jimdickie

JimDickieManaging PartnerCSO Insights

21 Farewell to finger-pointing

In the B2B economy, the trajectory of data-driven decision making will move toward consolidation in the front office. Specifically, I think we'll see more Chief Revenue Officers emerge—replacing formerly distinct (and isolated) VPs of Sales and Marketing. It's a farewell to finger-pointing. The intelligence aggregated from data enables more expansive views—and more expansive decision making power. Interestingly, marketing directors and sales directors, managers of the data at the operational level, will become more powerful, too.

@brittonmanasco

BrittonManascoPrincipalVisible Impact

22 Finding the right insights

With clear and measurable evidence that data-driven organizations perform better, sales and marketing teams will continue to find ways to quantify patterns and derive insights from data to find, close and keep the right (most profitable) customers.

In our era of massively available data, it is not easy to figure out what information really matters. I predict that we will see sales and marketing leaders hiring (or contracting or partnering with) data scientists, dedicated to analyzing buyer and seller behavior to increase revenue generation, sales productivity and customer retention.

@annekeseley

Anneke SeleyCoauthor, "Sales 2.0" and CEO and founderReality Works Group

23 The year of change

The shift to digital business will impact sales and marketing professionals in a way like no either. Professionals will:

• Recognize that we no longer sell products and services, as buyers seek experiences and outcomes. • Democratize the data to decisions pathway to enable innovation. Data driven decisions are the norm and speed up the time to action. • Realize that B2B and B2C are dead. It’s a P2P and M2M world. • Focus on context as right time relevancy beats real time information overload. Data drives context and relevancy. • Shift from engagement to personalization at scale. We're making that move right now.

@rwang0

R "Ray" WangPrincipal Analyst & ChairmanConstellation Research

24 Love the one you're with

I very much hope that we will witness greater concentration and focus on the development of existing client relationships. The reality is that far too many organizations are devoting 80% of their resources on finding new opportunities and yet 80% of their business arrives from current clients/customers. Unsurprisingly, those same customers who took so long to first identify, then qualify, then close, are often left feeling extremely neglected, and eventually disappear - or more often, are "stolen" by a competitor who shows more interest in them. Let's make 2014 the year we "love the one we're with" rather than being so commercially promiscuous.

@topsalesworld

Jonathan FarringtonSenior PartnerJonathan Farrington & Associates

25 Content = data + art

In 2014, content will become even more important for sales and marketing, and the most effective (and, increasingly, innovative!) content will be inspired by customer insights based on real facts—supported by data—not just hunch, opinion, guesswork or “feel.”

But, at the same time, content can never be completely data-driven. In other words, data is part of the process, but it’s just a part because creative inspiration is equally important.

The best content tells a true story well. The ability to create a compelling story (via creative inspiration) based in real customer insight (via data) is the key.

I guess you could say that data + art are the killer strategy in 2014 and beyond.

@annhandley

AnnHandleyChief Content OfficerMarketingProfs

Lattice delivers data-driven business applications that help companies of all sizes market and sell more intelligently. Inspired by today’s consumer applications, Lattice brings every relevant buying signal into the world’s most comprehensive, cloud applications. With Lattice, companies stop guessing and start relying on data science in an application that anyone can use to find, prioritize and close their next customer. Its rapidly growing customer base, including Dell, SunTrust and VMware, use Lattice’s open and secure applications to generate 75% more pipeline, triple conversion rates, and double win rates. Lattice is backed by Sequoia Capital and NEA.

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