PREDICTIONS

2015How will marketing and sales professionals become more data-driven in 2015?

Data and analytics are no longer optional. Companies are looking to turn information into action to gain that extra edge over the competition. In 2014, we saw the rise of predictive analytics, with analyst firms such as Forrester, Gartner and SiriusDecisions releasing new reports on the topic. It’s for more than just the early adopters. Marketing and sales professionals are looking for ways to uncover context and insight when it comes to understanding the buyer’s journey.

WHAT’S NEXT?WE BROUGHT TOGETHER OVER 25 THOUGHT LEADERS FROM SIRIUSDECISIONS, LINKEDIN, MARKETO AND MORE, TO GATHER PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT YEAR. WE ASKED THEM ONE QUESTION:

How will marketing and sales professionals become more data-driven in 2015?

Here’s to a great year! - The Lattice Team

1 Fewer wrong turns, greater profitabilty with analytics

It's important to understand that we're not simply acquir-ing a new set of disparate tools or even a set that works well together. This is the beginning of customer science because when you collect data, analyze it, and come up with hard numbers about what works, that's science. Science is about as far from gut feel as you can get and this represents a new era in front-office business. Businesses that use scientific approaches will discover that they take fewer wrong turns and achieve greater profitability. That said, big data and analytics are no longer optional.

@denispombriant

Denis PombriantManaging Principal,Beagle Research Group, LLC

@cahidalgo

Carlos HidalgoCEO, ANNUITAS

My hope is that in the coming year we will see context applied to the vast amounts of data. Many organiza-tions are awash in more data than ever before, but they are not performing the analysis with any context and therefore it is having little impact. The key to ensuring you are getting value from your data is understanding the "what" behind it. Context will be the key focus for data-driven marketers in 2015.

The "what" behind the data2

@megheuer

Megan HeuerVice President and Group Director, Data-Driven Marketing, SiriusDecisions

In 2015, marketing has no excuse not to be insight-led and technology-enabled. Really. The information we need about our buyers and customers is all around us and the tools to make use of it in a scalable way are ready, too. This year, smart marketers will plan better by using data to define where their best opportunities are in actual accounts and the buying centers in them, and not just look at general market segments. They will use this knowledge to align marketing execution (online and offline) to where growth is and not waste time on the wrong things. Better data and easier analysis of it will put a stop to artificial last-touch tactic attribution. Marketers will embrace the complexity of the buyer's journey and customer lifecycle, not persist in trying to oversimplify them. Technology that allows responsiveness to real-time cues will contribute to better customer and buyer experiences. It's going to be a great year.

Insight-led and technology-enabled3

@jonmiller

Jon MillerVP Marketing, Marketo

In 2015, companies will use more account-based marketing (ABM) to target specific individuals at specific companies. This will be true for prospects as well as existing customers. Increased usage of ABM will drive a change in the metrics used by marketers; in particular there will be a shift away from volume-based metrics (such as number of leads) towards quality, such as depth of engagement. More broadly, this trend will drive a rethinking of the traditional revenue funnel as well as the roles of sales and marketing at each stage of the customer journey.

A shift away from volume-based metrics4

In 2015, the biggest transformation that we will experience is embracing software that gets us closer to the consumer. Forrester says that we are entering the age of the customer and I couldn't agree more. Much of the customer experi-ence will depend on digital causing every company to be a software company. The more data-driven and software-focused future will certainly impact how companies manage software.

@TheLarryWeber

Larry WeberCEO, Racepoint Global

Entering the age of the customer5

@apapillaud

Alexandre PapillaudDirector Global Demand Center, McAfee

6 Adding a mix of elements to help score their prospects

As marketers, we already have a lot of data around our contacts – who they are, what they purchased, content they viewed, and so on. This helps us understand buyer behavior a little bit, but we are missing out on a lot of data and insight that is external to what we currently know. We also are in the dark about our contacts out-side of our known universe. In 2015, marketers will start adding in a mix of other elements to help score their prospects on all signs of engagement or interest. Media vendors will move towards opening up their data ware-houses to vendors for increased insights.

@b2bcmo

Jon RussoFounder,B2B Fusion

Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, recently said, ‘Data is the key competitive differentiator in today’s business environment.’ I believe he is right. Data is the megastar in 2015 and enterprises will generate new busi-ness, optimize their current state of data, and close more deals as a result of the improvement in data quality.Data is not a ‘balance sheet’ item so historically was overlooked by non-marketing executives until this point. Executives now assign company initiatives to improve data as they realize the direct correlation of the effec-tiveness of the inquiry to close conversion process to that of the quality of data in their customer relation-ship management and marketing automation databases.

Data is the megastar in 20157

CMO’s career credibility relies heavily on the data quality when reporting on their impact to the business and they too will invest more cycles in improving the current state of their data.From this point, companies will begin to experiment with the predictability models. SaaS-based enterprises with large volumes of inquiries and with client usage data will continue to be earlier adopters of such predictive technol-ogy. SaaS companies will sort out the most probable to deal close or most probable to upgrade, with other companies eventually following suit.

@BrennerMichael

Michael BrennerHead of Strategy, NewsCred

It all starts with culture. In 2015, CMOs will begin to instill a culture focused on customers. Budgets will shift away from paid promotion and into brand content. We will see a culture of content emerge. Chief content officers will become a real thing, with budgets and authority to drive strategic content programs. We'll move beyond quantity + quality, to creating the right content for the right person in the right place and time. Content gets personal as people-centric marketing takes over.

A culture of "content"8

@semseoexpert

Nima Asrar HaghighiDirector of Digital Marketing & Analytics, MuleSoft Inc.

B2B marketers will scale their reach and operations by• Leveraging Programmatic media buying via real-time buying and ad exchanges,• Enhancing their nurturing utilizing re-targeting technologies and dynamic creative optimization, and • Increasing sales efficiency by deploying predictive analytics.

Programmatic marketing takes the front seat9

@demandgendave

David LewisCEO,DemandGen

With digital now as the primary channel for engaging prospects and clients, the mid-point of our decade will give rise to the "data scientist" as a formal role of the modern marketing organization. Larger enterprises will be the first to budget and staff the role and many will leverage agencies to provide this function as it requires tremendous expertise in data capture, systems, analysis, interpretation, and utilization. This marketing data geek will be a highly sought after and their expertise and out-puts will help transform how sales and marketing operate.The role is in many ways analogous to the scene in the Matrix where “Tank” would look at a monitor displaying

The emerging role of the "data scientist"10

a green binary waterfall and interpret what was hap-pening. He could see the right path, identify risks, and the personas using what seemed like his super powers. The data scientist will leverage big data, technology, and process to help marketing teams with everything from targeting, segmentation, research, reporting, prediction and more.

@MarkBLevinson

Mark LevinsonService Director, Sales Operations Strategy, SiriusDecisions

As we look forward into 2015, B2B sales organizations will be shifting from single points of data-driven insight to correlated data analysis that will provide forward-look-ing sales intelligence. This transformation is being driven by the need to provide sales reps with real-time data about leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities. SiriusDecisions anticipated this transition with our intro-duction of the Dynamic Guided Selling concept during our 2014 Summit. As buyer behavior continues to be-come harder to predict, which slows the velocity of op-portunities, sales reps need real-time data to stay agile and aligned to their buyers. Sales operations has become progressively more proficient in the measurements nec-essary to track the pipeline, but much of this measure-

A much more strategic approach to sales analytics11

ment is still based on lagging indicators. As we enter 2015, we will see a much more strategic approach to sales analytics, requiring sales operations to take the insight from measurements and correlate those data elements to deliver real-time, forward-looking sales intelligence.

Welcome to the age of sales science!

Start now to get ahead in 2016 12Doing the same is not the formula for growth in 2015. Marketers must be comfortable with experimenting and testing of new technologies and tactics. Now is the time for new ideas, processes and tools. Analytics can really tie all your marketing investments together. Without that, you will be flying blind. Successful organizations will set themselves up for continuous learning and improving. They will take a deep dive into their past programs to fully understand how they performed — and then will make changes based on that analysis. Whether it's optimiz-ing SEM, dropping poor-performing events, or improving a nurture program, the focus will be on stronger performance. Marketers have to also look at how their investments are scaling. The most successful marketers will embrace analytics and find strong results. Marketers who ignore this in 2015 will realize that they are a few years behind come 2016.

@bkardon

Brian KardonCMO,Lattice Engines

@funnelholic

Craig RosenbergChief Analyst,TOPO

13 There are two types of marketers for 2015

Marketers who have built a substantial technology platform that is managing high volumes of lead flow. The natural progression for them will be predictive analytics. Many so-phisticated marketers have realized that engagement scoring is only one piece of the puzzle and not necessarily predictive. They have to be able to better identify the right people and companies to queue up for sales. Those people may not be "looking at the pricing page" or downloading ebooks.Marketers who need to get their technology machines hum-ming. They still need time before they jump into predictive. Should they wait to jump into predictive? Not necessarily, but it makes sense to build the foundation first and layer predictive analytics on top.

@jtrondeau

Justin RondeauData-Driven Marketing Evangelist

There is no doubt in my mind that personalization via advanced segments and dynamic insertions will be the most coveted digital marketing technique. Without a data-driven culture, your personalization efforts are going to fail. Any company who hasn’t adopted a data-driven mind set, will be left behind as their competitors turn their website into one of their best sales assets rather than a non-converting billboard. Companies are going to look at how customers behave within different segments, and in real-time provide a personalized experience to boost the user’s experience and increase conversions. The goal is to make the experience as close to a 1-1 relationship as possible. Companies who use one of the many emerging advanced personalization tools coupled with predictive analytics will undoubtedly see their business booming in 2015.

Personalization 14

@heinzmarketing

Matt HeinzPresident, Heinz Marketing Inc.

Up until now, gut-driven decisions and data-driven cam-paigns have existed separately. The sales "cowboys" haven't been too interested in over-analyzing decisions, and the math marketers think the "old school" sales & marketing pros are just winging it.I believe in 2015, those worlds will finally merge. We'll have more educated guesses validated and prioritized by data, and we'll have more math marketers working between the spreadsheet cells to identify new focus areas and advances in their results.I can't wait!

More educated guesses validated and prioritized by data15

@Megan_Marie_T

Megan TonziDirector of Marketing,QuotaFactory

I believe that 2015 will be an interesting year due to in- creased cohesion between departments and an abundance of integration between systems and processes within those departments. I'm starting to see a transition from 'Sales' and 'Marketing' departments to a grouped 'Sales and Marketing' department. I'm seeing indicators that a wave of integrated processes between sales and marketing will ultimately result in one large, streamlined process comprised of multiple differentiated roles within. Also, the technological advancements in sales and marketing programs may trickle down to the rest of the organization to provide insights into prospect and customer behaviors. As a result, I see marketing professionals in companies having a larger buy-in regarding technology — even technology that is not specific to marketing functions.

Merging "sales and marketing"16

Understanding customers 17@BrianVellmure

Brian VellmurePrincipal, Initium LLC / Innovantage

In 2015, we'll take another transformative step towards enabling deeper understanding about customers at the individual level, in addition to what's happening in aggregate. Most companies have already realized that today's challenge is not in gathering data — it's deriving meaning from it. While people and things continue to be instrumented to gather and store more granular data, the challenge (and opportunity) will continue to grow. The skills required to make sense of the data are still largely manual, but we'll see more of this burden passed on to more complex and intelligent algorithms.

The surfacing of data-derived insights, timely prompts for action, combined with intelligent recommendations will help marketers, sales (and service/support) personnel present more relevant offers and content in the path of their customers and prospects. We'll also see a growing disparity between the organizations who are leveraging these emerging capabilities and those who are not.

@hjsewell

Howard J. SewellPresident, Spear Marketing Group

I see 2015 as the tipping point when B2B marketers start measuring campaigns based on the metrics that matter — namely pipeline contribution and ROI. So many companies continue to focus on click rate and cost per lead, at a time when there are now solutions that make the process of measuring ROI easier and more accurate than ever. It’s mind boggling that so much money is invested in B2B marketing without any concept for the true return on that investment. Measuring ROI not only makes B2B marketing more efficient, it has the potential to radically change a company’s demand generation mix once they realize which programs, channels, offers, etc. are really working, not just driving clicks.

Measuring campaigns based on the metrics that matter18

@paulalves63

Paul Alves CEO, AG Salesworks

While marketing professionals have had their eye on data for a long time, the data and tools available today are far more robust than ever. Marketers now have access to detailed, real-time data providing deep insight into their customers and prospects. They have always had good ideas as to the what and the when, but more than ever before, they have insight into the why. Social media, electronic surveys & CRM just to name a few sources of rich data, when utilized properly can enable marketers to get to the all important why. Why customers purchased and why they continue on as a cus-tomer, or in the worst case why they are no longer a customer. Smart salespeople will team up with marketers to gather and analyze data with a keen eye on the why. Understanding the what, where, how, when are all important, however those sales and marketing teams that leverage data to understand the why will crush the competition.

Understand the "why" and crush the competition 19

@draab

David RaabPrincipal, Raab Associates

2015 will be the year that consumers fight back concerning content overload. They will become more aggressive about screening messages and more selective in which devices they use. Mobile will become the more dominant content consumption platform, which will further limit the size of messages that marketers can reliably deliver. As a result, marketers will need to work even harder to create short messages that deliver real value, either in terms of information or entertainment. The messages will also have to be more carefully crafted to encourage further engagement on more expansive platforms such as the desktop or TV screen. Channel owners like Facebook, Google and Amazon will limit the amount of

Understanding customers at the individual level 20

commercial traffic they deliver and drive up prices as they decrease supply. Paradoxically, broadcast media will become more important as one of the few remaining ways to reach broad audiences without paying for detailed information about specific individuals or segments. Marketers will become more skilled at measuring the incremental impact of individual messages and channels, further helping them to allocate their funds between mass and targeted media.We'll also see a growing disparity between the organizations who are leveraging these emerging capabilities and those who are not.

@chriscrandell

Christine CrandellChief Experience Officer, New Business Strategies

2015 will be the tipping point in what it means for marketing and sales to be data-driven. We'll start to see a shift towards value-chain based, environ-mental pattern analysis. Sophisticated marketers and sales teams will move beyond analytics designed to improve specific decisions. They are looking to spot and decipher underlying macro and micro patterns of behavior in markets, customers, partners, processes and employees. Data-driven technology will evolve to help individuals, teams and companies see the bigger picture in actionable ways that haven't been possible to date.This is part of a larger multi-year trend of moving away from a reductionist view of the world to an emergent one. Instead

How environments and cues trigger behavior 21

of a sum of all the parts to explain behavior, emergent theory focuses on how environments and cues trigger behavior. Emergent behavior pattern analysis does a much better job of explaining the "why" by linking multiple cross-dimensional drivers and factors. Marketers will move beyond analyzing event-based behavior and begin to understand swarming, which is how markets really behave. The challenge is — are marketers' ready to step up their skillsets to fully leverage these new data-driven insights?

@BrittonManasco

Britton ManascoPrincipal, Visible Impact

Sales leaders are increasingly hungry for data to drive predictable growth strategies. That’s one reason field sales activities are now being scrutinized like never before while inside sales organizations are experiencing explosive growth. The difference? Field sales largely takes place “off the grid” (hidden from view), while inside sales largely happens “on the grid” (where everyone sees what’s going on). The data that’s generated is used to analyze behavior, forecast outcomes, and make performance-driving, course corrections. For this reason, expect an increasing amount of selling activity to be made trackable and observable. While in-person, face-to-face meetings remain critical in many industries, the very fact that they happen off the grid helps explain why relatively fewer resources are now devoted to conventional field selling.

Getting on the grid 22

This isn't to say that field sales is in irretrievable decline — merely that the activities and interactions associated with it must become more visible from a management, coaching and improvement perspective. Indeed, you can expect more and more sales conversations conducted by field sales professionals to involve a phone, a shared screen, and other digital interaction technologies. That's good news. They will not only make more of their limited time, they'll produce valuable data -- the resource you need to amplify insight, learning and growth.

A steady stream of engagement to keep the relationship budding 23

@AmandaF_Batista

Amanda Batista Content Marketing Manager, Oracle Marketing Cloud

At Oracle Marketing Cloud, our content and demand gen teams will continue to ramp up our collaborative activity in 2015. We don’t subscribe to the idea of delivering “random acts of content”. In a longer sales cycle, what our organization faces, you need a steady stream of engagement to keep the relationship budding, and build interest momentum. We leverage data to uncover performance and content effectiveness by channel. This strategy has allowed us to enforce a continuity of content delivery for prospects, and has helped us refine our messaging to also be relevant to existing customers.

@annekeseley

Anneke SeleyCEO, Reality Works Group

In 2015 we will see continued investments in virtual selling. This is a prediction based on data—the best kind. Our recently-completed research shows that 40% of companies over $1B are shifting headcount from the field to inside sales. Smaller com-panies under $100M already generate more than 50% of rev-enues without traditional face-to-face selling. (Source: Reality Works Group and ZS Associates 2014 Inside Sales Survey.)Forward-thinking, best-performing companies are betting on the data-driven, measurable, predictable sales and profit growth they see from virtual or remote selling approaches, not just in inside sales but also in field sales. In some companies, the distinction between inside and field sales is blurring, given the number of buyers that are comfortable

Virtual selling 24

with or even prefer the convenience and instant availability of phone and online communication and decision-making, enabled by data and technology. Something else to watch in 2015: some companies are making moves to rebrand inside sales to remove outdated preconceived notions about the function and its capabilities.

@fortune_a

Fortune AlexanderMarketing Evangelist, Spiceworks

IT buyers are always moving through a purchase process in one way or another. It’s called the customer journey. They’re either identifying their needs, researching their options, buying, deploying, using or replacing products and services. So how can savvy marketers influence buyers on their jour-ney in 2015? It’s called contextual marketing, and it will be the dominant B2B marketing theme next year. Many mar-keters will talk about it, but few will do it well.Here are three ways to excel at contextual marketing in 2015:1) Build customer relationships to gain trust & influence.

Don’t waste buyers’ time with irrelevant marketing messages. Invest the time and effort to understand their needs first. Vertical social networks such as Spiceworks are a great place to get the dialogue started.

Contextual marketing in 2015 25

2) Pinpoint the customer’s location on his journey and help him along the way. Once you understand what problem the customer is trying to solve, you’ll be able to engage with the right content at his critical “moment of need”.

3) Be in it for the long term. Many B2B marketers think the job is done once they pass the lead to Sales. This is a big mistake. Smart marketers solidify customer relationships in the “post-purchase” phase to build loyalty and advocacy. Because the journey never ends, existing customers will be passing through the “buy” phase again soon, and when they do, you’ll be there to help them.

@jasonmillerca

Jason MillerSr. Content Marketing Manager, LinkedIn

My prediction last year was that Marketing Automation would finally go mainstream and while I think that’s happened to some extent, there’s still a ways to go. So this time I will take it a step further and predict that marketers will increas-ingly leverage big data from multi-channel customer touch points to drive their marketing automation strategy. Modern marketers have more data available at their fingertips than ever before in history and marketing automation will allow them to manage that data into actionable insights and scale their campaigns. 2015 should be the year where big data be-comes less of an opening act and more of a featured headliner when it comes to marketing automation solutions.

Big data becomes an "opening act" 26

@gerhard20

Gerhard GschwandtnerCEO, Selling Power

2015 will be a year where we'll have more of everything. More data, more insights, more predictive analytics, but also more doubt in our capacity to grow. Technology continues to im-prove year over year, but people and their leaders don't im-prove at the same rate. In 2015 we'll see technology accelerate the disruption of middle-class jobs. Unless we match the speed of innovation with an accelerated solution for improving hu-man performance we'll risk high unemployment.

More data, more insights, more predictive analytics 27

Transforming data into action 28In 2015, marketers will realize that science has taken the lead. To move the needle, marketing and sales professionals will focus on using data and analytics to make better decisions that help make their customers more successful. They will add a level of performance transparency, previ-ously unachievable. With the amount of prospect and customer information available today, each step of the marketing and sales process will become more data-driven and the need for guessing will finally be eliminated. It is more than just having more access to information. Successful companies must have a plan in place to see impactful results.

@shashiSF

Shashi UpadhyayCEO, Lattice Engines

More data, more insights, more predictive analytics 29

The gap between those who engage in digital transformation and those who wait will widen. With 52% of the Fortune 500 merged, acquired, bankrupt or fallen of the list since 2000, a digital divide widens. The top 3 companies in every catego-ry lead their market with 43 to 71% of the market share and 48 to 83% of the profits. Disrupt or be massively disrupted.

@rwang0

R WangConstellation Research, Principal

Reducing friction 302015 will be the year that sales team look to reduce friction. World-class sales organizations will strive to reduce friction between themselves and their customers, making it easier to do business with them. World-class sales teams will also strive to reduce friction for their own salespeople in managing their day-to-day processes.

@markroberge

Mark RobergeChief Revenue Officer, HubSpot

Lattice is pioneering the predictive applications market for marketing

and sales. Lattice helps companies grow revenue across the entire

customer lifecycle with data-driven marketing and sales applications

that make complex data science easy to use. By combining thousands

of buying signals with advanced predictive analytics in a suite of secure

cloud applications, Lattice helps companies of all sizes including Citrix,

DocuSign, Inc., HireVue and SunTrust Bank to increase conversion rates

by more than three times. Lattice is backed by NEA and Sequoia Capital

with headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

About Lattice