SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall Models

I'm sure everyone reading this has looked at something in their home and said, "This could be better organized". It might be your closet. It might be your kitchen. Regardless, a systematic approach brings order to chaos. This is where SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall models come into play. The Demand Waterfall was designed in modules that define milestones in the demand generation and management process. The stages are bundled together in a way that aligns them with common go-to-market strategies.

SiriusDecisions published an e-book entitled, "The Intelligent Growth Playbook: The SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall® Family" that reviews the evolution of the Demand Waterfall. In this article, I'll break down the three versions for you at a high level. My next articles will go in-depth for each version.

Version 1: The Original Waterfall

This version applies to companies that are in the infancy of their demand generation development. It's a simple process that breaks the complex demand journey into five defined stages:

1. Inquiries
2. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
3. Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
4. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
5. Closed/Won Business

This version demonstrates a predictable flow and incorporates current conversion rates to show their effect on revenue. It also provides a common language for sales and marketing to align on and discuss strategy and outcomes.

Version 2: The Rearchitected Demand Waterfall

This version was updated in 2012. It has been enhanced to incorporate demand created by both marketing and sales. It also highlights the important roles teleprospecting and inbound marketing play in demand creation. This allows for greater granularity in the MQL stage of the process and addresses lead scoring for the automation qualified lead stage. As mentioned, teleprospecting plays a role in this more complex demand waterfall. Additional stages have also been added to provide additional insight for organizations that use internal and/or external teleservices to source and qualify leads.

Version 3: The Demand Unit Waterfall™

This version brings a new lens to the demand generation and managemet process. This last version is the most current. The methodology contained within takes the more complex technologies and buying processes into account. It also begins earlier in the demand generation journey, before direct contact has been made with the buyer, via the target demand and active demand stages. It has been updated to accommodate the rise in go-to-market strategies based on buyer needs, predictive analytics and intent monitoring, as well as the increased emphasis on account-based marketing.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, look for additional in-depth information on each of these three models in upcoming posts.

5 Strategies to Help You Master the Nonlinear Buyer's Journey

Ah, the bygone days when a customer saw an ad, went to your store, and purchased your product. In today's world, you might have searched for a product online or saw an influencer hawking it. It interested you enough to look into it and the next thing you know, Facebook is showing you ads for the selfsame product. Is Facebook reading your mind? Nope. It's just reading your data.

The marketing funnel is still relatively unchanged: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. The customer journey that is taken along that funnel is a mess. To make things even more challenging, the customer journey goes beyond social media, making its way onto televisions, radios, streaming and more. 60% of buyers don't want to speak with a sales rep and 50% have made their decision before they reach out to the sales rep. The customer journey to purchase now looks more like this:

Attribution is Key

So, how do you go about measuring the effectiveness of content and collateral that played a part in a sale? You tag it. Ok...it's not that simple. There are multiple tools out there for tagging such as Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Insight Tag, Facebook Pixel, cookies, or any number of platforms. The point is, you need to track the behavior of your target audience in order to analyze the data around what content had what impact in their decision. Without that info, you'll be building your campaigns and content in the dark.  

Marketing Automation

One way to identify a user's messy click journey is through a marketing automation platform. There are dozens out there: Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot. Take your pick. Only you will know which one is best for your business. With the right journey orchestration platform in place, you can unlock customer intent, understand the journey, and provide the right information at the right time. Personalization is key. Many buyers don't see the difference between vendors because they are receiving generic marketing content that isn't specifically geared to them.   

5 Strategies to Help You Succeed

The overarching sentiment from buyers is that the journey needs to be personalized and streamlined. In other words, make the buyer's journey more relevant and more efficient.

1. Create content for goals and roles
• Learn who's involved in your customers' buyer groups
• Understand what each type of buyer wants at each stage of the journey
• Create a multi-dimensional content plan that maps content to the personas
• Audit your current content for accuracy
• Track the content type performance
2. Deliver the right content to the right people at the right time
• Serve up content based on demographics
• Let AI learn and display the highest performing content for different personas
• Build campaigns based on content types being downloaded
• Test and optimize the content marketing strategy
3. Personalize your marketing programs
• Design integrated marketing programs with behavior-based triggers
• Integrate marketing data with intelligent content
• Customize the journey for different users
4. Nurture leads with automation
• Treat interactions as conversations
• Shift the conversation based on behavioral cues
• Respond dynamically to customer's changing behaviors
• Collaborate with sales to ensure seamless customer experience
5. Create a self-service online experience.
• Connect your digital properties
• Create easily digestible content
• Make sure buyers can find what they need when they need it
• Create a guided or interactive experience

Experiential Marketing: Upgrading to the 4Es

Like many of you, I was "raised" on the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. It's a concept that has been around since Neil Borden introduced it in the 1950s - and it worked very well until the rise of the digital age when the consumer changed.

Today's consumer is more savvy. They are getting their information from more locations. They have shorter attention spans and want interactive experiences. They want to feel special and that the messaging has been tailored to them. They are talking to one another all the time - sharing their thoughts and experiences with products and companies. The 4 Ps were developed during a different era and they aren't keeping up with this evolution. They put the control in the hands of the companies and their marketers when consumers have moved beyond that. They have seized control and changed the game.

Marketing Needs to Evolve.

Several years ago, Brian Fetherstonhaugh of Ogilvy & Mather proposed replacing the 4Ps with the 4Es, and yet marketers continue to cling to the 4Ps. Why? Because they are simple and no one likes change - and that's been ok, until now. Now marketers are in a place where there is even more competition for digital real estate and digital audience attention. If we don't change now, we'll be left behind with DVDs, Zunes, and other relics that didn't quite make the evolutionary grade.

What Are the 4 Es?

The 4Es still maintain the basic framework as defined by the 4 Ps, but take into consideration today's environment. We live in an magical and turbulent time where there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of marketing channels, content is free, and distrust of corporations and other powerful entities is on the rise. The 4 Es comprise:

• Experience
  Experience replaces product. How? Yes, we still need to sell the product, but first and foremost we need to understand the customer journey. How do they get from first contact to customer to brand advocate? If you consider the retail experience, they succeed not so much by what they sell as by how they sell it.

• Everyplace
  Place becomes Everyplace. It used to represent only the place where the product or service was distributed. The problem is that this places the power in the hands of the company - which is no longer true. The power is in the hands of the consumer and the "everyplace" concept forces marketers to undertake omnichannel marketing to get their products or services in front of the consumers in the places and on the platforms where they spend most of their time. Not only that, but we must get the offering in the right place, at the right time, in the right channel.

• Exchange
  Price evolves into Exchange. In today's world, the customer's time is worth as much, if not more, than their dollar and marketers need to understand and respect that. Today, it's not just about price in trade for goods; it is the entire value experience the consumer goes through. A great example of this is the freemium model SaaS companies have adopted. They get the customer interested through a free limited version with the hope of upgrading them to a full paid version.

• Evangelism
  Finally, Promotion turns into Evangelism. We all know the customer journey doesn't end when the dollar is handed over. Customers share their experiences with those they know and suddenly, with the advent of social, word-of-mouth is exponentially more powerful. WOM drives 13% of sales, 2/3 of which is offline. We need to find the passion and emotion in the brand and share that. Authenticity is king and this is what makes user-generated content so valuable. Apple has this "E" nailed.

Out With the Old. In With the New.

It's time for marketers to step away from the 4P marketing model and evolve to the 4E approach. Consumers want an experience and a relationship with their business partners. They want value in exchange for their time. In the end, like all of us, they want to be respected and spoken with - not pushed at and felt taken advantage of.