A very interesting day at the SiriusDecisions Summit with a focus on the conference theme: Measure, Align, Transform

Here are some bullets and an observation:

• Siemens PLM has reduced marketing expense and increased revenue working with Sirius on a number of things including marketing and sales alignment.
• Tony Jaros spoke about the new "critical task families": Seed, Create Demand, Enable (sales), Accelerate (pipeline), Nurture—the "sea change" is that marketing must move from only creating demand to owning pieces and parts of the entire waterfall (Inquiry, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Accepted Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Closed).
• Tony referred to the never-never land between SAL and SQL as Lead Purgatory and stated that this problem was a critical one to fix.
• Tony also spoke about the great nurture debate—who should nurture opportunities? He emphatically recommended that marketing should be the owner of this important task.
• By 2015, 75% of all leads will come from your company's website—according to SiriusDecisions.
• Leads should have a "born on" date and if they don't move to SQL by a certain date (60 days was suggested but then thought to be too long) they should go back to marketing for nurturing.

I spoke with SiriusDecisions' co-founder John Neeson during the evening reception (glass of wine in hand) and suggested that his firm put more and more responsibility on marketing (including knowledge management, document management for proposals and on demand collateral and market intelligence). His point is that marketing must move from throwing leads over the fence (creating demand) to an active role from the beginning to the end of the waterfall. I expressed my concern that until we hold sales accountable, no amount of investment is going to pay off. I added that today's marketing automation solutions are a faster, less expensive way to waste leads and that unless sales accountability issues were fixed, companies should expect the same results.

More tomorrow!

By Dan McDade