Author Archives: Megan Heuer
About the Author
Megan Heuer is Vice President and Group Director, Data-Driven Marketing, at SiriusDecisions. With more than 15 years of industry and professional services experience, she has worked both in – and for – organizations to build a wide variety of collaborative sales and marketing deliverables that drive systematic, predictable growth. Follow Megan on Twitter @megheuer
Not Fade Away: Post-Summit Motivation for Sustaining Change
- 11th June 2013
It’s been a few weeks now since the SiriusDecisions Summit in San Diego. That means you’ve gone back to a whole bunch of existing plans and priorities that probably don’t leave much room for adding “sweeping organizational change” to the list. The trouble is, it will take serious change to adopt some of the best new ideas shared at Summit. Right now, you are faced with a choice: Is it ok to go back to what you know, because it’s hard to do something new, or were you inspired enough by the stories of success to make real change? Here are some ways to think about bringing new ideas to life in your organization. With any luck, not to mention some perseverance, you’ll be sharing your own success stories at next year’s Summit.
Continue Reading....Account-Based Marketing: Not One-Size-Fits-All
- 28th May 2013
We are often asked what account-based marketing (ABM) should look like, but the answer depends on the company looking to do it. That’s because ABM isn’t one strategy. There are four different types to consider. Depending on a company’s size, go-to-market model and business goals, some or all of these may apply. ABM models are prioritized based on seller and customer needs. To define your organization’s ABM needs, review these four options.
Continue Reading....Why Marketers Must Do a Better Job of Investing According to Opportunity
- 14th May 2013
In working with companies on developing account-based marketing programs, I’ve seen marketing become its own worst enemy when it comes to the concept of aligning effort to the right opportunities. Nearly every company has some form of the 80/20 rule (approximately 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of customers), but too few define marketing requirements based on this reality and its implications. We worry way too much about pure volume of activities and dollars and way too little about context and understanding the right investment levels to reach our ideal prospects, support our best customers and support the sellers aligned to them. This is not to suggest that all marketing dollars must be allocated to supporting that 20 percent. In fact, sometimes that group requires less marketing help than other segments, from a program investment point of view. However, support for the largest and highest-potential accounts should be a starting point for investment, not an afterthought. Here’s a checklist to help you align resources to opportunity the account-based way.
Continue Reading....Account-Based Marketing: Four Operational Considerations
- 8th April 2013
Account-based marketing (ABM) requires that marketers deliver results against specific kinds of goals in a more defined universe. That means the infrastructure and process that’s in place for traditional, broad-based demand won’t work without modification. On the bright side, traditional models can serve as a starting point, and with some adjustments, both models can live in harmony. Here are four operational areas impacted by a shift to ABM.
Continue Reading....“We’re Not Making Our Number”: How Marketing Can Help Close a Gap
- 18th March 2013
“We’re not making our number.” These words strike fear into the heart of business leaders, but especially those in sales and marketing. Unfortunately, marketing’s response can be a disjointed and expensive set of tactics conceived in a rush to “do something.” Sometimes these actions are helpful, but often they end up driving a wedge between sales and marketing. So what can marketing do? Plenty! So take a deep breath, grab a cup of tea and read this list. And for goodness’ sake, don’t forget to build in a way to measure whether marketing’s extra work has paid off! Here are three areas to consider.
Continue Reading....You’re Not Done Yet: Adding Customer Roles to B-to-B Personas
- 4th March 2013
If you want to start an interesting debate with a bunch of b-to-b marketing, sales and product folks, ask them what they think of the saying, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.“ With all the time and attention spent on what happens before anybody buys, it’s no surprise that there’s often not much energy left to do a great job after a buyer becomes a customer. This view is changing as companies recognize that holding onto more of the business they have is a profitable growth strategy, and that marketing can be part of the solution. Personas, which many marketers are building or have built, are a perfect example of a tool that can easily be extended, with a few minor adjustments, to help post-purchase.
Continue Reading....It’s Not All About Buying: In Defense of Customer Marketing
- 12th February 2013
In all this talk about the funnel (or waterfall) being dead, I’ve noticed an unsettling misunderstanding: How is it acceptable to tack on a single stage to the buying cycle, call it “the customer lifecycle,” and expect behavior to change? If the anti-funnel camp believes the buying view is too linear to reflect that process, then an over-simplified view of what happens after buying ends makes it worse. Any attempt to collapse an even more complicated relationship into a one-size-fits-all box doesn’t reflect the customer’s reality, or the seller’s for that matter. Let’s try another approach to looking at the customer lifecycle. Let’s consider that a customer relationship is just that – a relationship. There are two parties involved: customer and company.
Continue Reading....Making Account-Based Marketing Scale (or Not)
- 10th January 2013
Marketing Riddle: When is account-based marketing (ABM) not account-based? Answer: When it becomes one-size-fits-all and has nothing to do with actual accounts. Many marketing organizations don’t set aside much in the way of dedicated resources for ABM. So it’s no surprise that many of these budget- and bandwidth-challenged marketing folks wonder how to get some scale out of their efforts. And by scale, I mean using the same amount of effort to reach more than one account. This can be a reasonable approach when done right. So how do you do it right? Here are a few suggestions to get started.
Continue Reading....Make 2013 the Year of Realistic Thinking
- 2nd January 2013
The desire to make everything simple is lulling us into believing that great marketing execution is easy. To put it simply, that’s just not reality. Here’s my proposal: Let’s make 2013 The Year of Realistic Thinking. Why? If I’ve learned one thing over the last few years at SiriusDecisions, it’s that there’s a burning desire among marketers to simplify everything. From lead scoring and measurement to the buyer’s journey, customer lifecycle and the messages created to support it all, a common mission is to reduce the complexity. This can often be a good thing; for example, it helps us make decisions faster or prevents us from over-engineering execution. But other times, the insistence on a simple story causes marketers to lose some of the nuances that can make a big difference.
Continue Reading....Six Thoughts From SiriusDecisions Summit Europe 2012
- 20th November 2012
What happens when you get more than 200 great pan-EMEA marketing and sales professionals together in one place? At last week’s third annual SiriusDecisions Europe Summit in London, with so much energy and experience in the room, there couldn’t help but be some valuable takeaways. Many thanks to those who attended in person and those who shared their experience in real time via Twitter, as well as those who followed the action and gave the event a wider audience. Here are some thoughts on highlights from the Summit.
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