The Only SiriusDecisions Summit Recap You’ll Need

Over 2,000 sales, marketing, and product leaders swarmed Orlando for the annual SiriusDecisions Summit to participate in what has quickly become the go-to event for keeping up with the latest B2B growth strategies. Not to mention a place to achieve endless “ah-ha” nirvana when all of your scattered thoughts are seemingly effortlessly systematized into one of SiriusDecisions’ exhaustive models — like the rearchitected demand waterfall.

As with any event that draws marketers, you can expect countless blog posts recapping the event. If you didn’t get a chance to attend in person, these posts are a great way to hear attendees’ most important takeaways. Or if you did attend, the hope is this can be a way to help organize what you learned and surface new ideas from other attendees.

Whether you were able to attend this year’s SiriusDecisions Summit or not, here’s a compilation resources from the most influential attendees, minus the obvious vendor pitches:

Best Followup from the 2014 SiriusDecisions Summit

• Twitter stream of #SDSummit – All, or Twitter’s top picks.
• Jim Hopkins from DemandBase’s 5 Highlights from SiriusDecisions Summit 2014
• Lattice’s Amanda Maksymiw’s Top Influencer Marketing Examples From #SDSummit
• FierceCMO’s Drew Woolley’s SiriusDecisions Summit 2014 Coverage
• Vidyard’s Tyler Lessard’s 5 Key Marketing Takeaways from SiriusDecisions Summit 2014
• Annuitas’ Jennifer Harmel’s “From SiriusDecisions Summit 2014”
• Jon Russo at B2B Fusion’s 3 Enterprise Takeaways from SiriusDecisions Summit on the Eloqua blog
• Heinz Marketing’s 10 Key Takeaways from the 2014 SiriusDecisions Summit
• 50 Marketing Automation Trends, Tips and Facts from the 2014 SiriusDecisions Summit from John Common at Intelligent Demand
• Instragram feed of #SDSummit

Don’t have time to read all of them? Or not sure where to start? We analyzed these posts, reactions on Twitter, and other follow-up from the event to find two of the most talked-about themes of the event:

SiriusDecisions Summit Recap: Most Influential Themes

1) Transformational Change

According to SiriusDecisions’ 2014 B-to-B Confidence Index Study, transformational change is one of the top concerns for B2B this year. Malcolm Gladwell provided insight into how entire industries have forged transformation in his keynote session on the conference’s first day, and SiriusDecisions’ Tony Jaros translated this into an actionable model for gauging whether your companies’ transformation initiative is focused on needle-moving actions. For more on this theme, see FierceCMO’s recap: Three Steps to Promoting Change at B-to-B Companies.

2) Intelligent Growth

SiriusDecisions proved that not all growth is positive. Co-founder and managing director John Neeson encouraged B2B leaders to focus on intelligent growth in five focus areas:

• New Markets
• New Buyers
• New Offerings
• Acquisitions
• Productivity Gains

The theme of intelligent growth carried over into in a session led by SiriusDecisions analysts Jay Famico and Jennifer Horton discussing the importance of capacity planning for your demand creation efforts — why marketing, sales, and tele functions need to be aligned in planning for demand to not only avoid revenue shortfalls before it’s too late, but to plan for the impact of demand generation tactics on your tele and sales resources.

Ex: Hitting 100% of all of your year’s MQL goal in the last quarter of the year would lead to growth, but it wouldn’t lead to intelligent growth. You’d overload your reps and your leads wouldn’t close in time to impact the current year’s bookings. For more on the intelligent growth theme, see DemandBase’s 5 Highlights from the SiriusDecisions Summit.

Did you attend the SiriusDecisions Summit? What were your key takeaways?

Photo by: Bill Selak