• SiriusDecisions has identified six issues that portfolio leaders should consider in their 2019 planning
  • A renewed focus on audience-centricity is required as organizations search for ways to drive innovation and expansion
  • Portfolio marketers are responsible for creating unified go-to-market strategies that are based on buyers and their needs

The shift to audience-centric go-to-market strategies has become a high priority for CMOs and their marketing organizations in the last few years. An audience-centric organization focuses marketing efforts on its target buyers and their needs, not on pushing product features and capabilities. Moving to more audience-focused go-to-market strategies drives better productivity, results and revenue growth. Below are six ways portfolio marketers can continue the audience focus and set the scene for greater success in 2019:

  • this year i will notebook on wood surfaceCreate a cohesive go-to-market strategy. Many organizations struggle to bring offerings to market in an orchestrated way for their target personas, instead bombarding them with multiple campaigns, content and conversations coming from various products, solutions or services. Start by prioritizing your target buyers and establishing their buyer needs, then map your offerings to each need for more cohesive messaging, content and campaigns.
  • Understand all individuals in the buying decision. How many B2B buying decisions involve just one individual? Not very many. If you understand the role each individual buyer plays in the decision process (i.e. champion, decisionmaker, influencer or ratifier) and when and how each buyer engages in the buying process, you can help your marketing partners create more effective programs and content to accelerate opportunities in the pipeline.
  • Customize your messaging to drive account-based marketing (ABM). ABM approaches can create multiple land-and-expand opportunities, so account teams need support from portfolio marketers to understand new personas and create compelling messaging for them. Develop a targeted list of personas across accounts and leverage new and existing persona insights to develop needs-based messaging that will help deliver the cross-sell and upsell results account teams are looking for.
  • Align executives and stakeholders for launches. B2B launches sometimes take on a life of their own as executive, sales, business, product and marketing teams each have a different perspective and understanding of the launch – often causing incorrect positioning, wrong dates or misaligned target audiences. To help organizations align all stakeholders, we’ve created a launch plan on a page that communicates the higher-level business elements of a launch so that everyone understands the launch objectives and target audiences, as well as key tactics and timing.
  • Segment your internal audience by creating sales personas. Think of sales as another audience portfolio marketers must engage for adoption. Instead of providing the same training, tools and content to all the different sales roles (e.g. field sales, inside sales, channel resellers), treat these seller personas like buyer personas – by understanding and catering to their needs.
  • Adopt or adapt to agile practices. While agile methodologies have taken the development world by storm, agile practices can also work in marketing and even portfolio marketing. Working closely with product management and other teams, portfolio marketers can create cross-functional scrum teams for iterative sprints to gain market, buyer and competitive insights or to try out messaging and content before it’s finalized.

Portfolio marketers can make large impacts in 2019 by becoming more audience-centric throughout the go-to-market process – from strategy to sales enablement – and setting the scene for greater productivity and market results. For further insights, download a copy of SiriusDecisions’ Portfolio Marketing: Planning Assumptions 2019.

SiriusDecisions Resources:

Conducting Portfolio Mapping Based on Buyer Need (client access)

Capturing Buying Group Dynamics in the Buying Decision Process (client access)

The SiriusDecisions Launch-Plan-on-a-Page Template (client access)

The SiriusDecisions Sales Persona Framework (client access)

Aligning Portfolio Marketing With Agile Product Development (client access)