Demand Gen Report

Lattice Engines announced the latest release of its analytics platform, Lattice salesPRISM, which combines social data with predictive capabilities enabled by Big Data.

The new release of Lattice salesPRISM expands the cloud-based platform’s use of social information. Company officials noted that salesPRISM continually monitors social data allowing for a comprehensive understanding of trending activities such as posts, job listings or firmographic data. By combining it with other Big Data and proprietary data sources and applying predictive analytics, salesPRISM directs sales and marketing to the leads with the greatest propensity to buy.

At last year’s SiriusDecisions Summit, the big news was the firm’s updated Demand Waterfall — a well-known and widely adopted approach to multi-channel lead sourcing. This year’s Summit, held last week in San Diego, focused on how B2B marketers have (or in some cases have not) adopted the updated Demand Waterfall.

At the same time, the Summit also offered an interesting look at how changing technology and new content trends continue to rewrite the rules of the B2B marketing game.

B2B marketers have been on a content binge of sorts over the past few years, developing all types of campaigns in a variety of formats to bolster their lead generation efforts. But in the past six months or so, observers say that B2B marketers are realizing that for content to truly resonate, they need to make an even more vigorous effort to understand their buyers, and hence the renewed focus on buyer personas.

“Everyone today is a publisher, and B2B marketers are recognizing that the pressure to publish more targeted and relevant content is growing at a rapid pace right now,” said Adele Revella, President of Buyer Persona Institute. “Marketers are driven to produce assets. Developing buyer personas is a new skill for many marketers that requires a cultural shift.”

EPM Live, a cloud-based work management and project portfolio management platform, has released a Salesform.com app. The application integrates CRM capabilities with EPM Live’s existing software that will help streamline business processes and increase ROI, according to company officials.

Individuals can customize the app to personal preferences and communicate with other corporate teams through the Salesforce.com cloud. All critical data that needs to be shared is centralized in the Salesforce.com database, allowing all users in the cloud to view progress and identify potential problems in real-time. Data that can be shared in the cloud include milestones, budget costs, billing and status information.

When sales and marketing fail to collaborate, it has a big impact on the bottom line. That was one of the key messages from the Sales Enablement Strategies panel at the B2B Content2Conversion event.

Moderator Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, told the audience that poor sales-marketing alignment costs $14 million a year at a $1 billion firm. “For every 650 leads, one deal is closed in 19 months and sales cycle times have increased by 10% over the past three years, from five months in 2010 to 5.4 months in 2012,” he said, citing figures from Gartner, IDC, Alinean and DiscoverOrg.