This was posted on Oracle’s Blog this past week.  Reposting if you missed it.

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Today’s post comes courtesy of Jon Russo, founder of B2B Fusion, an agency that focuses exclusively on modernizing old demand generation practices to new to drive more revenue for clients like Thomson Reuters, Level(3) Communications, and Blackboard, among others. Jon serves on the Board of Directors for MOCCA, the leading enterprise association for Marketing Operations professionals. Prior to founding B2B Fusion, Jon held global CMO roles for 10 years in private and public technology companies in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Luxembourg.

This week in Orlando, 2,000 attendees had the opportunity to participate in the SiriusDecisions Summit, the granddaddy conference for the B2B marketing industry. Sirius analysts presented eight new frameworks and enterprise clients shared success stories, each group illustrating paths toward transformational growth for 2014 and beyond.

So what are the new themes from enterprises this year versus the seven prior conference years that I’ve attended?  Here are three new 2014 themes that emerged from the enterprise discussions:

1. Think globally, act locally. Enterprise presenters took a global planning approach to their demand planning versus more North America centric presenters of years past, possibly because companies see more growth in markets outside of North America. Polycom CMO Jim Kruger leveraged regional team presenters by sharing a global success story of installing an inquiry to opportunity process. Joseph Puthussery, Vice President of Demand Generation for Cisco, invested four years in architecting and building a global demand center, began his planning efforts in London, and leveraged successes within each global theater of operation.  Joseph previously ran APAC marketing efforts for Cisco from Singapore and emphasized how important it was to get outside of headquarters to think through architecting a demand center.

2. Data is foundational to true business insights. Pete Koliopoulos, Vice President of Marketing for Arrow Electronics, provided an incredibly thoughtful approach to Arrow’s data governance strategy to help elevate marketing to a true business partner. He presented screenshots of a whitespace report with product penetration by channel account, which enabled sales and marketing to drive campaign strategies to attack the whitespace. Arrow cleansed its internal owned data, appended external DUNs hierarchy data, and applied proper data governance to get to the dashboard destination.  Data strategy is often overlooked in other enterprises as executives overlook the impact data strategy has on sales & marketing productivity and business insights.

3. Marketing & Sales pivot toward a predictable science versus pure art. CMO Jim Bell of Jaspersoft and Vice President of Demand Marketing Meagen Eisenberg of Docusign proved how SaaS marketing has become more predictable than that of years past. SaaS companies have a clear advantage over other older enterprise companies as SaaS typically target new markets, deploy state of the art sales/marketing tools to attack those markets, and pinpoint customer retention trends in cohort clusters.

Jim illustrated how in a smaller organization, he doubled the inquiry to close rate from his baseline by installing rigor around funnel definition and discipline around the process.

Meagen explained how she leveraged intelligence from Docusign’s 90 nurture tracks, 20+ personas, and analytic/data vendors like Lattice Engines and Mintigo. Scott Barmmer, Meagen’s sales counterpart, commented how marketing brings an informed point of view to the conversation, one that has evolved and interpreted versus just presenting data. This interpretation leads to greater trust in the evolving sales and marketing relationship.

It was an exciting 2014 conference filled with another year of terrific networking and great enterprise audience growth from years past!  What can we expect in 2015 and beyond?  None of the presenters focused much energy on the success or impact of mobile initiatives; perhaps mobility will be an emerging theme in 2015.