Diving into the new SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall

SiriusDecisions since around the time when Rich Eldh and John Neeson gave birth to the company. I’ve found their frameworks especially useful in helping focus my teams’ actions and report on the value of our contributions. Perhaps you’ve found the same. For many years, the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall has been used as the standard framework for managing demand generation processes. The beauty of the original Demand Waterfall was its clarity and simplicity. Built as a useful guide, it was never meant to become “the law.” Yet over the past few years, many marketers have found themselves ensnared by a rigid, faithful type of application. From helpful leading indicators, we’ve created rigid sets of KPIs that lock us into a way of doing things and shape how we “see” our world. A host of short-sighted KPIs are now constraining our ability to innovate. At worst, they’re locking us into counterproductive behaviors that actually hurt our ROI. I’m talking here about KPIs that drive up volumes even as they drive down quality; about filters that ignore tangible evidence of demand in favor of titles and contacts at accounts that aren’t in the market at all. The newly announced SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall concept contains major insights that could open the door to a new wave of progress. These observations should help keep many of us from going over the falls in a barrel crafted of our own short-sightedness.