SiriusDecisions: Accelerating and Modernizing Organizational Performance

Overview | Selected Company Profiles

SiriusDecisions: Accelerating and Modernizing Organizational Performance

At a time of digital transformation, enterprises must understand high-performance disciplines and knowledge required to grow profitably in today’s competitive market. High-performing organizations often focus more on clear alignment of their marketing, sales, and product functions. They’ve also moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model and sell solutions rather than products to meet the demands of highly educated buyers who are looking for more than just product value.

SiriusDecisions was founded in 2001 and has been operating as a complete research and advisory services company. It works with high-profile business clients worldwide, such as Reuters, Bloomberg, IBM, and GE, to help them grow more profitably in their sales and marketing efforts. “To enhance operational excellence, we focus on collecting data and intelligence around high-performance organizations. We take this data and insights from many best practice organizations and develop proprietary models our clients can then leverage,” says Richard Eldh, managing Director and Co-Founder of SiriusDecisions. “By collecting budgetary data, analyzing performance metrics from marketing and sales companies, and studying different organizational designs and technology infrastructure, we can create a baseline of performance for our clients. We then compare and contrast like organizations to help our clients understand what best-in-class companies do differently and then help them apply our models to accelerate their growth.”

With an aim of transforming the sales, marketing, and product functions, the company relies on a growing body of systematically collected data and intelligence. “Our entire mission is to help b-to-b organizations understand how to allocate their resources—investments made in sales, marketing, and product functions—to generate high ROI through our advisory services,” states Eldh.

What differentiates SiriusDecisions is its extensive research and knowledge base, and how strictly it recruits Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The company doesn’t operate just as a consulting organization (these typically charge per hour). “We provide fact-based intelligence, not opinions,” says Eldh, “and our value proposition is acceleration.” It helps clients make better decisions through access to SMEs, available via a subscription-based model.

We provide fact-based intelligence, not opinions, and our value proposition is acceleration

A two-year agreement is renewable yearly and gives access to research, experts, and events.

The company organizes its research in three primary components: benchmarking, best practices, and operational models, and frameworks. It also offers consulting services, events and e-learning courses based on a curriculum developed over the last four years that is designed to increase the skill sets of digital marketers and is currently used by tens of thousands of people in the business world. The company’s flagship event, the SiriusDecisions Summit, will be held this year in Las Vegas on May 16–19. This event will have 3,000 attendees and is often referred to as the Woodstock of b-to-b sales and marketing.

According to Eldh, many organizations today grapple with sales productivity, and “whether in direct sales organizations or in channel partners, the investment is significant in terms of the expense line.” However, SiriusDecisions focuses on the three pillars of productivity: go-to-market alignment, demand creation, and sales efficiency. A realignment of marketing’s contribution to the pipeline can result in productivity increases ranging from 5 to 60 percent. This acceleration can take place for any of the five ways an organization can grow: entering a new market, offering new capabilities, generating new buyers, mergers and acquisitions, and increasing productivity. “All of our research is focused on strategies to enable these growth pillars to take place, and our clients grow two to seven times faster than their peers,” notes Eldh.

“We are a learning company,” he explains, “and with over 35,000 discussions a year on how to implement best practices in sales, marketing, and product, we now understand the whole business process and the steps to prescribe to accelerate and execute a growth strategy.” SiriusDecisions is moving from a reactive approach— listening to questions and finding solutions— to a proactive one, prescribing the key steps and business processes for building a high-performance organization.