My thoughts on the Inaugural Sirius Decisions Technology Exchange

I’ve worked with the folks at Sirius Decisions for a number of years now, first as a partner when I was on the consulting side helping to implement Marketing Automation and CRM solutions, and later as a client at Citrix and now at New Relic. Their Demand Waterfall methodology is a widely adopted framework for how Marketing drives demand for Sales teams at B2B organizations.

Suffice it to say, the analysts and researchers at Sirius Decisions really know their stuff when it comes to driving growth. One research area they’ve invested heavily in developing recently is technology coverage, which makes total sense given the dramatic increase in marketing and sales technologies over the past few years. The average marketer or sales operations professional has their hands full unlocking the potential of their existing technology stack, let alone making rational decisions on investing in additional technologies for their organization.

Recently, Sirius Decisions held it’s Inaugural Technology Exchange in San Francisco and I was honored to be asked to do a keynote speech on Day 2 on the topic, “Finding the Right “Technologist DNA”. This topic is particularly exciting for me for a few reasons. One, finding technical talent for marketing is something I’m passionate about. Two, I knew most of the sessions would be focused on frameworks and methodologies for managing technology stacks and evaluating additional investments, so being able to focus on the people side of the equation would be a nice break from what the audience had been hearing for the last day.

The crux of my presentation is this: hiring technical talent for marketing and sales organizations is crucial to leveraging technological investments and winning in the future, but we hiring managers can’t win if we’re all competing for the same rockstar unicorn ninja employees that check every box on the job description. In order to find the right kind of people, we need to be looking at certain talent characteristics that are predictive of future success, rather than focusing on past experience. Over the years as I’ve sourced, recruited, evaluated, hired, developed and retained numerous folks in marketing and sales ‘technologist’ roles, a few common characteristics emerged among successful team members — these characteristics formed the basis for the framework I shared in my presentation.

I call it the PHACE framework (I’m a marketer so of course there has to be an easily remembered acronym!). The characteristics I look for are: Proactive, Hacky, Analytical, Connected, and Empathetic. This framework gives my team guidelines for evaluating candidates and allows us to consider folks we might have otherwise passed on. The traditional candidate evaluation methods are backward looking and don’t focus on the potential upside. In future posts I’ll spend more time going deeper on each of the PHACE characteristics, recommendations on evaluating candidates, and how to embed this within your own organization.

Here are some other observations from the various sessions I attended and folks I spoke with:

• Even the smartest folks feel like they have a lot of work to do. When I polled the audience during my presentation to see who thought they were fully leveraging their existing technology stack, not a single hand was raised.
• BSOS (Bright Shiny Object Syndrome) came up many times. As a marketer who loves technology I know personally how easy is it to get excited about something new, but we all need to be smarter about investing our time and money into new technologies
• Sirius Decisions spent a lot of time in the various sessions talking about auditing your existing technology stack to make sure you understood where everything fits, what value it’s providing, and identifying gaps before considering additional investments. This is fantastic advice and is a must-do for the folks managing marketing technology.
• There are a lot of new technologies that don’t fit into existing categories, and vendors are having a harder time differentiating themselves. I still see a lot of vendors using product-first marketing rather than focusing on the customer needs / pain points.

Overall I thought it was an excellent inaugural conference and a great addition to the marketing conference landscape. I look forward to participating next year in Austin!