BC Startup Sales Podcast – The Demand Waterfall with Ryan Mettee (SiriusDecisions)

SiriusDecisions introduced The Demand Waterfall® concept in 2006 to create a shared view between marketing and sales to ultimately reveal the health of an organization’s new-business-related activities. We love this concept and recommend it to pretty much any portfolio company that cares about marketing and sales alignment. As demand generation efforts are becoming more and more important to the health of any SaaS company we thought it would be great to bring on our friend Ryan Mettee to this edition of the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast to discuss The Demand Waterfall. While we’ve discussed marketing and sales alignment and how marketing can drive growth in early stage SaaS, we have not covered this topic with such a level of structure. Ryan has been with SiriusDecisions for over three years and leads the sales effort on the west coast teaching this concept to many early stage SaaS companies.

We start out with a high level discussion of some of the engagements that SiriusDecisions works on around sales and marketing and how they invented The Demand Waterfall concept some time ago. We then cover how it has changed through the years and what any early stage company needs to think about when setting up The Demand Waterfall. We next give a detailed overview of the actual waterfall and each stage within it. For a visual check out this link. Ryan then discusses how to think about the alignment of sales and marketing and some of the critical things to watch out for as an early stage organization trying to build a culture of alignment. We close on some critical things plaguing companies abilities convert leads to revenue and Ryan also gives the listeners some successes that he has seen (100%-700% increase in closed / won business) when companies implement this process. Finally, he gives some wise advice around his three key criteria to early SaaS success in sales and marketing infrastructure. “Adopt” then “Operationalize” then “Optimize.” We will let you listen to the podcast to hear specifically about what he is talking about!

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