Sports metaphors are a great way to communicate the idea of the sum being greater than its parts. In a recent blog post, Forrester analyst Jeremy Schwartz uses a familiar baseball metaphor to address the fractured state of B2B growth. He explains that a focus on individual wins – a lead, a campaign engagement, a sale – is like crediting a baseball team’s success to the achievements of a single player, such as the home-run hitter.   

 

Internal silos inhibit influence on the decision-making committees which are ever-present in the world of B2B. In this industry, a lack of alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success becomes painfully obvious in the B2B buyer’s experience. This is why we built Trilliad: to integrate an operating system across these functions in the truest sense. It’s not a series of handoffs under one roof; it’s an entire operating system devoted to B2B growth, where shared  strategy, technology, data, metrics, and measurement underpin the execution of growth. Much like a team, the system produces results that are greater than the sum of its parts.  

 

Jeremy identifies five important questions he will address with Forrester clients: 

• How should demand strategies evolve when buying groups are the standard? 
• What signals matter most when identifying real opportunities? 
• How can marketing and sales work together more effectively? 
• What operational foundations are required to scale buying group programs? 
• How will AI help teams identify, engage, and orchestrate buying groups? 

 

I love these questions because they align with the gaps we see in today’s B2B landscape. They are simple questions with increasingly complex answers. It wasn’t always this way. 

 

Marketing changed dramatically with the introduction of digital – prior to that many CMOs weren’t particularly interested in data, analytics, or technology. They cared about brand marketing. When the world became digital, marketing leaders had little choice but to become fluent in data and technology and their impact on performance. Demand for marketing data and the tech associated with it skyrocketed.  Since then, a global pandemic has created shifts in sales, making it much more digitized than ever before. This shift resulted in an expansion of the B2B buying committee, as well as an influx of sales-specific technologies and newly digitized data.  

 

Sales is catching up to marketing in terms of the data being captured and the technology used to enable it. But what hasn’t kept pace are the operating systems that activate data across marketing, sales, and customer success.  

 

At Trilliad, we like to say that “data leaks at the seams.” Mapping data across digital channels, CRM, and seller engagements is fundamental to understanding the intent of a B2B buying committee. In doing so, you are less prone to attributing too much value to independent engagements, such as assuming a campaign was successful because it produced a high volume of whitepaper downloads. Did the campaign also provide useful information to sellers so that they could close deals? Were CRM and campaign data linked, enabling an understanding of the dynamics of a target buying committee? If the answer is “no,” then you need to examine the system.  

 

Many brands turn to AI as a panacea for stalled growth. The introduction of AI to workflows and intelligence promises brands a competitive edge. But AI without a data strategy will result in accelerated chaos. We’ve all seen it: AI-driven efficiency for efficiency’s sake, resulting in sub-par output. AI-driven activations informed by incomplete or fractured data sets can quickly eradicate your brand’s goodwill through one bad customer experience. It can take years to build brand trust, and a split second to lose it.  

 

 What does it mean to design growth? Rarely do talented employees, a few powerful pieces of technology, and some data magically coalesce into a winning strategy. It takes: 

• A diagnostic of where growth is stalling and why 

• Sequenced strategy and activation to address growth across marketing, sales, data and technology, revenue ops, and AI workflows  

• Shared ownership and accountability to real business outcomes  

 

We built Trilliad to account for all of the above, creating a system that not only grows a business, but compounds its gains. To plug the leaks. After all, strategy without execution is just a lineup.  And activation without strategy is stepping into the batter’s box without ever scouting the pitcher.