Dean Davison

Principal Consultant - TEI Serving B2B Marketing Professionals

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Dean serves B2B Marketing Professionals. He has extensive experience in the buy side of technology, advising customers in purchasing and implementing solutions, including interacting with CIOs on six continents. His experience also includes sell-side work in sales-focused marketing functions such as pricing strategy, competitive intelligence, product marketing, customer insights, and market analysis. Dean is a thought leader in sales enablement, helping technology vendors adapt their marketing programs to focus on a customer's business outcomes rather than product features or functions.

Previous Work Experience

Dean has spoken extensively around the world to audiences at events such as Sourcing Interests Group, Outsourcing World Summit, RUSSOFT, and the China Outsourcing Summit. During his tenure at Meta Group, he managed conference tracks, created hundreds of presentations, and spoke at conferences globally. His work has been widely published by news organizations such as CIO Magazine and Forbes.

Education

Dean received a Bachelor of Science in accounting with a minor in philosophy from Brigham Young University, followed by an MBA in marketing from The University of Connecticut. He is also a Certified Outsourcing Professional by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP).

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Dean Davison

Principal Consultant - TEI Serving B2B Marketing Professionals

Read Dean's blog posts

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Dean Davison's Research

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For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Forrester's Standards Guide For Sales-Ready Competitive Battle Cards

May 18, 2012Dean Davison

To accelerate the work of sales enablement professionals in overhauling sales battle cards, Forrester organized a group of experienced practitioners who helped create Forrester’s battle card standards. Forrester’s battle card standards cover four areas of focus with a total of 18 standards attributes that make battle cards relevant for sales reps. This workbook explains each of those standards and how sales enablement professionals can use the standards to accelerate their company’s change to building battle cards that help sales teams.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Using Standards To Accelerate Your Sales Battle Card Transformation

Insights Into Building Battle Cards That Help Reps Win Deals

April 26, 2012Dean Davison

To justify your investment, sales battle cards must help sales outmaneuver competitors and ultimately increase their overall win rate in competitive deals. Given the siloed way competitive insight is developed at most companies, and despite their best intentions, the product managers or marketing teams that build battle cards lack enough insight into the reality of sales conversations to capture or convey the content reps need to successfully preempt or counter competitors. To accelerate the work of sales enablement professionals in transforming sales battle cards, Forrester organized a group of experienced practitioners who helped create Forrester's battle card standards. This report introduces those standards and outlines a plan for sales enablement professionals to shape the practices of groups that create battle cards and the sales reps who use them.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Build Battle Cards That Focus On Buyer Priorities

Insights Into Building Battle Cards That Help Sales Reps Win Deals

February 6, 2012Dean Davison

Sales reps need battle cards to anticipate and counter competitors' claims in sales conversations, but today's battle cards are little more than side-by-side product comparisons. Sales enablement (SE) professionals will help sales reps outmaneuver competitors by developing battle card content from the customers' point of view — using buyer problems and priorities to frame the points and counterpoints that matter to them. This report outlines Forrester's standardized approach to building battle cards to help your sales reps win competitive deals.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Align Sales Battle Cards With Customer Priorities

January 11, 2012Dean Davison

Effective sales reps display a strong competency — often unconsciously — of establishing mindshare with their customers. The best ones influence customers and beat competitors by focusing on the customer problem and articulating a roadmap for the buyer to reach their goals. Even when a sales team is engrossed in a transactional purchase, reps win more deals when they understand the customer problem and are able to share — and defend — a path that maps to the buyer's priorities. An effective battle card, simply put, is a systematic way to help more reps within your company do what top sales reps do intuitively. This presentation, played back here in an easy-to-use format, gives SE pros the fundamentals to creating sales battle cards that focus on the buyer's priorities.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Forrester's Sales Battle Card Evaluation Results

Insights Into Building Battle Cards That Help Sales Reps Win Deals

October 11, 2011Dean Davison

Sales enablement professionals are increasingly stepping up to fix the massive inventories of battle cards at their companies that provide inconsistent value to sales reps. These battle cards originate from product and marketing teams spread across the company, and each one is designed with a different focus. To help you initiate change, Forrester has created a baseline of the current state of battle cards along with recommendations on how to improve them based on industry standards.

For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Make Competitive Intelligence Sales-Ready Using Forrester's Customer Conversation Framework

Engineering Valuable Content For Sales Enablement Success

December 17, 2010Dean Davison

Competitive and market intelligence (CMI) leaders and their teams currently structure the bulk of CMI content around a product point of view, forcing sales teams to figure out how and when to build the intelligence into their conversations. CMI leaders can significantly boost their value in enabling sales by engineering deliverables that are purpose-built for what salespeople do — talk with customers. Using Forrester's customer conversation framework (CCF), this report guides CMI teams through the process of constructing research output that is sales-ready because it lines up with a specific sales objective and stakeholder.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Enhance Sales Success With Better Battle Cards

Designing And Delivering Content For Sales Conversations

April 14, 2011Dean Davison

Competitive and market intelligence (CMI) teams produce battle cards that help sales reps anticipate and respond to competitors' claims. Sales reps, however, don't value today's battle cards, which typically push company messages and product features rather than parse the subjects that customers want to discuss. As CMI teams refocus their content onto customer conversations, they must also deliver battle cards more effectively, depending less on sales portals and static documents and more on emerging software tools. CMI leaders should take the first step toward better enabling sales by evaluating their current battle cards against the design principles — specificity, content, delivery, and validation — outlined in this report.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Use Competitive Selling Scenarios To Build Better Battle Cards

Designing And Delivering Competitive Content For Sales Conversations

June 6, 2011Dean Davison

CMI leaders we speak with are as painfully aware that today's battle cards fall short of expectations and don't line up with sales reps' needs as they are unclear about how to bridge the gap. Sales reps similarly struggle as they yearn for compelling battle cards but instead receive competitive mashups that require an inordinate effort to decipher and apply in customer conversations. Battle cards become relevant and effective when CMI teams — or other marketing professionals — use competitive selling (CS) scenarios as the context for delivering point-counterpoint content that is specific, conversational, validated, and usable.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Create Sales-Ready Market Intelligence Using Forrester's Customer Conversation Framework

Engineering Valuable Content For Sales Enablement Success

February 3, 2011Dean Davison

Market intelligence teams typically support sales enablement executive decisions around key sales strategies like coverage models, channel alignment, and prospect targets but rarely support sales teams directly. As the problems that customers address with technology become more complex, buyers representing both business and IT expect more empathy and value from sales reps. In order to contribute — and increase their own value — market intelligence leaders must step up and create deliverables designed to support more timely and relevant sales conversations. Market intelligence analysts should use Forrester's customer conversation framework as a guiding tool to adapt market-centered research into sales-ready content.
For B2B Marketing Professionals

REPORT: Customer And Market Intelligence (CMI) For Sales Enablement Success

February 24, 2011Dean Davison

CMI organizations need to engineer sales content so that it aligns with selling activities, especially with ongoing conversations that sales reps have with stakeholders that allow realize selling objectives with each customer. Since most CMI analysts do not have sales experience, they need assistance framing deliverables into a customer-conversation point of view. This presentation, played back here in an easy-to-use, interactive format, defines the kind of CMI content that sales reps need and outlines a framework for non-sales professionals to create sales-ready deliverables.