As we approach the holiday season, many of us take the time to reflect on our lives and think about how we can give something back. One of the articles in this month's E-ZINE is about sustainability, which, in the words of BT's Janet Blake, "is about making a positive contribution to society and the environment in which we do business." There are some wonderful tips in our interview with Blake about ways in which marketers can help articulate the business case for sustainability; I encourage you to check it out.
On the corporate giving front, I'd like to draw your attention to a cause that ITSMA is proud to support: the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, a nonprofit organization that designs, manufactures, and distributes low-cost laptops to children in the developing world. We made a substantial donation to the Foundation in recognition of the 2007 Marketing Excellence Award judges and entrants. (You can view this year's Marketing Excellence Award winners here.) A special giving campaign called "Give One Get One" is now taking place; it's a great offer and a great cause, so please take a minute to look into it when you have a chance.
Happy holidays to everyone. See you in the new year!
What's
Hot
Marketing and the Bottom Line: Key Takeaways from ITSMA's Annual Marketing Conference
"Marketing has to drastically improve how it measures, tracks, and communicates its impact on the business."
This call to arms was issued by Dave Munn, president and CEO of ITSMA, to kick off ITSMA's Annual Marketing Conference on November 15 and 16. Under the banner "Marketing and the Bottom Line: Leading the Growth Agenda," Munn offered evidence that there is a positive correlation between marketing's impact and measuring results: The discipline of measuring the return on marketing activities leads to better resource allocation, which in turn leads to improved results—a virtuous cycle.
He then introduced an agenda of speakers who all presented ideas to help marketers increase the impact of their programs on business success.
Increase the Impact of Ideas and Messages
The most important element of marketing's impact is its ideas and messages. Undifferentiated, unremarkable content cannot improve overall business success, no matter how many marketing metrics are in place. Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, revealed his research into ways to make ideas and messages memorable, or "sticky":
Simple: Memorable ideas are simple enough to spark conversations and make operational decisions—think FedEx's overnight delivery concept.
Unexpected: The Atkins Diet is memorable because it shatters accepted expectations about dieting.
Concrete: B2B marketing messages should be as clear as the instructions on a prescription bottle.
Credible: Ask a question that is credible—for example, "Where's the beef?"—and that puts the audience on the path to understanding what is better about your product or service.
Emotional: Marketing messages are more powerful when they connect with the core identity and beliefs of the audience. For example, "Don't Mess with Texas" is a successful anti-littering message because it relates to Texans' pride in their state.
Stories: Compelling, extraordinary stories about a company's offerings or its operations stick in customers' minds.
Get People Talking
Peers are customers' most trusted source of input for purchasing decisions, according to ITSMA research. Marketers need to actively create and manage those peer conversations, said Paul Rand, an executive board member of WOMMA and president and CEO of the Zócalo Group. Successful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns focus on finding and engaging the 300-400 people in each vertical market who are most influential in shaping discussion and making recommendations to their peers. According to Rand, "Eighty-one percent of all marketers say that, within five years, they will spend 50 or more percent of their marketing dollars on word-of-mouth or conversational marketing."
Make an Impact with Thought Leadership and Ideas
Discovering and researching issues that are important to customers—and creating managed discussions around those issues—is a good way to have maximal marketing impact on a limited budget, said Srinivas Uppaluri, global head of marketing for Infosys. Uppaluri worked with Infosys consultants to develop points of view about four emerging trends in global business: the growing impact of emerging economies like India and China, demographic shifts in age and working populations around the world, technology ubiquity, and increased regulations. The emphasis on ideas rather than selling helped Infosys garner the attention of high-level executives in existing customers and prospects; a focus on managing the conversations (mostly) online helped save marketing dollars.
Experiment for the Future
The business impact of online marketing tactics such as social networking is controversial, but that does not mean marketers should ignore them, said Julie Schwartz, ITSMA's senior vice president of thought leadership. ITSMA research shows that marketers who identify themselves as having a significant impact on the business are experimenting much more with online tactics like social networks and Webinars than marketers who say they are having limited impact on the business. Both Schwartz and Bruce Richardson, chief research officer at AMR Research, emphasized that, to get the biggest impact from online marketing, marketers should focus on younger customers who have made these new Web 2.0 platforms and communities an integral part of their lives. This way, marketers will be ready when the next generation of customers—who will want to communicate using Web 2.0 tools—arrives.
Look Forward, Not Back
Marketing metrics usually rely on past data, which limits marketers' ability to perform predictive analysis—especially as market conditions and strategic intentions change. Lynn Anderson, vice president of influencer marketing, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard, has implemented a model for measuring and managing marketing campaigns on a portfolio basis rather than measuring each campaign individually. The model allows HP to compare the effectiveness of different categories of outbound marketing tactics (such as events and direct marketing) against one another over time and make projections on future returns to make better investment decisions.
Measure Value on Three Levels
Most marketing groups evaluate the value they deliver on a single level: the ROI of specific marketing programs. However, marketing needs to expand its measurement horizons to two additional levels: value to the business and value to the business's customers, said Bob Baginski, senior vice president, Member Engagement for ITSMA. "We can't continue to leave value to the business and value to the customer to chance," he added.
Find the Right Customers for Innovation
As product life cycles continue to shrink and globalization opens up many new and diverse markets to serve, companies are going to become more reliant upon customers and external partners to help them innovate, according to IBM research. However, not all customers will be valuable collaborators, said Robert Painter, vice president of marketing, IBM Global Business Services. Marketing needs to engage with customers to find the 20% who can help define and develop the products and services of the future. For example, at IBM Global Business Services, marketing owns client profitability segmentation analysis and uses that data to develop programs designed to collaborate and build deeper relationships with the company's best customers.
Use Solutions to Combat Commoditization
Though Northrop Grumman IT (NGIT) continues to develop some of the world's most advanced IT products and services, customers in its key markets increasingly believe that IT services are commodities and so shop on price, said Steve Perkins, sector vice president for NGIT. To continue to build revenues and profits, NGIT began using a solutions strategy to create a portfolio of repeatable solutions that leverage NGIT's underused intellectual property portfolio.
Talk with—Not at—Customers
Customers have taken control of marketing messages through tools like blogs, collaboration software, and social networking Websites, said Larry Weber, chairman of the W2 Group. In this new era, marketers need to begin segmenting customers by behavior rather than through traditional demographics and to build brand through dialogue rather than message control.
Next Year
ITSMA's 15th Annual Marketing Conference will take place on November 4 and 5, 2008, so save the date!
New
Thinking
Sustainability: An Interview with BT’s Janet Blake
We recently sat down with Janet Blake, head of Global Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) at BT plc, to discuss what sustainability means today and the benefits of taking a sustainable approach to doing business.
ITSMA: What is sustainability, and more specifically, what does sustainability mean to BT?
Blake: Sustainability is about making a positive contribution to society and the environment in which we do business. At BT, sustainability is at the core of our brand and our value set: We see it as the way to make our business a long-term success. In a macro sense, any business can only be successful in an economy, society, and world that is also successful. So by investing time and energy into our sustainability initiative, what we are doing is managing our ecosystem for a maximum win-win situation.
If you put your hat on as a shareholder or an investor looking to analyze a company like BT, part of sustainability is not only being able to prove that we are doing it for the right reasons but also that we can actually demonstrate that there is a good business case, too. One of the things that we use to build our case is the "triple bottom line." This means having a clearly articulated business case that says:
Financially this makes sense
Economically this makes sense
Socially this makes sense
ITSMA: Your CSR program demands a serious investment; tell us more about the benefits BT receives as a result of its focus on sustainability.
Blake: Firstly, if you think about our corporate customers—large blue-chip global organizations—they want to do business with a company that is reputable and credible and takes care of the impact it has on society and the environment. This is because their own reputation becomes attached to the reputations of the companies with which they do business. We are now seeing customers asking us about our sustainability credentials before, or as part of, the bid process. We have been tracking how much business comes with a set of sustainability credentials attached, and last year it was £1.8 billion; this year it will be higher still. When you consider that the total revenue of BT is about £20 billion you can see that that is already a pretty significant proportion. So we know that being able to demonstrate our credentials relating to sustainability is absolutely key to our customers, and we know we win deals on the basis of this, which makes it a very strong reason to be doing it well.
The second example would be our employees. We employ 106,000 or so employees now and we ask them annually about BT's sustainability credentials. Sixty-two percent of them told us that our credentials make them more proud to work for BT, and we know that pride in BT is a reason that they both join the company and stay with the company. So it is really a way of attracting and retaining the best talent globally, which in a services industry is absolutely key as a differentiator.
Ultimately as a shareholder owned company, all of the different stakeholders, be they customers, partners, employees, community groups, or investors, will see the benefits to their own individual group and feel, in turn, more positive about the company. That has a knock-on effect, so investors are more likely to invest in us and the share price is more likely to be protected and to increase over time.
ITSMA: What's next for sustainability within the telecommunications industry?
Blake: I see it really heating up in the innovations space: What solutions can you offer to your customers to help them become more sustainable?
For instance, if a customer has a high carbon footprint and it needs support to drive that carbon footprint down, IT and communications services are a key way to help them do that. As another example, agile working is really you offering your workforce the ability to work from home or from various offices, perhaps in cheaper areas, as opposed to the main central city locations. When you enable your workforce with broadband from their homes, they can reduce their own carbon footprint as individuals at the same time you can reduce significantly the company's own carbon footprint by not having to fund heating, lighting, power, etc. from large central city office locations.
A second example would be collaborative working such as using things like audio or video conferencing, Telepresence, and Webcasting. For big-team communications, these technologies can have a huge effect on travel. You don't have to bring dispersed global resources together on a regular basis. Instead you communicate with them in a different way through these other methods, which would have a significant reduction on CO2 emissions. It also improves individuals' work-life balances, so you get an extra spin-off benefit.
A third related example would be field team automation, where you have organizations that are geographically dispersed or a mobile workforce. In this instance, technology can really help workforce management through applications like vehicle tracking, real-time job status advice, or dispatch on wireless handheld devices that enable engineers to go straight from one job to another job but also report back after completing each job. As a result, you can allocate work more effectively and reduce the number of miles driven by each of those drivers. So I have just given you three top-level examples that for most businesses would be applicable on an immediate basis.
On
the Job
Sales Enablement Above All: How SAP Enables Services Sales
In 2006, SAP Global Services Marketing and the Field Services Management Office were forced to face a few unsettling facts. The company was driving toward a goal of having more than 100,000 customers by 2010, but because software—not services—is SAP's primary focus, less attention was given to services opportunities. In addition, multiple lines of service with complex and broad portfolios—all with different approaches to sales enablement—made it difficult for sales teams to prioritize and sell the right services for each customer and prospect. Couple that with the fact that, all too frequently, the company launched services marketing programs of which sales was not aware and you can see why the services teams were concerned.
Turning that concern into action, the services and support teams partnered in new ways to promote the active selling of SAP Services. The first step on the path to transformation began with the leadership team's decision to make a significant investment in sales enablement—so significant, in fact, that 40% of all 2007 Global Services Marketing program tactics are devoted to it. The goal of the enablement initiative is to help sales recognize and articulate the value that services can bring to their customers.
We Feel Your Pain
The first order of business was to create a sales enablement team within Global Services Marketing with the express purpose of improving the collaboration between sales and the services marketing organization. The team identified three major causes of disjunction between services marketing and sales and then developed strategies for easing the pain:
Complexity of the sales force. In a complex environment with multiple sales teams executing against different charters, the sales enablement team works to:
Help sales teams detect services opportunities for specific sales situations and understand the value that services will bring to their deals
Provide tailored support to each sales team; deliver as much information as necessary but as little information as possible
Consolidate and standardize the sales support material for strategic services programs
Motivation to support Global Services Marketing programs. The sales enablement team is tasked with making services more attractive to the sales force. They strive to make it easy for sales to support services programs by:
Preparing them for demand generated with marketing programs
Standardizing material
Using existing channels for rollout
Enabling remote learning
Providing support infrastructure
Information overload. Each solution and service group tries to get the attention of sales for their programs. The team's goal here is to consolidate and integrate the messages by:
Focusing the service offering materials only on the strategic services portfolio
Tailoring sales enablement campaigns and materials to the specific needs of each sales group (based on needs assessments)
Leveraging existing channels, platforms, and infrastructures to publish services assets, activities, and messaging
Being a "gatekeeper" between the content owners and the sales force
Getting Down to Brass Tacks (a.k.a. Tactics)
From January to April 2007, Global Services Marketing program management created 220 tactics across all services programs; approximately 90 of them were created by the sales enablement team to help bridge the gap between services marketing and sales. This section outlines just a few of the highlights.
Several of the materials the team created address all three of the pain points between marketing and sales:
Services Welcome Packs. These are given to newly hired sales representatives to explain the services strategy at a high level as well as introduce the strategic services, provide guidance around how to sell them, and explain where to go for more information.
Remote and tiered learning material. The team created a series of sales enablement podcasts on strategic services that outlines, in an interview format, how these services are positioned to customers and why doing so is beneficial for both the customer and the different sales teams. The podcasts are distributed in sales newsletters and are also available on the corporate portal.
In addition to creating content and collateral, the sales enablement team:
Participates in onsite sales trainings
Hosts regional Webex sessions for sales around online campaigns
Creates surveys and games to motivate the sales teams to sell services
Supports learning about strategic services
Increases the exchange of information and feedback between services marketing and sales
Results
The sales enablement team within Global Services Marketing has created a new definition of what sales and marketing collaboration looks like at SAP. Of the many results the company has tracked since the program's inception, sales is reporting high levels of satisfaction with the materials provided to them by the sales enablement team. They are also reporting an increased number of customer wins and stronger positioning with prospects as a result of integrating the messaging about SAP's services into their sales pitches. In addition, the sales enablement team's efforts at SAPPHIRE 2007, SAP's international customer conference, paved the way for services experts to meet with more than 200 customers to discuss the company's various lines of service.
Internally, the team has received kudos from sales and the leadership team within SAP's services organizations. Bernd-Michael Rumpf, head of SAP Global Field Services, recognized the teams for their efforts, saying, "Over the past year, our Field Services Management Office and Global Services Marketing team have come together to develop joint marketing plans for SAP's strategic services initiatives. They've worked in close collaboration with the Services Sales Operations teams in every region of the globe to deliver a marketing plan that is truly embraced by our Services Sales Managers."
Today, SAP Services continues to bridge the gap between services marketing and sales, driving toward the company's mission of maximizing customer success.
EuroNotes
Where Are We Going with Our Digital Marketing Strategies?
ITSMA research has shown that budgets allocated to interactive/online/digital marketing are growing; in 2007 they stood at 15% of total marketing communications budgets versus 12% in 2006. Perhaps more importantly, digital marketing is the only category in which none of the respondents report that their investment in digital marketing will shrink over the coming year. Instead, the vast majority (69%) expect the amount they spend on digital marketing to increase in 2008.
With this as a backdrop, it's clear to see why digital marketing is getting a lot of airtime right now, and at our Roundtable meeting on digital marketing in London on 27th November, Google presented a list of four useful tips to to consider when developing your digital marketing strategy:
Be very, very clear about your Website strategy.
Drive traffic by integrating online and offline activity.
Engage, listen, and respond.
Measure success with different metric strategies.
Be Clear about Your Website Strategy
The first point may seem obvious, but many organisations have seen their Web presence built under the direction of the IT department, with little if any input from marketing. If you are to achieve an online experience that addresses customer or prospect needs rather than one based on a solution that is technically easy to implement, this is the first thing that should change. You then need to decide on the content, the architecture, and the value you place on a Website visitor.
Drive Traffic by Integrating Online and Offline Activities
The second point relates to driving an audience to your site by integrating online and offline activity. Many online sources will drive traffic to your site, including blogs, email, and searches, but don't forget that offline activities can be just as effective. Google commented that this link between offline and online activity has led some companies to put in place a 'search tax' internally: Whenever an internal programme or campaign is run, the proponent agrees to pay a sum of money to the online search budget to cover the increased volume of traffic that they know it will generate.
Engage, Listen, and Respond
Most marketers strive to 'engage, listen to, and respond' to their audiences in all areas of their marketing, but this mantra is made all the more relevant with the openness and immediacy afforded by digital channels. The amazing growth in the use of online communities and blogs can provide an unrivalled insight into the behaviours and opinions of many of your prospects and customers. For example, by monitoring searches and questions that had been posted regarding its products, National Instruments (NI) found that an incredible number of people were looking to buy a circuit board with a USB port—a product that was not available at the time. By monitoring the activity and feedback, NI soon came to realise that this change to the product could net considerable results. The company acted on this insight, created a circuit board with a USB port, and has reaped great rewards.
Measure Success
And finally, everyone's favourite topic: measurement. One of the major selling points of digital channels is the ability to track and measure almost all activity. The challenge, of course, is knowing which pieces of information are relevant, then correlating that data to business performance and offline activity.
Above all of this, one thing is clear: Before you embark on a digital marketing strategy, you have to be 100% committed to making it work and to moving it forward. As with all other areas of marketing, getting people interested and building momentum in something you cannot sustain is a definite no-no.
Research Desk
Ask ITSMA: Are Web 2.0 Activities Effective or Not?
Each month, ITSMA receives a number of queries through Ask ITSMA, a resource designed to give members a quick and easy way to get insight on important services and solutions marketing questions they face. In this column, we will publish some of our favorite questions along with excerpts from our replies.
Question: At ITSMA's Annual Marketing Conference in November, you presented some research that seemed to contradict itself when you listed social media and blogs as some of the least effective marketing activities, but then cited those very two activities among the activities that differentiate the best marketers from the rest of the pack! Please explain.
Answer: At first glance, you're right, there does seem to be a contradiction. But here's what's actually happening: Right now, Web 2.0 activities are less effective than marketing activities such as executive briefings, customer advisory boards, references, and case studies—for most marketers, at least. However, one of the striking differences between the best marketers and the mediocre marketers is that the best marketers are using Web 2.0 activities as part of the marketing mix. It's not a cause-and-effect relationship (i.e., Web 2.0 does not make these marketers more effective), but there is a correlation between the most effective marketers and having Web 2.0 in the mix.
What the correlation means is that the best markers are experimenting more with newer marketing techniques such as blogging, podcasting, and social networking. They're more willing to take risks and do something different from the status quo, which can lead to impressive results when your competitors are stuck in an undifferentiated rut. So these marketers' willingness to try new things (and not just new Web 2.0 things) is a big factor in why they're so effective.
On top of that, I'd like to point out that although Web 2.0 techniques are not the most effective ones in marketers' tool chests today, they will certainly become more effective as the next generation of business leaders comes of age and joins the workforce. The marketers who are experimenting with Web 2.0 now will be in a much better position to communicate with the next generation than the marketers who are taking a "wait and see" approach. Better to practice now and gain some expertise before everyone starts using these tools (even if some of the tools you experiment with ultimately do not take hold) than to wait for the train to leave the station without you on it.
Do you have a services marketing question? Visit Ask ITSMA to access
our experience, insight, and research results.
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