In the August 2008 issue:

• First: The Marketer’s Children
• What's Hot: Five Steps to Assess Businesses and Markets
• The Interview: Brian Carroll’s Five Tips for Lead Management
• Research Desk:
  • Ask ITSMA: Does More Staff Mean Better Results?
  • Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership
  • Most Popular Listens
• News & Notes
  • Upcoming ITSMA Events

First

The Marketer’s Children

By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com

We’re all like the geek who is consumed by technology but doesn’t own a computer.

Let me explain. In this year’s ITSMA Services Marketing Budgets and Benchmarks Survey, you said that online marketing is the fastest-growing category of spending in your marketing budget this year (79% of you plan to spend more in 2008), yet only 36% of you have a marketing automation system to track marketing programs and results.

This adds up to a dramatic difference between the way you use technology externally with customers and internally in your own operations. This is not a sustainable gap. The good news is that 63% of you say that spending on marketing automation will increase this year—with total spending increasing from 3.1% to 4.2% of your services marketing budget in 2008.

Lots of Data, No Insight

In the meantime, online marketing is generating tons of data, and many of you don’t have automated means of converting it into knowledge and insight. Indeed, there seem to be no plans to change the situation. For example, “Advancing data mining and customer analytics” ranked last on your list of priorities for 2008.

This isn’t just bad for marketing; it’s bad for marketing’s reputation inside the company. In my research into this subject over the past six months, one theme has emerged over and over: Marketing is the least automated major function in the corporation.

While other functions have been automating—and more important, integrating—their operations since the mid-1990s, marketing has been mostly on the outside looking in. Indeed, when it comes to technology, marketing is one of those messy best-of-breed environments that your company might make millions fixing. Talk about the shoemaker’s children.

Automation Equals Accountability

It’s no accident that marketing struggles to prove its ROI. With automation comes accountability and efficiency—the ability to assemble hard numbers and data. Not only does marketing lack this ability, but it trails most other functions that are trying to do the same thing. No wonder that marketing struggles to get the respect of top management in many companies.

But before you get defensive, don’t think I’m blaming you for all this—at least not entirely. Software providers don’t offer an integrated marketing platform that does it all. IT and the business leadership play a role here, too. My sense is that many marketing groups do not have a strategy for IT. I also suspect that IT does not pay as much attention to marketing as it does to the rest of the business. Indeed, I wonder if marketing even controls its own budget in most of your companies.

This month we have a survey out to the membership that will address all these issues and more. I hope you will join us for the September 9 Online Briefing, where we will address the future of marketing automation and offer some best practices for addressing the marketing automation challenge. In the meantime, please visit my blog and give me your comments about the state of marketing automation in your company.

What's Hot

Before You Do Anything, Assess the Business and the Market

By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com

Becoming a marketing leader is like watching a storm approach: You have some brief, indeterminate amount of time before the deluge hits. Take advantage of it to do something very important: Begin conducting a comprehensive research investigation to assess the business and the market.

Expect to get lip about taking the time and resources necessary to do it right.

Senior management will want you to just get started—chances are, they’ve already lost whatever patience they had while the transition to, well, you, was taking place. They might not like the idea of spending money to discover what they think they already know.

Defend yourself by putting the true risk in context: The company will spend millions of dollars to market the new product or service in the coming years; without deep, accurate market facts and insight, this investment could be misdirected or result in “me, too” marketing programs. The goal is to use this research to inform a world-class marketing program that will help the company generate profitable revenue.

Remember, you need to know the business as well as or better than anyone else in the organization—and be ready to discuss its possibilities from multiple perspectives. This knowledge will not only enable more effective marketing strategy and planning; it will also help position you as a peer at the management table.

Bob Baginski, ITSMA’s senior vice president and longtime services marketing veteran, has laid out a five-step framework to help marketers acquire broad and deep knowledge of the state of the business and the market:

• Markets. It’s critical to understand what’s happening inside your company and your most important markets.
• Clients. Just as important as knowing the market is understanding the challenges facing your most important customers and market influencers.
• Alliances. Partners and alliances can play a vital role in market development and sales. You need to know who they are and their strengths and weaknesses.
• Competitors. As a newcomer, you enjoy particular advantages in gaining this information—you are, as yet, unencumbered by the internal tribal beliefs that might be coloring your new colleagues’ beliefs about competitors.
• Company. Here too, newness matters. You’ll have the chance to do a clear-eyed assessment of the level of maturity and differentiation of your new company’s products and services.

Each of these categories needs to be developed fully during the course of the research. Each will bring a series of important questions you need to ask over the course of two to six months.

Of course, the effort—if done right—will generate a ton of information. That’s why it’s important to package the results so that they are easily consumed. Otherwise, the value of what you’ve done will be lost. The packaging should be done in three cascading varieties: a one-page snapshot for top executives, an executive summary that explains the reasoning behind the points on the snapshot, and a full report for those who want to investigate particular details or find source information.

Though time consuming, the business assessment will be well worth the effort. “I find that business unit leaders—rightly or wrongly—typically sit in their own silos and do not have a comprehensive view across the entire company and its markets and clients,” says Baginski. “So if I show up at meetings armed with the information from the business and market assessment, I can add real value—not only in terms of plotting the marketing strategy but also to help the business unit and other business process leaders gain a more thorough understanding of our business.”

In the process, the marketing leader has earned a seat, as a peer, at the management table.

ITSMA members can download a tool with all the most important questions to ask in each of the five categories as well as a chart showing how to create a summary snapshot here.

The Interview

Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips

Brian Carroll wants us to get passionate about one of marketing’s most important tasks: finding and nurturing leads—80% of which wind up being ignored or discarded. “To me it's better to not be involved with a customer at all than to start a relationship and then drop the ball,” says Carroll. “What we are doing is just generating more leads. But it's not about more, it's about better.”

Here, Carroll, who is CEO of InTouch, a lead generation optimization services firm, gives us five ways to make B2B lead management more effective. For much more on lead management, you can read Carroll’s book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, and check out his popular blog, B2B Lead Generation.

1. Create a marketing funnel.

Most organizations don’t have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.

Lead generation really is about building relationships. It’s how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready.

The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads.

2. Create a universal definition of a lead.

If you are trying to measure lead generation and you don’t have agreement within your organization on what the word means, you won’t be successful—especially if your organization is growing fast and the number of leads is growing all the time. In this situation, salespeople will have a tendency to focus on the relationships they already have and ignore the others. They need to keep their numbers up and don’t trust uncertain leads to move the needle.

To get past this, you have to sit down with the sales team and ask, What are the major things that you need to know in order for you to feel that a lead is viable? In my work with one organization, these were the key points of information that sales wanted about a lead:

• Role in the organization
• Authority in the buying process
• Business need
• Timeframe for buying
• Defined internal initiative
• Stage of investigation

We asked sales in this organization, At what point do you want to start receiving leads? For them, it was all about need. They said that the lead has to have an active initiative.

It’s important to remember that the lead definition process is iterative. It's not a one-and-done thing. With my clients, we revisit the definition and make changes. And we’re always asking questions, such as, Are we asking the lead the right questions?

3. Use the phone.

The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. We found that you can email, you can do Web profiling, you can measure all these touch points, but in the end if you want to know something, you need to talk to someone and engage them in conversation.

4. Ask about goals—don’t sell.

One of the mistakes we see in lead handoff is that sales sees that someone downloads a white paper, so they do a follow-up call and want to set up an appointment. That’s not going to get you anywhere. You want to be able to engage them in more of a discussion rather than trying to make an immediate qualification. To do that, you need to ask a question: What question were you hoping to answer by downloading our white paper? The next question is, Was that you asking the question, or was that someone else in your company asking the question? The goal is to be a trusted advisor or a relevant resource to your audience until they move to the point of being ready to talk about initiatives or a project.

5. Define lead nurturing—and the right people to nurture.

In our experience, lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy. The people to be nurtured are generally those with whom you’ve had a direct, meaningful interaction via phone or email and who are in companies that fit your preferred profile. The point is to build the relationship with them over time—without trying to qualify them during each interaction.

ITSMA members can read all 17 of Brian Carroll’s tips for lead management later this month.

Research Desk

Ask ITSMA: Does More Staff Mean Better Results?

By Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer, ITSMA

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.

Is there a correlation between the number of marketing staff of a company and its business results?

In all the benchmarking that ITSMA has conducted since 1995, we have found little to no correlation between the size of the services marketing staff or size of the services marketing budget and business results. Long ago we came to the conclusion that the magnitude of marketing resources is not as important as the quality of marketing resources. Hiring a large staff and paying lots of money for them to produce glossy brochures will not necessarily improve business performance. However, well-placed PR supported by groundbreaking thought leadership and follow-up seminars just might. More important than number of marketing resources is what your marketing resources are doing. Keep in mind that building a quality thought leadership program and a comprehensive PR program that features face-to-face small-format seminars with targeted prospects might require you to increase your marketing staff. Build the case for more staff from the bottom up.

	Do you have a services marketing question? Visit Ask ITSMA to access our experience, insight, and research results.

Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership

The First Task of a New Marketing Leader: Assess the Business and the Market
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/TB039.htm

Marketers need to know the business as well as or better than anyone else in the organization—and be ready to discuss its possibilities from multiple perspectives. This knowledge will not only enable more effective marketing strategy and planning; it will also help position marketers as peers at the management table. In this ITSMA Tool, Bob Baginski, ITSMA’s senior vice president, lays out a five-step framework to help marketers acquire broad and deep knowledge of the state of the business and market.

Close the Loop: How to Build an Effective Lead-Nurturing Process
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/V0041.htm

For years, the process of lead generation in B2B has been like making cream: Skim the best from the top and forget about the rest. In this ITSMA Viewpoint, Paul Dunay, global director of integrated marketing for consulting company BearingPoint, outlines a process for retaining the people who aren’t hot sales leads and nurturing them until they heat up.

The Steps to Vertical Market Leadership: ITSMA's Vertical Maturity Model
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/U0061.htm

ITSMA has created a Vertical Market Maturity Model to help gauge progress toward vertical market mastery. In this Update we examine the model and outline the steps necessary to transform a company and its marketing group into vertical market experts.

The View from the Other Side: B2B Marketing Practices from Other Industries
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB080612.htm

If you want to break through and be unique, you need to look at how other industries market. It’s not that they are more creative, it’s simply that they might face different competitive pressures, industry norms, and corporate cultures. In this Online Briefing, we examine consumer packaged goods and professional services and look at ways to organize marketing more effectively to deliver breakthrough demand-generation programs.

Elevating the Focus on Customers: ABM at Unisys Europe
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/CS0017.htm

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is an ambitious strategy that views each of a company’s most important customers as a market of one. Though the concept is simple, the follow-through is not. As Unisys Europe discovered, ABM implementation brings significant challenges, including organizational change, shifting marketing competencies, close coordination with sales, and a need to raise marketing to new heights, both inside the organization and with customers. Unisys has already learned some valuable lessons that we discuss in this ITSMA Case Study.

Most Popular Listens

Account-Based Marketing: Best Practices and Critical Success Factors
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB070213.htm

ITSMA's Jeff Sands, IBM's Naomi Wilsey, and Xerox's Liz Vega co-present this Briefing on best practices and critical success factors for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a hot new approach that helps companies deepen relationships and increase revenue with key accounts.

Thought Leadership Marketing for Professional Services: Getting Attention in aCompetitive Marketplace
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB070612.htm

Today's crowded market for professional services puts a tremendous premium on thought leadership. Even though professional services firms tend to have a stronger track record with thought leadership than product firms, in many companies, marketing isn't seen as a player in content development. This needs to change. During this Briefing, ITSMA's Steve Hurley, The Bloom Group's Bob Buday, and Accenture’s Terry Corby tell you how.

News & Notes

Upcoming ITSMA Events

To view all events, please go to http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/events/calendar.asp

Are Spreadsheets and CRM Sufficient? Marketing Automation in the 21st Century

Web Briefing
Free for ITSMA members
September 9, 2008
8:00 am Pacific – 11:00 am Eastern – 16:00 London (Duration: One hour)
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08OB09G24.htm

The incentives for marketing to automate its operations for more efficiency and effectiveness have never been greater. Yet the technology options are complex and confusing. In this online briefing, we will untangle the complexity of marketing automation and offer valuable advice—including results from ITSMA’s exclusive survey of best practices, challenges, and ROI from top marketing decision makers’ use of marketing automation technologies.

The Lasting Legacy of Sustainability: Marketing for the Future

Roundtable
Invitation-only meeting for ITSMA members
September 10, 2008 (12:00–15:00 GMT)
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08RT09E23.htm

Corporate Social Responsibility is regarded as the only responsible way to conduct business within the 21st century. No longer is it acceptable for organisations to operate with little or no regard for the greater ecosystem within which it exists. The purpose of this ITSMA Roundtable is to stimulate an open discussion around this broad and important topic. We will hear from organisations which have developed strong CSR and sustainability-related programs.

Sharpening Marketing's Edge: New Tools and Approaches

Breakfast and Lunch Briefings
Free for ITSMA members
(Dates subject to change)

September 16, 2008 (12:00 – 2:00 p.m. ET)
Toronto
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08LB09N25.htm

September 18, 2008 (7:30 – 9:30 a.m. ET)
Sheraton Premiere Tysons Corner, Vienna, VA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08BB09N26.htm

September 24, 2008 (12:00 – 2:00 p.m. PT)
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08LB09N28.htm

October 1, 2008 (7:30 – 9:30 a.m. ET)
Newton Marriott, Newton, MA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08BB10N27.htm

The incentives for marketing to automate its operations for more efficiency and effectiveness have never been greater. Yet the technology options are complex and confusing. In this briefing, we will untangle the complexity of marketing automation and offer valuable advice—including results from ITSMA’s exclusive survey of best practices, challenges, and ROI from top marketing decision makers’ use of marketing automation technologies.

Making Marketing "Atomically Global": How the "Flat World" Is Changing the Way Marketing Is Organized and Managed

Executive Roundtable
Invitation-only for ITSMA Members
September 25, 2008 (12:00 – 4:30 pm ET)
Santa Clara, CA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08RT09N29.htm

During a recession, marketing budgets are among the first to be slashed. Marketing’s resilience can be traced directly to a history of outsourcing to outside agencies. Today, offshore outsourcing provides access to marketing staff in other countries where salaries and other expenses are comparatively lower and perhaps the talent is comparatively higher. At this Executive Roundtable, ITSMA’s Dave Munn and Ajit Maira will share the results of ITSMA’s latest research on marketing operations and management and facilitate discussion with a group of your peers.

Marketing 3.0: Challenging the Paradigm and Embracing Change

Annual European Marketing Forum, October 8 and 9
Beaumont House, Old Windsor, Berkshire, England
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08AF10E31.htm

ITSMA’s European Forum brings together the region’s top marketing practicioners and thought leaders every year to discuss where the profession is and where it is going. This year’s event is focused on change, and how leading organizations are shifting their behavior and adopting new approaches. You’ll hear from marketing leaders from BT, Google, HP, and IBM, along with Professor Malcolm McDonald from the Cranfield School of Management, Richard Lewis from Richard Lewis Communications, Des Lee from Executive Change, and ITSMA’s own Richard Seymour and David Munn, among others.

Maximizing Marketing’s Influence: The New Marketing Rules

15th Annual Marketing Conference, November 4 and 5
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08AC11N32.htm

No more excuses: It’s time for marketing to step up to the plate and lead. We’ve dealt with shrinking budgets and staff, mastered complex CRM systems, learned to get great work done within a matrixed organization, and stood our ground with the Board. Now more than ever we need to maximize our influence and create bold new marketing rules. Join usas we hear insights and success stories from marketing leaders on a wide variety of vital topics—each with a window into what they did, how they led, and the results they achieved. An essential combination of both pragmatic and strategic will be highlighted through presentations, panel discussions, and interactive breakout sessions.

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