So rather than creating a functional group that “does” social media, companies are creating more loosely organized social media centers of excellence that overlay the entire organization, with a locus in marketing. These groups provide support, training, and a limited amount of governance, while encouraging participation throughout the organization, not just within marketing (see the ITSMA Case Study Intel: How to Build Social Media Engagement Among Employees ).

The rise of thought leadership marketing is necessitating a similar approach because just like social media, thought leadership cannot be owned exclusively by marketing. It requires participation and support from the business. The growing importance of analytics is also creating demand for a skill not traditionally practiced by most marketers. All of these centers of excellence require specialists, and many are coming from outside the traditional marketing sphere, such as journalism and data analytics.

Of course, with the rise of specialists comes a demand for marketers who can take the components created by the centers of excellence and orchestrate multichannel marketing programs that relate to the offering portfolio and the business strategy. These super-marketers are consummate generalists who have just enough background in all the marketing specialties to have credibility and good judgment, while having the leadership and relationship skills to pitch and manage these programs both internally and externally.

We’re seeing some of these super-marketers emerge in companies that are practicing account-based marketing (ABM). From their positions within collaborative account planning teams with salespeople, these marketers need to do just about everything, from meeting with senior customer executives to tweaking PowerPoint slides for subject matter experts. They are helping manage the entire customer relationship. We think these people are living blueprints for future marketing leaders. Some of the key characteristics of these marketers from our ABM council research include:

• People skills. ABM marketers learn to go toe-to-toe with sales and with the senior executives (inside the organization and at customer companies) while maintaining good relationships with the supporting groups and outside agencies who keep ABM programs running. They gain valuable experience speaking in front of internal groups and partners, as well as clients, and have good presentation skills.
• External focus. ABM marketers develop as much passion for serving the client as they do for practicing marketing.
• Business understanding. ABM marketers understand not just the customers’ businesses but their own as well. They are able to engage customers in spontaneous discussions and offer insights and suggestions from both sides of the table.
• Tactics and strategies. The practice of ABM has a healthy mix of the challenging and the mundane. For example, ABM marketers have the breadth of experience to do high-level account planning but also have the patience and skills to proofread a PowerPoint presentation.
• Knowledge of business development. By working as part of a team with sales, ABM marketers gain an understanding of and empathy for the challenges that their business-development colleagues face.

My response is only if you are not serious about having a seat at the executive table. To continue to progress as a strategic function, marketers must commit to change. Even though there might be some money flowing to the marketing budget again, most things will not revert to the way they were before this recession.

How Is B2B Marketing Transforming?

Based on our research this year and our discussions with ITSMA members, here are the 10 ways we see B2B transforming :

The Five Focus Areas for Change

That’s a lot of change, I know. So what should marketers be focusing on in the near term? I see five main areas. Marketers must:

• Become more data driven. Analytics has been a recurring theme this year. Marketers have been talking about not just measuring more and better but also predicting buyer behaviors. We’ve written about how IBM is making the transition to analytics, and others are beginning to follow its example. One way to start down that road is to begin investing in a closed-loop lead management process. If you can measure behavior during the lead process, you can start to predict it.
• Think relationships. All aspects of the marketing relationship are changing. Social media is perhaps the most obvious change, however there are many others. For example, marketers are questioning whether PR as it is currently practiced will remain relevant. We need to create a new view of the relationship with buyers in which we use some of the more traditional tactics, such as events and councils, with social media to create entirely new ways to have relationships with customers.
• Drive sales productivity. In some companies, salespeople spend up to 40% of their time doing tasks that marketing should be doing, such as creating presentations. We’re seeing some companies develop sales-enablement systems that take advantage of automation and social media to make salespeople more credible with customers and shorten the sales cycle, such as Xerox’s Competipedia and BT’s Global Key Account Marketing system.
• Use social media to connect and facilitate dialogue. Our research has shown that marketers are accountable for their companies’ participation in social media—even if marketers aren’t engaging in those conversations themselves. Marketers must train, educate, and support subject matter experts who participate on behalf of the company.
• Invest in skills required for transformed marketing. Let’s face it: most colleges prepare us for B2C marketing, not B2B. And B2B services? Forget it. B2B services marketers need their own standards of excellence. That’s why some top ITSMA members have asked us to collaborate with them to create the ITSMA Professional Diploma Course for B2B Services Marketers. We’re hopeful that we will start turning out some transformed marketers beginning in December.

What other focus areas do you see for marketers in the transformation? Please tell me.

Other marketers know what happens to leads—sometimes—because they keep manual, often inaccurate, spreadsheets. As a result, many leads are lost. We know that it can take up to 12 to 15 touches before a lead is ready to buy. And many times, when it comes to services and solutions, leads may not be ready to buy for months or even years.

That is why companies must have a system in place to maintain and build relationships with leads even when they are not ready to buy. But to do that, marketers need content! Marketers need to use the content from their content-generation engine to create multiphase campaigns designed to progressively move leads from one stage of the buying process to the next.

The Benefits of the Closed-Loop Process

The main obstacles preventing companies from knowing what is working are lack of systems and disparate data. Marketers need a closed-loop system for demand generation and lead nurturing.

Unfortunately, very few services marketers have formal lead-nurturing and lead-tracking programs. In fact, in ITSMA’s annual Budget and Trends Survey this is a priority for just one of the companies we surveyed.

Still, some companies have made great strides in this area. They have linked their customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems. As a result, they are experiencing many benefits:

• Ongoing personalization of marketing materials
• Closed-loop feedback with sales
• Lead tracking
• Performance metrics

And perhaps most important, these companies are gaining the ability to demonstrate marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline and on closing deals.

To find out how CapGemini is creating an automated lead management process, read ITSMA’s Manifesto for Marketing Transformation in 2010.

Funding for marketing has dropped to a point where we are concerned about its health, relevance and impact. Services’ marketing budgets are at all-time low: 0.8% of revenue in 2009 and 0.9% of revenue forecasted for 2010. What is the perception of marketing in the organization today? Even if marketing is not yet marginal, it will be soon if funding continues this way.

Something has to change. Otherwise, marketing’s stature and impact on the business will continue to be under siege through the recovery and beyond.

Even though 43% of our members forecast a marketing budget increase in 2010, that still leaves nearly 60% whose budgets are flat or still declining. In this kind of environment, most marketers can’t add anything on to what they’re already doing and can’t go back to doing things the way they did before the downturn.

Budgets Aren’t the Only Drivers

Budgets aren’t the only drivers behind the need for marketing transformation, however. Buyer behavior continues to shape and change marketing. Customers have steadily gained more power in the buying process as their access to information has improved, thanks to the internet and social media. This, combined with a nearly continuous atmosphere of cost cutting since the dot-com bust, has made buyers more demanding, selective, and value conscious.

Buyers want more than information today. Telling them about products and services isn’t enough. They are looking for insight and ideas. Marketers have shifted money into creating white papers, Web briefings, private briefings, and the like to try to meet that demand. But ITSMA research has consistently shown that at least 50% of buyers view the content they receive as ineffective in helping them identify and solve business problems.

Technical Changes Drive the Transformation

Technology will also have a big impact on marketing transformation in three ways. First, technologies such as social networking are pushing marketers away from the traditional emphasis on controlled messaging to a more collaborative, dialogue-based relationship with customers, prospects, and influencers.

Second, technology is also changing how we manage and measure marketing activities and integrate with sales. Companies are moving off spreadsheets and leveraging more automated marketing tools for integrating their lead-nurturing efforts with customer relationship management systems to create a closed-loop lead-management process.

Finally, as cloud computing takes hold, it will change how we go to market. For example, there will likely be more partnerships among companies as a cloud ecosystem develops and creates more dependencies among providers offering different pieces of the cloud ecosystem, such as applications that are based on the cloud infrastructure. The cloud will have a profound impact on how you deliver your products and services, what offerings you develop, what companies you partner with, and who you compete with. It will impact marketing as well as, as it becomes a place where marketing services and marketing systems live.

We see three major areas where transformation is necessary for marketers:

• Marketers must create a new content development and dissemination engine.
• That engine should be supported by an automated, integrated closed-loop lead management process.
• Marketers must create a fact-based decision culture supported by analytics.

To see how we recommend tackling the coming transformation, download this free PDF.

ITSMA members can hear these recommendations explained in detail by ITSMA’s Dave Munn and Julie Schwartz by listening to the playback of our Online Briefing: ITSMA’s 2010 State of the Profession Address.

Marketing and sales will share leadership. Okay, so just 17% of the 31 companies we surveyed in ITSMA’s recent survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, have marketing and sales report to a shared leader—say, a vice president of sales and marketing, for example.

But we think this number is going to go up. It has to.

For the past two years, marketers have told us that sales enablement is a top priority. We think that sales enablement consists of more than brochures, data sheets, and tools. It should extend to shared goals and metrics between marketing and sales.

The only way to know whether marketing is improving salespeople’s effectiveness is by having them share accountability for revenue and sales quota goals. Yet of the companies we surveyed, just 16% have shared metrics between sales and marketing. Worse, only 25% of companies said that their marketing and sales groups even have an understanding of each other’s goals and metrics.

That’s got to change. Especially when you consider that many of the activities that traditionally defined marketing—collateral and trade shows, for example—are going away.

Increasingly, marketers are going to become more directly involved in supporting the customer relationship. Some 48% of respondents to ITSMA’s recent Market Pulse survey are going to increase spending on sales enablement, and more than 50% are going to increase spending on lead-nurturing activities such as thought leadership and private events.

Social media becomes integral to the buying process. In ITSMA’s How Customers Choose survey, we found that use of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over last year and finally pushed to majority status; 55% said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008. More important, we found that executives in large organizations use social media more than in smaller organizations and that C-suite executives actually use social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, whereas 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs and assistant VPs said that they ignore the stuff.

This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels.

This makes sense when you consider what our IT buyers have been telling us for years: that their peers are by far their most preferred and trusted choice for information during the buying process. This year, our research showed that most buyers go to colleagues inside their own companies for referrals of people to talk to about a purchase. No doubt, they would like to expand that circle beyond the company—30% say they rely on peers from councils and communities they belong to, and 29% say they speak to colleagues at other companies for referrals.

Within this elite audience, social media is becoming a tool for expanding the circle of trusted peers that they can call on when they’re about to make a big purchasing decision. Marketers can enable these relationships by creating and managing online communities. Indeed, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the percentage of B2B marketers that say they’ve built online communities themselves or through third parties such as LinkedIn and Facebook. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April, 43% said they had built their own communities and 54% had built group pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. By October, the percentages were 70 and 79, respectively.

Social media integrates into the thought leadership supply chain. Among respondents to ITSMA’s recent Market Pulse survey, 58% said they planned to increase spending on thought leadership development—nearly as many as the 73% who told us they planned to invest more in social media.

We don’t think that’s an accident. Social media is a helpful new piece in the supply chains for both thought leadership development and dissemination. For example, by tracking employee blogs, you may find some new subject matter experts who can help develop and refine thought leadership. Tweets are the raw nuggets that become blog posts that eventually lead to thought leadership white papers.

And social media tools are great ways to tease your thought leadership content and lead customers and prospects to other marketing channels, such as events and the Website. In ITSMA’s survey Web 2.0 Gets Strategic, 67% of respondents said that driving traffic to the Website was a primary benefit of social media.

The importance of the epiphany stage of the buying process grows. With buyers themselves doing more and more research during the buying process, providers need to make sure that they can be found.

Providers stand a better chance of being found if they create content for every stage of the buying process, including the stage that occurs before customers even think about buying. In the epiphany stage, marketers educate customers and prospects about business issues and future requirements, helping them reveal needs (see The Epiphany Stage: The Missing Link in the Buying Process).

How should marketing accomplish this goal? By creating idea- and trend-based thought leadership that helps clients discover and respond to the most important business issues they face and by taking clients out of the day to day to collaborate and spark new ideas. The best epiphany marketing also gives sales a reason to call on customers to discuss the content.

There’s plenty of opportunity for differentiation in the early stages of the buying process. In ITSMA’s How Customers Choose survey, just 16% of buyers said that their providers are very helpful in showing them the possibilities to solve their business challenges. And just slightly more than 50% of buyers said that providers’ thought leadership marketing is helpful in this regard. Companies that invest in understanding buyers’ business issues and creating good thought leadership around those issues have a tremendous opportunity to stand apart from competitors.

Cloud computing and costs will drive partnerships. In our Market Pulse survey, 42% of respondents said they were planning to increase their investments in partnerships. In part, this is due to already lean staffs being unable to shrink further. Even in the darkest days of the recession last January, 43% expected their budgets to remain unchanged or to increase in 2009. The lean staffs and budgets that have been with us since the dot-com crash don’t have much fat left to cut. Marketers are looking to share costs by working with partners. It’s also an inexpensive way to grow when the economy improves.

But we think that cloud computing will also drive a need for more partnering. The development of cloud-based platforms such as Salesforce’s AppExchange or Apple’s App Store show how partner ecosystems will become more important for B2B over time—much as the “Wintel” platform redefined provider partnerships at the beginning of the client/server era.

What trends do you see coming in 2010?

If you haven’t seen it, you soon will. Two big trends are driving this need. First, the trade press is dying. Revenues for B2B publishers for the first five months of 2009 were down a total of 26.3% and ad pages were down 30.3%, according to American Business Media, a B2B trade association. Online isn’t helping. Add in digital revenues, and total advertising revenues for the first half of 2009 are still down 19%.

As magazines shrink, the opportunity to place your thought leaders in those pages shrinks, too.

As an old, rusty spigot of content gradually clogs and shuts down, a bright, shiny new one is opening up all the way: social media. Blogs, communities, Twitter—they all demand fresh and insightful content. Meanwhile, the constant drip, drip of the lead-nurturing process demands the kind of in-depth thought leadership that trade journalists used to create for us.

But if we can no longer rely on their content, we can steal their process. You’ve probably heard this one before: marketers have to become publishers. But how?

How to Adapt the Publishing Process to Marketing

To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for content, you need a process. And the publishing process works better than the marketing content development process because the publishing process comes with the threat of extinction. The publishing process is intended to identify a target audience, develop an understanding of that audience, and deliver targeted, relevant content. To consistently beat competitors, that content needs to remain relevant and targeted. If it doesn’t, circulation drops, ad revenue drops, and the publication goes out of business.

In other words, relevance is the primary measure of success.

That’s how we should think about our marketing content process. Here are some aspects of the publishing process that drive relevance:

• Identify the target audience. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
• Create an editorial calendar. Every good publication has an editorial calendar. The calendar-planning exercise generates a wealth of ideas. Since much of the content we offer as marketers is “evergreen” (i.e., the topics will be as relevant next year as they are today), there’s no reason not to have a plan for content. If nothing else, it gives you something to wave in salespeople’s faces the next time they come screaming about a brochure.
• Research the issues. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and to flesh out key issues. Marketers can embed survey questions in their content to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
• Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue-planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
• Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding people who are. They’re also good at finding the people who live the stuff they’re writing about every day. All good journalism comes from expert insight and real-world examples. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
• Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider asking for feedback within printed materials and adding a review button or comment feature to online content.
• Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic- and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
• Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely also means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

Have you created a publishing process for your content? Please tell me about it.

1. Increase sales productivity. Although marketing will never replace sales, it can replace certain steps in the sales process, thus freeing sales staff to be more productive. ITSMA’s newly released survey report, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, found that salespeople spend 23% of their time on indirect selling activities. The sales process is labor intensive enough without this kind of inefficiency, said Julie Schwartz, ITSMA’s senior vice president of research and thought leadership. Salespeople need to maximize their time spent with customers because the sales relationship is one to one and therefore the coverage model is thin. Sales resources are expensive.

Marketing, on the other hand, is more highly leveraged. Marketers need to generate interest and awareness, generate leads, educate prospects, propel them from one stage of the buying process to the next, and nurture relationships until prospects are ready to buy. Salespeople who are enabled by effective marketing can give up these steps in the sales process and engage with buyers when they are further along the sales funnel and more likely to purchase.

If marketing is to take on more responsibility for the early stages of the buying process, there needs to be a good relationship between marketing and sales. A better relationship feeds improved sales productivity. Bernadette Nixon, CA’s senior vice president of field marketing, talked about the company’s decision to install a single leader for both sales and marketing. The move signaled that CA’s top leadership believed that alignment was important at all levels of the organization. Shifting the key metric from qualified leads to contribution to pipeline also demonstrated a shared commitment. “That ended the urge to push every possible lead to sales,” she said. “Now people are pushing leads that will make it through to the pipeline.”

Nixon believes that it’s important to bring people with both sales and marketing experience into the marketing organization—thereby creating empathy for both groups. CA has also created a joint marketing and sales account planning process to improve collaboration.

Nixon has consolidated what she calls the “last mile” of marketing—all the sales content that traditionally has been spread across many different silos at CA—into a single area—field marketing—so that salespeople know where to go to get all the content they need.

Another way to improve sales productivity is to take advantage of the time spent with customers by those outside of sales. David Ryan, managing partner, Gray Matters Group, talked about “activating” technical delivery people to build deeper relationships with customers. The point is not to create a rogue sales force, says Ryan, but rather to expand the relationship “comfort zone” of delivery people so that they learn more about customers and increase their network of contacts within the organization. The benefits include more and better visibility into sales opportunities, deeper client loyalty, and differentiation from competitors.

Of course, one of the most direct ways that marketing can improve sales productivity is through tools. Xerox decided to build a tool specifically designed to help with one of the most important questions salespeople have: What’s the competition doing? This kind of information tends to be scattered all over the place. Some comes from marketing and some of it comes from sales. It comes in all sorts of different formats, from reports to tips heard on the elevator. Xerox developed a tool, called Competipedia, to capture that disparate information and make it easy to find and easy to share. Xerox built the tool as a wiki, because a wiki is by nature a work in progress that is always ready to be updated. Marketing filters and manages the content to ensure that it remains useful.

2. Invest in epiphany marketing. Marketing has an important role in the portion of the buying process that occurs before customers even think about buying. In this stage, marketers educate customers and prospects about business issues and future requirements, helping them reveal needs.

How should marketing accomplish this goal? By creating idea- and trend-based thought leadership that helps clients discover and respond to the most important business issues they face and by taking clients out of the day to day to collaborate and spark new ideas. The best epiphany marketing also gives sales a reason to call on customers to discuss the content.

IBM’s Global CEO Study epitomizes effective epiphany stage marketing. Much more than a survey, it is fully integrated with marketing and sales activities. Through an extraordinary blitz of press and analyst briefings, advertising, and client events, IBM’s marketing team created an opening for salespeople to visit C-suite executives to discuss their future strategies against a backdrop of deep research insight.

Following the global launch, country-marketing teams created 33 local launch events, and IBM featured study findings at more than 150 other events worldwide. Print and interactive advertising drove more than 160,000 individuals to IBM.com, with 46,000 registering to either download or receive a printed copy of the study.

When they got to IBM.com, visitors were greeted with more innovative approaches to reach customers. IBM’s Innovation Jam was a 90-hour online event bringing together leading thinkers to work collaboratively on creating what IBM calls the Enterprise of the Future. This massively scaled online discussion garnered nearly 90,000 log-ins and 32,000 posts from more than 1,000 companies across 20 industries. But perhaps most important, the program created 550 new leads for sales.

3. Shift budget to content creation and community. Marketers are struggling to add social media strategies on top of already stretched marketing budgets and lean staffs. Yet the marketing mix is shifting beneath our feet each day as traditional advertising models are imploding. “Outdated media mix models are driving spend allocation,” said David Edelman, partner, Marketing and Sales Practice, McKinsey & Company. “Social media appears to be more, and the costs and risks of more aren’t sustainable. Maybe it’s time to start thinking differently rather than just trying to add more.”

Meanwhile, companies face a very real risk by ignoring social media: their brands can go rogue, hijacked by online critics whose assertions go unchallenged.

Edelman talked about how one large financial services company decided to hit the reset button on its marketing in 2006. The company saw connectivity everywhere and began using multidimensional, multichannel targeting. The key shift was going from placing ads in third-party content to creating content for direct consumption through collaborative channels developed and managed by the company. Marketers soon realized that they needed to become publishers and had to create processes for developing and disseminating content quickly.

B2B marketers should create communities for reaching their target customers. Indeed, the point of advertising should be to bring customers to a destination for interaction and learning. But to be effective, these destinations need to be highly targeted, said Larry Weber, chairman of Digital Influence Group. For example, IBM recently created a private community for healthcare CIOs. “Three years ago there were 300 different Java programming communities,” said Weber. You need to micro-segment your target audience.”

These audiences will be looking for more visual content in the future. “We are beginning Web 4.0—more emotive, more video, more real-time,” he said. “The influence of opinion through content, connected through digital delivery, is the future of marketing.”

4. Predict the business impact. Can marketing move beyond measuring its business impact and go directly to optimizing that impact? IBM has done it, said Kathryn White, vice president marketing, Global Business Services, IBM. Marketing built a model to measure impact of marketing tactics on sales and market share, optimize marketing investments by media and by country, and tune/act on the right levers and improve the efficiency of tactics. Using the model, IBM was able to predict sales out of the channel within 15%. The model also proved that within two weeks, marketing had an impact on the sales cycle. Finally, the model showed optimal levels of marketing spend for particular tactics—for example, a chart showing Web landing pages with the highest impact.

For marketers struggling to build a reliable analytics program, White recommends asking yourself these key questions:

• What are the metrics most important to your business?
• How does marketing impact those metrics?
• What are you currently measuring?
• How can you change those to a more holistic approach, taking advantage of more information, for more insight … in the language, in the management system, of the business?
• What decisions will you make as a result of those metrics?
• What behavioral change is required?

5. Narrow your focus. ITSMA research shows that buyers favor providers that understand their specific business needs. Oracle has done this through its Account-Based Marketing program with some of its top accounts, said David Rumer, senior director, Americas Marketing, Oracle Corporation Inc. The program uses targeted awareness and demand generation programs that are designed to drive sustainable account growth and increased customer satisfaction.

The benefits of the program are that it aligns marketing and sales in a common account strategy and helps position Oracle as a trusted partner and advisor. Salespeople have an easier time uncovering new opportunities and increasing customer wallet share and revenue.

Marketers can also improve results with constrained budgets by focusing on narrower markets, said Jesse Paul, CMO of Wipro. This creates a number of potential advantages:

• No need to blanket mass media with messages
• Enables focused offerings
• One-to-one communication is possible
• You can own a superlative: first/largest/only in a smaller space

With limited budgets, marketers can’t afford to broadcast their messages. Better to take that budget and apply it toward influencing the influencers—analysts, bloggers, and journalists—who can then spread the message themselves. Another way to get others to broadcast your message is by using what Paul calls “extreme pricing”—extremely high or low prices that attract press coverage and market attention on their own.

Another important aspect of working with smaller budgets is determining which segments of your market have the most potential to spend during the recession. Indeed, in some areas of the world, such as India, China, and Brazil, the current economic crisis has had much less impact, according to a joint ITSMA-PAC survey. These markets are also poised to make strong gains during a recovery and thus would benefit from more marketing investment right now. “Don’t wait,” said Jean-Christian Jung, senior vice president, Consulting Services and Business Development, Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC). “Identify growth opportunities by country, by industry, and by topic to better focus your investments and efforts.”

But if providers are to take advantage of this opportunity, the account planning process needs to change. It needs to become a collaborative effort that involves marketing, sales—and the customers themselves. Everyone has something to gain from collaboration in account planning. Salespeople have the opportunity to move customers through the buying process faster—and become a part of the planning process for those purchases. Marketers have the chance to eliminate much of the distance between the work they do and the outcome they desire—a clear, direct impact on the sales process. And customers have an opportunity to get help and ideas on the issues that are most pressing to them.

However, collaborative account planning is not for every customer you have—marketing simply doesn’t have the resources, nor do salespeople have the appetite. It should be used in a small subset of top accounts (or prospects) that provide (or could provide) the largest proportion of revenue to the company.

There are six steps to collaborative account planning:

1. Pick the target accounts.

2. Conduct research and map to customers’ strategic planning processes.

3. Validate with customers and analysts.

4. Link the initiatives to the responsible individuals.

5. Develop targeted offerings.

6. Create tailored value propositions.

Marketing’s Role in Collaborative Account Planning

Collaborative account planning requires that marketing take a larger—though not equal—role in the process. Sales still calls the shots, but marketing contributes to the process and in some cases even facilitates it. Essentially, collaborative account planning allows each group to do what it does best: Marketing does the research and manages the process for developing the plan, and sales holds the customer relationship and directs the actions inside the account.

Ideally, sales and marketing should collaborate on both selecting accounts and digging up the market and customer intelligence to support the plan. Salespeople are good at understanding the “now” inside accounts—the current opportunities—while marketing develops the larger picture of market trends and new opportunities.

Develop Institutional Memory

As marketers work with salespeople across many different accounts, they gain invaluable perspective on broad customer trends and best practices for reaching customers. Marketing brings institutional memory into the account planning process, helping salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources might be appropriate, and what existing company assets can help.

Marketing can also play an important role facilitating meetings between the strategic accounts and sales and developing a cadre of subject matter experts to create and deliver thought leadership at those meetings. For example, at one professional services firm, marketing created a group of “client marketers” who devote themselves fully to helping sales build deeper relationships with a select group of strategic accounts.

A Reason to Work Together: Bottom-Line Results

ITSMA research shows that collaborative account planning produces real bottom-line results. Having marketing involved helps bridge the alignment gap between sales and marketing. For sales, account planning is an opportunity to maximize revenues from top accounts, expose all opportunities inside the customer by revealing the customer’s business priorities, and reduce wasted sales effort spent chasing the wrong opportunities. Collaborative account planning is the chance for sales, with the help of marketing, to expand knowledge about accounts, increase business, and improve relationships with its top accounts.

The collaborative account planning process forms the basis for a new kind of relationship with customers, in which sales stops selling what it has and instead brings more targeted ideas and solutions to its accounts.

Want to learn more about collaborative account planning? ITSMA program clients can download the full report here, or contact Jeff Sands for more information.

There should be two versions of this campaign:

• Functional plan. The leaders of marketing should develop a list of ways that marketing can work with sales to sales’ benefit. And then run it by sales leaders to see what they would add or change. Then send the list to everyone in marketing and sales so they get a clear sense of why they should collaborate more. Just as FedEx employees all know that the work they do together is designed to get packages to customers the next day before 10:30 a.m., marketing and sales should develop a shared understanding of why and how they should work together. This plan should  be more specific than “making the sale.”
• Personal plan. Think about your own role. If you don’t have any direct interactions with salespeople, how could you work with them in a way that’s valuable to you and them?

Right now, it seems that the collaborative gap between sales and marketing is mostly papered over with technology. For example, the trend toward creating a closed-loop lead generation and nurturing process between marketing and sales is a positive step, but it seems like a bridge across the chasm rather than a true route to collaboration. Sales and marketing create a shared definition of a sales-ready lead, implement software to track leads from marketing to sales and back to marketing, and then go back to doing their respective jobs in isolation.

In typical functional fashion, sales and marketing have gravitated toward things that the other can’t or won’t do. To greatly oversimplify it, sales sells and marketing does that mysterious “creative” thing it does. Few salespeople or marketers feel qualified—or interested—in crossing over to the other side.

Find Shared Tasks
Many organizations we talk to are baffled about how to bridge the gap. They try to do it with golf games or off-site team-building exercises. That can help, but salespeople and marketers need more concrete reasons to work together.

It’s all about that basic mammalian instinct: empathy. It’s much easier to see the value of someone else’s work when you’ve tried to do the same thing yourself. You need to find tasks that both sales and marketing have a need for and interest in but that make sense to share.

Our research on Account-Based Marketing has revealed a few such tasks:

• Customer understanding. In B2B, both marketers and salespeople know the value of learning about customers’ business issues and needs. And both know how to gain that understanding. But it makes sense to collaborate. Salespeople are best equipped and most motivated to understand the “now” of the account: what has already been sold to customers and what they are most likely to buy next. Marketers can use those contacts to start building a larger context—the business issues that cross functional, corporate, and vertical boundaries. Marketing needs this information to create thought leadership and marketing materials designed to reach many different clients at once.
  Salespeople may have this kind of broader perspective, but more than likely they don’t have time to gather it. However, they know (or can be convinced) that having this deeper level of information will enable them to have more intelligent conversations with executives at prospect companies, spot additional opportunities to add value, and build more trusted relationships. Why? Because it is a deeper, more thorough version of what they already are doing to make the sale.
• Sharing what works. Salespeople love to get clear, simple tips on what’s working for others. Marketing can help. By doing research within multiple accounts, marketers gain invaluable perspective on broad customer trends and best practices for reaching customers. Marketing develops an institutional memory that can help salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources may be appropriate, and what company assets exist that can help.

What are the ways that you collaborate with salespeople? Please share your thoughts and experiences on my blog.

The demographic change is driving a new wave of newbies inside corporations to look at social media. Because this second wave is likely to be more influential inside the company and with customers than the first, twentysomething-based one was, it’s worth looking at the way B2B marketers should position themselves with employees—since, in our research, social media policy falls to marketing and PR.

There are some important prerequisites that need to be in place if marketing is going to be able to serve as a source of information about social media to employees—and be thought of as a competent manager of the organization’s social media presence. I see two big prerequisites:

1. Know what your employees are doing with social media. Responsibility for what employees are saying about the company will eventually make its way to marketing, so marketing needs to find out what employees are doing with social media. Think of yourself as a venture capitalist rather than a cop (though every company should have a social media policy). Seeing how social media happens organically among employees can give you important insight into potential new thought leaders, as well as a handy test population for gauging which tools employees are most comfortable with and, therefore, which ones might be best for integrating into conversations with customers.
2. Create permission. Having a set of social media guidelines is important, but those guidelines should be simple and shouldn’t patronize employees with a lot of detail. The policy should demonstrate trust in employees rather than trying to CYA. Rather than saying, “Don’t lie,” say, “We ask that employees conduct themselves as they would in any business situation—with honesty, integrity, discretion, and respect for their audience.” That’s about all you need. Companies should also ask employees to post a disclaimer on their blogs and offer suggested language for it, but they should not punish those who fail to do so.

IBM created its social media policy through social media—a wiki. It could be much more concise, but it offers a model for all the issues you need to consider and is written in a clear, nonthreatening tone. If you have employees who are already blogging, bringing them into the policy creation process will add credibility; just make sure legal doesn’t rewrite it after you’re done.

However, permission isn’t just about setting rules. It’s also important to demonstrate permission through action. The CEO should blog to employees, and a few top thought leaders and subject matter experts should start their own personal blogs to set the tone and demonstrate that the corporate culture is ready to give up the iron grip of control over the conversation, both internally and with customers. A few showcase social media examples from important individuals inside the organization will energize others and help demonstrate the kind of dialogue that matches the culture of the organization. Customers buy from you because of who you are as an organization as well as because of the products and services you offer. So, the tone of your social media communications should match your organizational personality.

You also need to get permission from IT. Again, we don’t mean permission in the literal sense—there are plenty of ways to get around IT with social media. But social media is not very secure. So, involve IT in planning your social media strategy. Don’t let IT dictate what employees can and can’t do with social media (they may want to ban it altogether), but collaborate with the IT leader on policy and keep him or her informed about what employees are doing. Remember that many of these tools start within the IT community, so IT can be a great source of advice and a bellwether for new trends.

To comment on this piece and to check out more content on social media strategy for marketers, go to my blog.