“Community” is a huge buzzword this year, and its easy to poke fun at the hype. But the reality beneath the buzz is that buyers are casting their nets much more widely in a search for ideas and evaluation, and formal and informal online communities are increasingly the arenas of choice. Moving community-oriented programs more to the center of marketing strategy suggests a number of important changes in existing thinking. Six challenges in particular stand out.’

Building and maintaining a solid reputation through marketing activities such as thought leadership, public relations, reference management, and educational seminars should be the cornerstone of professional services marketing—not more tactical lead-generation programs or simple sales support.

In early 2004, the European marketing team at Xerox was tasked with helping the company take a service-led approach. To meet the new mandate, the team decided to explore account-based marketing (ABM).

In the last 50 years, few industries have been identified so strongly with innovation as technology has. From a marketing perspective, however, the tech sector has lagged far behind the cutting edge, particularly on the business-to-business side of things. Until now. As the tech industry matures in a post-bust world and hunts for its next wave of growth, the locus of innovation is shifting toward the marketing department. Indeed, marketing leaders are on the verge of three dramatic transformations.

As the account-based marketing (ABM) trend picks up speed, ITSMA is seeing more and more of our member companies allocating resources to marketing plans for individual clients. Along with these investments, however, comes a very real issue: Where do you place your bets? ABM is too expensive to do for all your clients, so how do you decide which ones are worth the time and money?

Thought leadership remains a hot topic among services marketers, and for good reason. Buyers who tune out traditional sales and marketing pitches are quite interested in innovative thinking about using technology for business advantage. Thought leadership campaigns can be an effective approach to generating interest and credibility among prospective buyers.

On June 2, Sun Microsystems announced the acquisition of StorageTek; the official press release touted the deal in typical blah-blah marketing speak. A few days later, Suns president and COO Jonathan Schwartz explained the rationale in plain English on his popular Weblog. Sun’s aggressive use of blogging may not lead the company to the promised land by itself but it does reflect the more collaborative attitude that tech firms need to succeed in today’s customer-driven market.’

We took a close look at how to balance the strategic and tactical demands of services marketers. Since this is an area where so many marketers struggle, those who are able to achieve the right balance will reap great rewards. We explored a number of ways to strike this balance, with several of the speakers stressing that marketing can learn a lot about how to prioritize from people outside the department.

Buyers of your services and solutions are checking you out on the Web, talking to their peers, listening to your critics, and gathering input from an endless array of online sources—and you are probably paying too little attention to this conversational whirl that can make or break your sales and reputation. Practically speaking, three Cs become central to marcom success: content, conversation, and community.’

Companies that minimize marketing investments for maintenance and operational services (M&OS) risk serious damage to a critical component of profitable growth, according to participants in ITSMA’s recent marketing roundtable in Paris.

Moving to a solutions orientation tops the agenda for many technology companies. They recognize that competitive pressures and customer demand require them to integrate products and services in innovative ways to deliver clear business value. Here, we examine how industry leaders Lucent, IBM, and HP each come to the challenge from a unique position, but share six specific priorities.

In a world of services and solutions, customer experience becomes a critical arena for brand differentiation. Customers have more information at their fingertips and endless choices of providers. They want to be treated as individuals and they want excellent service. If they don’t receive it, they go elsewhere to find it. Thus loyalty in both the business and consumer worlds is built by delivering a consistent, valuable, and differentiated experience for the customer.

Marketing leaders across the technology industry point to brand differentiation as their top challenge in 2005, according to ITSMA research. Real differentiation is possible, however, for companies willing to invest creatively in ongoing programs to build and promote a compelling story. Specifically, there are five investment areas that separate todays brand leaders from the rest of the pack.’

Serious marketing strategies for IT services and solutions always begin with the customer, not the product. As soon as you look at any business-to-business market you find out it is not homogenous and everyone does not want the same thing—including the cheapest price. You have segmentation issues right away: Where are the segments? What do the different segments want? Which segments do we want?

Technology companies are facing a fundamental challenge with their business buyers. “Build it and they will come” worked for much of the twentieth century, with some aggressive selling to smooth out the periodic downturns. But the industry upheavals in recent years have gone beyond the typical up-and-down cycle. Buyers are now in charge, and theyre less and less interested in the old ways of the industry.’

Dont have one yet….’

ITSMA’s recent Inner Circle Dinner in London highlighted three pockets of opportunities that are capturing substantial attention these days among technology services marketers: e-government, outsourcing, and midtier clients. Opportunities like these supported the cautiously optimistic mood that characterized the ITSMA dinner, where 20 top services marketers discussed marketing’s key challenges for 2005.

In an environment where buyers are skeptical of vendor claims and generally uninterested in generic pitches, standard market research is decreasingly useful. Increasingly, marketing high-end services and solutions requires detailed insights into individual clients (and prospects’) business challenges, business processes, and buying dynamics in order to develop truly compelling value propositions. The new environment demands a more systematic approach to gaining–and sharing–the necessary information.’

The shift from promoting discrete products and services to more integrated solutions is bringing all sorts of concern to marketing communicators. If potential buyers are already skeptical about the promise of most IT investments, the promotion of “solutions” brings perhaps the toughest reactions of all. Building an effective communications program for solutions requires emphasis on four critical steps.

The way customers evaluate, select, and purchase technology solutions is undergoing a fundamental transformation. No longer are vendors selling hot technology to “the IT guys.” A recent ITSMA study with solutions buyers from multiple industries highlights five key dynamics that are changing the way customers buy and therefore greatly affecting the way providers need to market and sell.

Following the old wisdom about grabbing market share while times are tough, IBM has invested heavily in strengthening its position in professional services over the last few years. According to a recent ITSMA study of 400 buyers in nine vertical markets, the efforts have paid off big-time. Digging a little deeper into the data, however, provides evidence that all should not be doom and gloom for IBMs competitors.’

Its bad enough that we’ve had to endure several years of economic malaise. Now we have to argue that IT is still even relevant? Marketers are now facing ever greater requirements to understand customers’ individual needs, tailor solutions to meet those needs, and jump through all hoops necessary to demonstrate the business value of those solutions.’

Momentum continues to build for the software-as-service model, with Fortune magazine, among others, recently citing this approach as one of the five biggest trends in technology. Some software firms have begun to gain traction with this approach, but many others are struggling with the difficult realities of successfully marketing, selling, and delivering subscription-based offers. To truly create the value that will make these programs sell into the mainstream, vendors need to do four things.

It wasnt all gloom and doom at ITSMA’s March 20 Executive Roundtable in Boston, but the senior marketers in attendance did acknowledge the continuing challenge of finding sources of near-term growth for services. Nevertheless, participants from companies such as BearingPoint, Brooks Automation, Dimension Data, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lucent, PTC, Spherion, Unisys, VFA, and Xerox suggested six types of initiatives that can contribute to growth right now.’

One of the greatest challenges in developing new services and solutions is that windows of opportunity close quickly in a copycat environment. Long a problem in products, the rapid appearance of “me-too” challengers is increasingly a problem with services and solutions as well. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s New Service Offer Launch Process provides a great example of creating an effective, systematic program to bring new global services offers quickly to market.