For years, lead generation in B2B has been like making cream: Skim the best from the top and forget about the rest. Paul Dunay of consulting company BearingPoint is determined to change that. He has developed a process for retaining the people who aren’t hot sales leads and nurturing them until they heat up.

To help marketers find their place along the vertical market maturity path and develop appropriate marketing strategies for each stage, ITSMA has developed a conceptual framework. The framework gives companies an agreed-upon way to gauge progress of vertical market competence and perception and match the right marketing strategies and resources along the way.

Pity the poor buzzword “solutions.” Some would argue that it has so many meanings that it has none at all. For most companies, it is a swap-out word for a product or service—the idea being that a solution sounds more valuable than a plain old product or service.
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ABM is an ambitious strategy that views a company’s most important customers each as a market of one. Though the concept is simple, the follow-through is not. As Unisys discovered, ABM implementation has significant challenges, including organizational change, shifting marketing competencies, and close coordination with sales. Though Unisys has not yet completed its ABM journey, it has used the principles learned in a customized ITSMA ABM training program to start along the path—and learned some valuable lessons along the way.

In case you’re still wondering, the online marketing train has definitely left the station. But what’s more surprising is how the emergence of online has busted up marketing’s overall priorities. Behind the perennial mantras of differentiation and sales force enablement—which top the list of priorities this year as they almost always do—marketers have shifted their priorities dramatically.

As economic fortunes tighten, the need for marketers to learn more about customers will become even more important. How can marketers warm up new accounts in these tough times? ITSMA’s 17 and Kathy Macchi offer some practical advice.

If giving your competitors a place on your Website sounds like heresy, you’re right. It is. That’s why Gord Hotchkiss likes the idea.

Cisco needed to centralize its fragmented customer advisory board structure. Yet any attempts to centralize could be perceived as attempts by corporate to stultify a series of independent communications channels. If the existing structure were to be changed, it needed to be done carefully.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is primarily used to make existing customer relationships even better. Yet it also has potential for gaining new business. The ABM approach takes away some of the subjectivity of new account selection by using tools to objectively score and rank potential targets.

The avalanche of recession advice has begun. We at ITSMA decided to try to look beyond the standard advice and came up with ideas we haven’t seen everywhere else. Like these:

Steve Mann is creating and implementing a social media strategy for B2B software giant SAP. He agreed to talk with ITSMA about how B2B marketers should approach getting started in social media.

All of Cognos BI Radio podcasts have one thing in common: high production values. There is a professional announcer, smooth mixing of sound elements like music, and quick-cut voice clips—even commercials. This high-quality strategy is a real departure from conventional thinking about podcasting—one that all marketers should consider.

Marketing measurement must become a crystal ball, able to predict the success of a particular program or portfolio before a single dollar is spent. Few companies have built this kind of analytical capability yet. Building an integrated, holistic view of measures across all of marketing is a good first step. But four other key elements are also necessary.

It may sound a bit jaded, but being strategic is a time sink. As marketing is asked increasingly to get involved in issues such as company strategy and direction, how do we ensure the benefit of these actions is taken into account when analysing marketing performance? The answer relies on the right mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Larry Weber is outspoken about the impact of the web on the world in general and on marketers in particular. In this interview, he discusses how to take the first steps in building successful online communities for customers.

As a professor at Stanford University, Chip Heath has listened to his students pass on the same ridiculous urban legends that he heard as a student—that we only use 10% of our brains, or that the Great Wall of China is visible from space, for example. He became curious to discover the attributes of urban legends that make them “sticky,” or durable over time, so that he could apply those lessons to more useful ideas. The results of his research are outlined in the bestselling business book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”. In this interview, Chip shares some of the ideas from the book.

When we look at the output from our recent Services Marketing Budget Allocations and Trends survey, the picture we see is a very positive one—in spite of the uncertain economic outlook in many quarters. In fact, ITSMA members are predicting 18% growth in services revenue for the year ahead! At the first European Inner Circle Meeting of the year, we delved into why we’re seeing these optimistic growth forecasts given the current economic climate. One area we discussed was the continued growth we’re seeing in both near-shoring and off-shoring activity and the potential impact this trend could have on the overall forecast.

Autotask Corporation, a provider of Web-based professional services automation (PSA) software, was limping along in a crowded category with 70 competitors. To make matters worse, it was operating on a shoestring marketing budget. The software was originally aimed at more than 6 million professional firms that provide billable services, and although the company was generating inquiries, the prospects came from a huge cross-section of business types, making each sale a slow, consultative process. Read on to discover how CMO Bob Vogel turned the situation around.

Despite the dark clouds hanging over the economy and growing fears of a recession in 2008, services and solutions marketers are optimistic about the year ahead. In fact, according to new ITSMA research, our members are predicting robust revenue growth, bigger marketing budgets, and increased headcount in 2008. In addition, more and more marketers are experimenting with new tools and approaches, leading to an exciting year ahead.

In the digital era, differentiation has increasingly come to rely upon reputation. Indeed, at ITSMA, we believe that differentiation and reputation have become two sides of the same coin. Differentiation is what you say about your company, while reputation is what others say about you. Although reputation traditionally has ranked as a lower priority for marketers than differentiation, that situation must change. This article contains a list of five steps you can take to influence your companys reputation and improve its standing in the eyes of customers, analysts, bloggers, and other important influencers. ‘

Most marketers are familiar with the term “Web 2.0,” but Larry Weber, chairman and CEO of W2 Group, a marketing services organization focused on digital constituency management, and author of “Marketing to the Social Web,” thinks were way beyond Web 2.0. Here, he talks about the rise of the “emotive Web” and what’s coming down the pike for marketers in 2008.’

Since its introduction to the world of ICT in the 1970s, the term “convergence” has come to mean something different to just about everybody you ask: “fixed and mobile,” “voice and data,” “access devices,” “media and entertainment,” “unified communications” . . . the list goes on and on. Too many people, however, consider convergence a technology issue and overlook the wider business implications—including its impact on marketing. At a recent Inner Circle Meeting in London, ITSMA examined the commercial and social implications of convergence to better understand how marketers need to adapt in the face of this trend.

Think back to the turn of the millennium. Remember all the anxiety around Y2K, the software bug that threatened to shut down computer systems at midnight on December 31, 1999? Well, by the time the dust settled, Satyam, an Indian IT services company, was officially “on the map,” boasting more than 7,000 employees and $300 million in annual revenue. The problem was that customers and prospects perceived the company as a basic, commoditized service provider. The companys tiny marketing department was challenged to change people’s perception of Satyam to that of a true trusted advisor while at the same time bridging the culture gap between India and the rest of the world—all on a bootstrap marketing budget.’

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.

In 2006, SAP Global Services Marketing and the Field Services Management Office were forced to face a few unsettling facts: multiple lines of service with complex and broad portfolios 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.