We often hear about how we should innovate our way out of a recession. Well, the entrants in this year’s ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards proved it. Despite the rotten economy, we had more entries in 2009 than ever before. And the quality of the entries was excellent, proving that marketers are finding ways to deliver value in lean times. We have prepared case studies of our winners that ooze best practices.

As customers begin discussing your company more online, you need to build your digital reputation. To engage customers in discussion and gain their loyalty, you need more than a profit motive. Marketers need to help their companies articulate their moral purpose. Doing so will improve your company’s reputation and make your marketing more relevant and successful, says Larry Weber, chairman and CEO of W2 Group.

We need a new name for thought leadership: idea marketing. This term describes what we should be doing with thought leadership: selling a point of view – rather than a product or service – that educates the reader and builds a relationship. We also need a better source for ideas than marketing.

We have to take some responsibility for salespeople not making the transition to “consultative selling.” It’s not a DNA thing; it’s an information thing. We need to give salespeople the information they need to create the consultative relationship. We need to help salespeople create an information dependency among customers.

“Solutions” may be a hated buzzword, but ITSMA research shows that more than ever, customers want real solutions to their business problems. We at ITSMA have been working with our Solutions Council for more than a year to develop a useful framework for helping companies understand how to organize themselves to deliver true solutions more effectively.

How often have you seen salespeople take your carefully developed marketing materials and massacre them in PowerPoint? Xerox dealt with this problem by creating a sales enablement tool that helps salespeople learn about their customers’ business issues while also maintaining a more consistent brand image.

Many marketers treat research like a fragile object. They hand it over to customers virtually untouched, without taking the opportunity to demonstrate their companies’ powers of thinking and analysis. That’s not how IBM handles research. It wrestles the data to exhaustion and puts it into practice through programs such as the Innovation Jam.

As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how and why we gather information from prospects. Social media is proving to be a valuable lead generator, but not if we keep trying to pull prospects’ mothers’ maiden names out of them every time they come to our Websites.

Eight out of 10 ITSMA member companies say that they are responding to the current economic uncertainty with this action: modifying value propositions. But this quest is complicated by the long sales cycle in B2B. Indeed, the sales cycle is so long that marketers need three different types of value propositions to span the various stages of the buying process.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Katharyn White of IBM, which is one of the few B2B companies using analytics rather than guesswork to predict the success of marketing tactics—i.e., IBM knows whether a particular tactic will work in a particular geography before committing a dime to it. White will be one of our keynote speakers at the 2009 ITSMA Annual Conference: Marketing Returns: Surviving and Thriving, where she will go into more detail on IBM’s breakthrough marketing analytics program as well as other important aspects of IBM’s strategy.

Based on our recent survey and research, we’ve developed a simple model to help B2B marketers develop and refine their Web 2.0 participation strategies. If your company doesn’t yet have a coherent Web 2.0 strategy, you’d better get one soon. Our survey shows that companies are spending more on Web 2.0—even in the depths of a recession—and more than 80% of respondents say that Web 2.0 will be as important or more important than traditional marketing channels within the next five years.

As we begin preparing for the 2009 ITSMA Annual Conference: Marketing Returns: Surviving and Thriving, we wanted to give you a taste of the kind of relevant, engaging, and instructive content you can expect to receive. We have put together an interview with Tom Davenport, one of the keynote speakers at our 2008 conference, who offers his insights into the ways that B2B marketers can use analytics to gain competitive advantage.

Solutions are one of the few bright spots in dark economic times. ITSMA’s joint survey with Solutions Insights shows that respondents believe they will improve solutions revenues this year. But to do so, they will need to concentrate on four key initiatives. (For more information on the survey, go here.) [[link http://www.itsma.com/research/survey-insights-impact-of-economic-downturn/]]

Most account plans sit on a shelf gathering dust. One of the reasons for this stagnation is that there just isn’t enough time for salespeople to do the research necessary to make these plans meaningful. We’ve just completed some important new research that outlines a new (and, we think, improved) approach to account planning that gives marketing a greater role in the process—what we call collaborative account planning.

Okay, so shameless promotion of ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards (MEA) was my original motivation here. But then I started thinking: What if we put every campaign or program through an awards application process before we rolled them out? They’d probably be better. At the very least, we’d ask some tough questions that would help us avoid trouble down the road. Here are some award-winning questions to ask yourself. (And please do apply for a real MEA award—the June 12 deadline is fast approaching, and all B2B marketing organizations are eligible.

When something bad happens that involves your company—think Tylenol poisonings, accounting scandals, etc.—what do you do to protect the brand image you have spent years building up from crashing down around you? And perhaps more important, should you let the brand crash—that is, start fresh with a new name and image? Here are some important issues to consider in the wake of a crisis.

It’s a question that marketers need to ask themselves at least once in awhile. We all know that marketing and sales need to be aligned, but for that to happen, there needs to be something in it for salespeople.

Our research is showing that the investment in ABM is more efficient and effective than sending sales out to bang down doors. Furthermore, the principles behind ABM have applicability in a growing number of ways.

In 2005, HP’s CIO, Randy Mott, began an ambitious effort to reduce HP’s number of data centers from 85 to six worldwide and reduce 6000 software applications down to 1500. Soon thereafter, HP began developing a version of this monumental project to sell to customers. HP’s marketing team faced a similarly huge challenge: How could they package and sell something so big and complex?

The demographic heavies—the 35-49 age group—are adopting social media. B2B marketers need to position themselves as resources for helping social media newbies, and they need to create clear policies for social media use. Here are two important prerequisites for marketers.

What many companies do not seem to realize is that investing in marketing during a downturn can have a more pronounced positive impact on revenue generation than adding salespeople.

Part of businesses’ reluctance about “inviting marketing to the table” is that it’s not clear what they will receive in return for giving up the elbowroom. In CSC’s case, it’s clear: They can evaluate their solutions from a portfolio perspective and have someone to manage the long and difficult process of developing the overall product and service portfolio.

Everyone has his or her own idea of what constitutes new and innovative. And frankly, few of our companies have much new to say on a regular basis. To compensate, we focus on trying to make everything we do sound new and innovative. But that just leads to jargon and fluff. Worse, it alienates our customers. They want us to offer insights about things that matter to them. This is the essence of good thought leadership marketing.

ITSMA research has revealed eight areas where marketers can be efficient while still giving customers and prospects the levels of individualized attention they seek. We’ll be looking at reuse as part of our in-depth series of workshops on Account-Based Marketing (ABM) coming up later this spring.

How high is the bar for differentiation in IT services today? So high that providers can afford few mistakes. They must deliver on the promises they make, and they must demonstrate a clearer understanding of a client’s business. (This story includes a link to a free summary of ITSMA’s IT Professional Services: 2008 Brand Tracking Study.)