Marketing Imperatives for 2010

Here are five ways that marketers can be ready to take advantage of the recovery:

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.”

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ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. We work with the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA annual program clients include business leaders such as AT&T, Cisco, Deloitte, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. Our comprehensive research, consulting, and training on topics including ITSMA Account-Based Marketing℠, Brand Positioning, and Solutions Development provide the insight and experience companies need to improve business results. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.