When Hard Times Hit, Innovate

ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards focus on the three principles that are critical to the success of any marketing program: innovation, execution, and business results. When we first started offering the awards in 1998, it was difficult to find these three elements together. Today, however, we see a much more intimate tie between marketing and business results in our entries. Check out our case study eBook for more details of how our winners made their programs happen. Congrats to our winners!

Account-Based Marketing

Diamond: BT: N3—Connecting Healthcare. There are a number of different ways that you can use ABM, but one of the most important is relationship development. BT, the giant telecom provider in the United Kingdom, took this approach when it began renegotiating its broadband contract with the U.K. National Health Service. BT delivers of one of Europe’s largest high-speed virtual private networks—N3—on behalf of the National Health Service (NHS). N3 links every hospital, medical centre, and GP surgery in England (and extended into Scotland) with high-speed broadband and Ethernet services.

BT’s marketing team undertook an intense period of contract review and planning in collaboration with NHS and then developed a two-year comprehensive marketing and communications plan to support a deepening of the relationship. This activity resulted in increasing customer satisfaction from 70% to 86%, reducing customer dissatisfaction from 30% to 8.3%, and reducing dissatisfaction on keeping customers informed on products and services from 27.8% to 8.4%.

Gold: AT&T: ACE Partners Program—Customer Relationship Solutions

Finalists: Capgemini and Wipro

Leveraging Digital Marketing

Diamond:CSC: WikonnecT: CSC Strengthens Client Collaboration with First Social Network in Insurance Industry. CSC, the global IT solutions and services provider, has long had a specialty in consulting with and building software for the insurance industry. Leveraging its connections with 1,200 clients, CSC launched the first business-to-business social networking site for the insurance industry—WikonnecT®. Built by a global team using free, open-source applications, it is a complete online community that combines blogging, message boards, and wikis to help 10,000 insurance professionals solve business problems together in more than 100 different interest-based communities.

In case you’re still wondering whether social media can pay off, consider this: Three different client surveys have measured improvements in overall client satisfaction rates, with increases ranging from 4 to 11%. Referenceability has also increased by 3%.

Gold:Siemens: Siemens Digital Channel

Finalists: Accenture, Deloitte, and Telcordia

Enabling Sales

Diamond:Iron Mountain: Account Penetration Strategy. Having aggressively acquired 200+ companies in the last 20 years, Iron Mountain wanted to gain a better understanding of its expanded customer base and to shift focus from acquisition to organic growth. The company began working with Extraprise to develop a hosted marketing database platform. Insight from the database was used to identify the best cross-sell opportunities and most effective strategies for communicating with prospects, enabling sales to better penetrate accounts.

As a result, in just three years, sales appointments have increased from 6,000 to 15,000+, and the number of targeted customers who use more than one product has risen by 17%.

Gold: TIE between Cisco: European IBLM Sales Enablement Program and Xerox: Competipedia—a wiki-based competitive resource.

Finalists: Avaya and Cisco

Thought Leadership Marketing

Diamond:IBM: CEO Study. IBM’s Global CEO is particularly noteworthy for its full integration with coordinated marketing and sales activities. Through an extraordinary blitz of press, analyst, advertising, and client events, IBM’s marketing team created an opening for salespeople to visit C-suite executives to discuss their top business issues 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.

Gold: TIE between Deloitte: The Risk Intelligent Enterprise and Cisco: Unified Computing Launch.

Finalists: Infosys and Wipro

Targeted Demand Generation

Diamond:HCL: Blue Ocean SAP Upgrades. We all know what a long year it has been economically. But for sellers of enterprise software, it has been a long decade. It’s very difficult to sell these big, complex packages of software, and when they’re installed, companies become very sensitive to spending any more money on upgrades. HCL faced this challenge with its SAP business. Sales growth stagnated even after setting up a specialist SAP Geo Sales team and making some big investments in people and capabilities.

So HCL’s Business Marketing Team launched its SAP Blue Ocean (BO) Upgrade campaign a year ago to do a number of things: first, rework the value propositions that salespeople were using with customers to better emphasize value from the customer perspective; second, rework the positioning of the service to target customers that were most likely to need an upgrade; and third, create a 360-degree integrated marketing program with tight program management that included partner marketing, industry events, online, analyst engagement, and direct marketing.

The result: 20 new Fortune 1000 clients and $290 million in qualified pipeline business.

Gold:Cognizant: BPO Services

Finalists: Cognizant, Deloitte, and Infosys

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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 Avaya, BT, Cisco, Deloitte, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, 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.