ITSMA Launches 12th Annual Marketing Excellence Awards Program

Despite the tough market, we want to hear from you!

LEXINGTON, Massachusetts—March 11, 2009—ITSMA, the leading marketing association for technology, communications, and professional services providers, is pleased to announce the launch of its 2009 Marketing Excellence Awards program.

The awards program, now in its twelfth year, honors the marketing strategies, programs, and campaigns that have achieved excellence at technology, telecom, communications, and professional services firms worldwide. The awards put special emphasis on marketing innovation, program execution, and business results.

“We know how stretched most marketing organizations are right now but we encourage you to share your successes with us and be recognized,” said David Munn, President and CEO. “It’s a great opportunity to show how marketing is having an impact on your business during the downturn.”

Categories for 2009

Entries for the 2009 Marketing Excellence Awards program may be submitted in the following six categories:

• Account-Based Marketing: Describing unique aspects of your Account-Based Marketing program, including collaboration with the delivery and selling teams, processes and the role research may play. Providing examples showcasing campaign relevance and innovation, and real business results for you and your client.
• Enabling Sales: Improving collaboration between marketing and sales, developing integrated sales and marketing programs that generate increased results, and providing new tools and new approaches that improve sales productivity.
• Targeted Demand Generation: Identifying new opportunities, designing innovative and focused marketing campaigns (often for 10s or 100s of new and existing accounts rather than 1,000s), using multiple demand generation tactics in an integrated fashion; achieving substantial results.
• Leveraging Digital Marketing: Using the new online digital channels to obtain customer and market insight and disseminate company thought leadership, engaging with customers and market influencers, generating demand, and tracking and measuring business impact.
• Thought Leadership Marketing: Describing your thought leadership development process and giving an example of a recent thought leadership marketing program: from inception through results.
• Marketing Measurement and Accountability: Describing your systems and approaches (such as dashboards, CRM), key measurements, explaining how the data is used and communicated, and the results of your measurement initiative on marketing’s value to the business.

Deadline for Submissions

The deadline for submissions is Friday, June 19, 2009. The winners will be announced at a special awards dinner at ITSMA’s Annual Marketing Conference in October.

Last year’s winners included Accenture, Agilent Technologies with PARTNERS+simons, Alcatel-Lucent, Autotask, CompuCom, Fujitsu Services, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Patni, Tata Consultancy Services, Unisys, and Xerox Global Services.

2009 Submission Guidelines

The awards are open to all companies worldwide that market and sell services and solutions. Visit ITSMA’s Website at http://www.itsma.com/news/mea for detailed submission guidelines and the application form.

Company Contact:
Pamela O’Rourke, +1-781-862-8500, Ext. 136, or porourke@itsma.com.

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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.