ITSMA Conference Highlights Marketers Priorities for 2004′

Bringing together more than 100 services marketers from a range of top technology and consulting companies, ITSMAs October 21-22 conference in Berkeley, California, "Marketing Returns: Leadership, Innovation, and Results," highlighted four critical priorities for marketers in 2004:

• Strategic discipline
• Competitive differentiation
• Marketing-led sales
• Marketing accountability

Strategic Discipline

Increased scrutiny by top executives, intense competition, and rapidly changing markets place a premium on strategic discipline throughout the marketing function. No longer can marketers afford to have different teams marching in different directions. At Hewlett-Packard, for example, the first-ever chief marketing officer, Michael Winkler, recently launched Operation One Voice to align all marketing initiatives around a common company strategy.

Maintaining strategic discipline does not necessarily mean adhering to a fixed strategy for very long, however, according to ITSMA Vice President Philip Oliver, former head of strategy for IBM Global Services. Rather, strategy today should be a continuous process, with marketing taking a lead role in constantly identifying market changes, opportunities, and threats to support ongoing strategic decisions and initiatives.

Competitive Differentiation

Me-too marketing is the bane of buyers’ existence. When everyone says they can provide "proven solutions" to "core business problems," it all sounds the same and customers tune out.

Part of the challenge is focus. Don’t just key in on a specific industry vertical, argued Rick Olivieri, director of service marketing for retail networks at Vanguard Managed Solutions; go after even narrower sub-segments to make it easier to become truly expert in those markets. Olivieri attributed a great deal of his company’s success in collaborative marketing with AT&T to the fact that the initiative focused on only six out of 20 segments within the wide world of retail.

Beyond focus, services marketers need to take a hard look at communications tactics, according to Brian Fugere, chief marketing officer at Deloitte Consulting. Stop telling people what you can do and just show them, he said. Fugere and colleague Chelsea Hardaway, global director of brand communications, stressed the promise of "branded content," products and activities that provide real value to potential buyers, often for free, while reinforcing the corporate brand. Rather than brochures, Webcasts, and press releases, they said, produce books, films, diagnostic tools, and demonstrations.

Fugere and Hardaway outlined five rules for the new approach:

1. Stop talking about yourself; eliminate "we" from marketing communications.
2. Stop the hype; the nonsell is what sells.
3. Entertainment is more than half your job, even in high-end IT services.
4. Design is almost everything; kill deadly PowerPoints.
5. Authenticity is absolutely essential in a cynical market.

Marketing-Led Sales

The idea that customers no longer respond to sales calls ran through the entire conference. Reporting on several recent studies, ITSMA Vice President of Research 5 noted: "The message is clear: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’" For this reason, marketing must play a larger role in generating demand and leading sales into discussions with prospective customers.

At Wipro Technologies, a global marketing-led sales effort has demonstrated impressive results in developing new business with Fortune 1000 accounts. By investing in an integrated program to target desired prospects and carefully cultivate new leads, Wipro’s chief marketing officer, Sangita Singh, and her team have increased leads by more than 350% in one year, shortened the sales cycle, and contributed directly to 40% of new business compared with very little two years ago.

Similarly, a marketing-led "value selling" program at Cisco Systems has revamped the sales effort for high-end services to focus much more on understanding customers’ business issues, quantifying potential benefits in financial terms, and integrating marketing, sales, and delivery into a more seamless value delivery chain. The initiative has contributed directly to at least $100 million in new business.

Marketing accountability

If marketing truly is to "return," participants agreed, it must become much more accountable for business results. Brian Eckert, executive vice president of marketing at Dimension Data, suggested that marketing should have direct responsibility for sales. Describing his own commitment to return $10 in sales for every dollar invested in marketing, Eckert noted, "This certainly makes you think differently about how to spend your marketing dollars." Top marketing priorities at Dimension Data include customer research, highly targeted "micro-campaigns," and sales-related incentives for marketing staff.

Building on the same theme, Leigh Alexander, chief marketing officer at Unisys, described a yearlong process to create a globally integrated marketing measurement system. Tied to the company’s top business objectives, the measurement system helps ensure that all marketing activities are measured against their contribution to one or more of these objectives.

For all the focus on rigorous planning and measurement, however, a final conference message was the continuing importance of the unknown. Perhaps most important, as keynote speaker Howard Rheingold noted, the emerging reality of pervasive information and communication promises yet more upheavals in both the technology industry and in the practice of marketing itself. Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, outlined the profound yet still unknowable implications of the mass global convergence of wireless communication, Internet connectivity, and ubiquitous computer chips. "We’re about where the PC was in 1980 and the Internet was in 1990," he said.

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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.